主播大秀

In this post, Steve Titherington, Senior Commissioning Editor reflects on a recent season of programming across 主播大秀 World Service examining how the world is getting richer and what impact it is having on us as individuals.

More often than not journalists are criticised for dwelling on the negatives; war, famine, disease and mayhem, rather than the positive. The  was a chance to right the balance and look at a remarkable and persistent trend over recent decades which shows that the vast majority of people around the world are living longer, and are better fed and better educated. However, the problem is that it doesn’t always feel that way and there is still grinding poverty and growing inequality and it was clear we had to include that too. After much debate the title became “A Richer World – but for whom?”

Highlights for me were the stories that made us think anew about what we take for granted. We know Africa is changing and there’s a slow growth of a new emerging middle class, but the search for  was something else. This is a new,young and vibrant Africa – and people could not quite believe the 主播大秀 was reporting it in this way.  examined how community crowd sourcing can make a global impact, or at least help, by telling stories of those starting a business in Detroit and Nepal, while a psychological experiment asking  was conducted in LA and Hong Kong.

To end the season Swedish professor,  – in many ways the statistician who has done most to explain why there is more to be positive about in the world than we often think – looked at the spread of Ebola and how Africa organised itself to begin to containit.

This was the fourth World Service season based around a Creative Challenge where anyone can pitch ideas to make the programme or feature they’ve always wanted to. Other themes have been the internet “Superpower”; the future ‘What if..” and “Freedom”. Each prided itself on being bold and audacious, but the programmes also have to take the audience on journeys they haven’t been on before and say something new about the way the world is changing. There has to be variety, a huge range of voices and perspectives, or what is the World Service here for? 

This tests both the audience and the journalist.  was big, wide-ranging and ambitious – look at the website to see the variety of stories and countries: the richest and the poorest. We went to new places in a new way. So the presenter of the Nightclub series was DJ Edu from 主播大秀 Radio 1Xtra; for Soup we took Detroit social entrepreneur Amy Kaherl to Katmandu to see what each place could teach the other about ground-up enterprise. For  we took the same snap shot in six separate countries to see who offered the best chance of taking the economy forward. It tests us as an organisation and tests the audience. As I write that it feels odd to admit that; surely our job is to take a complicated world and make it simpler to understand, to entertain and inform and move on. I think there’s a truth in that, but our global audience is young, inquisitive and challenging – they want to understand more than us and their lives are often much more complicated than ours. Some of our biggest responses come from the deepest dives we take on a subject: an hour-long programme simply allowing series of thinkers working through the idea of whether the world could get rich forever was picked up by re-broadcasters across the globe. 

It takes a year to make all this happen. First of all we do a call out across the whole of the 主播大秀 World Service – the Creative Challenge it’s called. Quite simply you have to come up with an idea, a plan, but crucially to do it in tandem with someone you’ve never worked with before. Nightclubs was an amalgam of Radio Current Affairs, 主播大秀 Africa and 主播大秀 Radio 1Xtra, others brought Business and Science departments together, 主播大秀 Mundo worked with 主播大秀 Trending. 

When we started this five years ago it was a very different process. As the idea has progressed people understand how a subject shared across languages and platforms makes a bigger impact, and can be great fun. It also brings together people with a great story to tell with great craft skills to share. The mix of images at the start of the Soup film from Detroit is breathtaking. So those relationships have grown as the demarcation between the 主播大秀 World Service and the rest of the News has faded, but what the World Service does is reach a global audience – as well as UK – and the way it works is rooted in collaboration with the World Service Language Services who to me define what makes the 主播大秀 unique as a global media organisation.

As the Richer World began there was a perfect storm ahead of  as people wanted to look at wealth inequality and opportunity and what it says about how we live today across the world. So the reaction was really strong. We looked at what a fridge says about the way we live and the UGC picture gallery had half a million hits, putting your wages against a top flight footballer from WS Languages had over 3 million. The quiz and compelling piece of video looking at how posh cars don’t stop for pedestrians has over 14,000 shares. Bill Gates tweeted about our Ebola stats to his 20 million followers. And in Africa, our Nightclub fascination was trending around the continent with my favourite tweets expressing disbelief that then 主播大秀 was reporting from a nightclub, “主播大秀 is dope” means what? 

I think the quality this year was staggering. on the Aral Sea was beautiful radio and a haunting immersive piece of online journalism with over a million hits. But for this to work there needs to be planning and logistics working across all the platforms and different projects. Anuradha Awasthi was the Editor for the whole season and worked with many people to make what can seem at first like a list of impossible dreams into a series of sharp and focused pieces of contemporary journalism. What I liked best? Check out Rupa Jha in  and  on the Indian economy for Six Routes or . Each offered glimpses into the building blocks of everyday life often in very difficult circumstances – life that does make it A Richer World once you share in it. And that’s the lesson from this and the other seasons – every time we involve you – our audience - the better it is. Next time we will look to link up with you from the start – to create the ideas and the help create the results. Now that’s a good challenge.

Steve Titherington is Senior Commissioning Editor, 主播大秀 World Service