Wykeham Journal 2021 | Page 22

THE WYKEHAM JOURNAL 2021 Active newsroom at the BBC , London .
vision of what ’ s now become the Western Front Way has given his tragic death in the Great War a new salience for those planning to walk or cycle parts of the newly established trail across Belgium and France . His niece Peggy and her niece Lal helped me piece together his time at Win Coll , his service in the Great War , and a sense of how his ideas have shaped the legacy of distant events for pupils in the 21 st Century .
You might argue that in swapping Winchester College ( by way of Magdalen College , Oxford and a few years in the Palace of Westminster ) for the BBC , my own career has stayed comfortably inside well-weathered institutions . You ’ d probably be right ; the BBC celebrates its centenary year in 2022 , and it ’ s given all of us the chance to reflect on whether we are ready to rise to the challenges of the next hundred years . And there are certainly plenty of challenges . A public broadcaster funded by a universal licence fee enforceable by law is not a model anyone setting up the BBC in 2022 would have chosen . And yet it remains a system that delivers huge value to vast audiences . Despite what you may have read elsewhere , the BBC reaches over 80 % of the potential audience weekly . We remain the most-trusted news provider in the UK , and globally , where the World Service ’ s audience has risen to almost 500 million people a week . But the digital transformation of the world is moving more quickly than most can respond — probably the most significant challenge to the BBC now is the fact that more audiences are streaming content from digital subscription services than are watching peak-time TV . Spotify has transformed audiences ’ relationships with live music , and away from network radio . Netflix ’ s Reed Hastings famously said that their greatest competitor was sleep — for the BBC , time spent with our services is the metric we worry about most . For people to love the BBC , and willingly pay for it , they need to spend enough time with us to value what we do — whether that ’ s BBC local radio , Strictly , our news website , CBeebies , Radio 3 , our 42 language services , and so on .
THE RESILIENCE OF THE SCHOOL IN ADAPTING TO THE REQUIREMENTS OF ONLINE LEARNING HAS BEEN INSPIRING .
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