CONFIDENTIAL DRAFT COPY - DO NOT CIRCULATE

Case Study: BBC News Online

Version: 29 October 2002

The launch of BBC News Online

In January 2002, Richard Sambrook, Director of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s

prestigious News Division, was looking speculatively at an architect’s model for an
extension to the Corporation’s flagship Portland Place Headquarters. Flagship in more
senses than one, since the 1930s current building, decorated with frescoes by the noted
typographer and artist Eric Gill, resembled the prow of an ocean-going liner, bearing
down towards the crowed shopping nexus of Oxford Circus. To the unitiated, Richard’s
contemplative face might have suggested unease with the architects’ ultra-modern
extension plans. In fact it had more to do with a decision which had been troubling him
since the idea of a new building, which would as also serve as a new home for the News
Division, was first mooted. The problem was relatively straightforward - namely where
to site a recently founded organisational unit, BBC News Online. Despite a relatively
low-key start, this venture had flourished into one of the most successful content-only
Internet sites in Europe and had a global following. Richard suspected that some of this
success arose from a unique set of circumstances surrounding its birth, particularly in
that the venture had enjoyed a level of independence and autonomy unusual in the BBC,
an organisation known for its tight – some would say bureaucratic - management style.

There were a number of options available to Richard. News Online’s independence

could be preserved by providing the unit with offices separate from the rest of News. Or
it could be given its own area in the proposed large bi-media (radio and television)
newsroom. Alternatively, and this was the option Richard increasingly favoured, News
Online could be placed at the very hub of the new newsroom. In this way the speed,
flexibility and creativity which characterised this new unit’s work style might ‘infect’
the rest of the news division. It would also provide a logical foundation for a major
current strategic initiative, the development of interactive television. But, Richard noted
wryly, this option was also a risk. All that was special in the way News Online worked,
might simply evaporate when it was brought in closer contact with the rest of the
organisation.

Dr. Lucy Küng prepared this case solely as the basis for class discussion. Cases are not intended to serve as endorsements,
sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management. (Lucy.Kueng@unisg.ch)
The history of the BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation, founded in 1922, is the world’s oldest public
service (PSB) broadcaster. Unlike the majority of its international PSB peers, it is
funded by a mandatory universal licence fee paid by all UK households owning a
television and receives no advertising income. The level of this fee is set by the UK
government after a prolonged process of consultation with the organisation. Until the
1950s the BBC enjoyed a monopoly as the only supplier of television programming in
the UK. While a limited level of competition was introduced into the UK broadcasting
scene in 1954, it was not until the 1980s that it began to experience real pressure from
commercial operators.

Its current range of programming still bears the traces of its monopolistic origins, and
also reflects government requirements that it act as a ‘portmanteau’ broadcaster – that is
offering ‘something for everyone’ in the UK. As a result it offers a broad range of
programming – liberal and conservative, high and low brow, mass market and elitist.
And its activities span virtually all branches of the broadcast and print media industries
ranging from Teletubbies CD-ROMs to consumer magazines; however, the provision of
television and radio for UK audiences are its core activities, with international satellite
television channels and book, magazine, audio and video products secondary ones.

Internet involvement

The BBC’s Internet activities began in September 1996 when it announced a joint
venture with ICL Fujitsu to launch an online service comprising an ISP and content
pages to be called BBC Online. Intriguingly, for a non-commercial organisation at the
height of the ‘content for free’ era of the Internet, the BBC initially envisaged BBC
Online as a commercial service funded by advertising, subscription and e-commerce
revenues. The Corporation was however simultaneously developing plans for a public
service website independent of its commercial activities. In November 1997 this was
launched as BBC Online (the commercial site having been renamed beeb.com). BBC
Online in its public service incarnation was designed to be the ‘umbrella brand’ for all
the BBC’s Web activities and a complement to the existing radio and television

2
operations. BBC Online was one of four major independent public service sites – BBC
Online (containing hundreds of mini-sites based on BBC programmes), BBC Education,
BBC World Service and BBC News Online. The relative size and the relationship
between these sites is shown in Figure 1.

BBC Online

Education

World beeb.com
Service

News

Figure 1: The BBC’s online sites and their interdependence in 1997

The development of News Online

BBC News Online was officially launched in November 1997 after a two-year planning
and concept development period. Its launch name was BBC News Online1, and its task
was to repackage the BBC’s extensive news coverage for the Internet and to use this as
the base for a public service news site. The site found immediate resonance with online
users and reached its page impression target for 1998 after only three months. From its
launch until January 2001 it achieved an average monthly growth rate of 7.3%, leading

1 BBC News Online was initially part of a department called ‘Continuous News’. BBC News was
restructured in late 1999 creating a new set of departments, one of which was termed ‘BBC News New
Media’. In 2001 this was renamed BBC News Interactive.

3
all UK news competitors, and traffic to the combined News and Sport Online site
increased significantly faster than the UK Internet market (Figure 2). By November
2001 its success was clear: it was the most popular content-only website, the most
visited non-portal website outside the US, led all other European broadcasters and was a
consistent winner of online journalism awards. This performance stood in stark contrast
to that of larger commercial peers - for example Disney, Time Warner and Bertelsmann
- all of whom were experiencing severe problems with their Internet initiatives2.

Figure 2: Traffic to the combined News Online and Sports Online sites against UK
Internet usage.

2000

1800
1600
1400
1200

1000
800

600
400

200

0
Jan-99 Jan-00 Jan-01 Jan-02

The establishment of BBC News Online falls into two distinct phases, Phase 1, ‘Start-
up’ and Phase 2, ‘Establishment’. Each of these phases is described in the following
pages – supported in places by direct quotes from the individuals involved3.

2 Time Warner’s Pathfinder portal was shut down in 2001 and Disney’s Go Portal was also shut down in
2001, to be later relaunched in a more modest incarnation.

3 Where necessary quotes have been lightly edited for syntax or grammar.

4
Phase 1: ‘Under the radar screen’

At start-up, BBC News Online was staffed by a tightly-knit team of 30 committed staff
who were granted a very high level of independence from the rest of the organisation.
This team was led by a number of internally-recruited senior managers who were
experienced ‘news hands’ with long careers within the BBC and a strong personal
interest in the Internet. The creative staff was made up of younger journalists and
technology experts who were in the main recruited from outside.

In retrospect, staff describe this period as ‘Wild West’, where they ‘operated like
pirates’, ‘completely independent and bloody-minded’. They ‘made it clear that they
weren’t working by the rules, did whatever they wanted to do, ‘raided whatever they
needed from wherever they wanted’. This attitude stemmed in part from the individual
in charge of the project, a strong leader with maverick tendencies:

He knew the BBC inside out and ... was... to say the least a very robust man. He was
good at arm-twisting and just getting on with things and ignoring people to the point
when he couldn’t ignore them any more.

The project leader was also reacting to the fact that he had been brought in to replace
the venture’s first manager, who had not proved up to the task. Although he was no
expert on the Internet, he was a senior BBC news staffer and an experienced project
manager. He was however under pressure to catch up on lost time and launch the site
fast. The sense of urgency he sought to instil became an important element in News
Online’s culture.

But he also benefited from the fact that the ‘wider BBC’ was not anyway very interested
in the Internet:

if you wanted to be a hero, you did great television, ... in an organisation like the
BBC, the stars were people who were stars on television, ... [News Online] was a
nerdy thing that didn’t really matter.

Further, within the News division attention was focused on the launch of ‘News 24’, the
BBC’s long-awaited response to CNN and Sky News. This round-the-clock news

5
channel was both an expensive and a late arrival in the 24-hour news field (some twenty
years after CNN and 10 years later than Sky). Because it was to be available only via
cable, a delivery system that still had a tiny market share in the UK, it was viewed with
scepticism and some resentment by the rest of the organisation. This served to deflect
interest away from News Online:

we had freedom and autonomy because the focus was on News 24, we launched the
same week as them, which was a big help.

News Online was a relatively inexpensive project in comparison to News 24, and the
latter therefore served to catch any flack from the rest of the organisation concerning the
resources it might be consuming. Employees felt that News Online was therefore free to
‘grow up very quickly with them not noticing’, and to be ‘a parasite on the rest of the
organisation’. This perception was bolstered through geography in that the division was
given its own offices in Television Centre, White City, in the same building as but
independent of the BBC’s bi-media news operation, and several miles away from BBC
Online which was located near Broadcasting House in central London (where the
Director General had his office). Distance meant freedom:

The further you were from Broadcasting House, the more you could mess around
with things.

News Online was given a clear remit by the BBC’s Director General, and the venture’s
senior managers had a clear vision of how this should be fulfilled:

right at the top of the tree … the senior managers and editors who set it up were very,
very clear about what they wanted.

They also enjoyed considerable latitude in terms of how that vision could be realised:

we were a start-up, so we were under the radar screen of the rest of the BBC. We
could kind of get on with the job and nobody took any notice. We didn’t invade
anybody else’s territory because we were absolutely new, so we could do what we
wanted.

6
The result was that BBC Online was right from the start a very focused entity, and
thanks to its independent status, able to concentrate on its news service and avoid the
fabled BBC bureaucracy. Clarity of focus in terms of core remit was echoed by a
clarity of focus in terms of structure and processes, which in turn led to direct
communication and the ability to move fast:

we have ... a bit of a start-up feel ... from the very beginning … we have had a very
flat hierarchy. ... two years ago now, thereabouts, one of the ... team came to me and
said...why don’t we do a little e-commerce sub-index, subsection and see if it will be
popular, ... we walked across to Mike and said we’ve had a great idea, we want to do
this, and he said yeah, do that. And we did it, and half an hour later we had it on the
site.

News Online’s senior team was cross-functional, comprising a Technical Director,

Editorial Head, Head of Design and Head of Operations, all of whom reported to the
project leader. Their working style was intense, and this was echoed by the rest of the
operation:

[It was] very much managed as a start-up … with weekly progress meetings, a
furious pace, long hours … many [editorial] meetings per day.

Intriguingly, the widely-held perception that News Online was ‘under the radar screen’
did not reflect reality. The project had been endorsed by both the CEO and the Director
of BBC News and its progress was definitely being monitored – albeit at a distance.
However this perception was actively fostered by the project’s leader in order to build
esprit de corps:

[he] successfully allowed a culture to flourish that was very different from the
mainstream BBC way of doing things. So what was going on was well known: how
it was being done was very different to the norm.

The result was that News Online was free to design an online news service which
reflected the strengths of the new medium and responded to the needs of Internet users:

7
 what people crave on line is usefulness, community and things like that, not
narratives. So … there was a cultural difference because the people who succeeded
in online had the kind of mind that could look at a problem in terms of usefulness
and multi-user connections and what people wanted in terms of problem solving,
rather than in terms of ...’can I repackage my media by putting it up and hoping
people will love it in this new medium'. So part of the cultural difference between
new media and old media was a… recognition that ...television watching is an
incredibly passive thing. Most people who are watching television have a heartbeat
of ... 65. They are tired and probably drinking something ...they're certainly not
writing things, as many users of websites do. So it was not surprising that we
developed a different culture.

News Online’s autonomy was possible because of the strong but arm's-length backing it
enjoyed from the top echelons of the BBC. The CEO (in BBC-speak ‘Director
General’), John Birt, gave News Online considerable leeway. Birt had a strong personal
conviction about the potential of the Internet, and the role of news on the new medium.
Ahead of many of his peers running mass media organisations in the UK, he concluded
early on that the Internet would in time develop into a third core broadcasting medium
after radio and TV, and foresaw news as playing a dominant role in this emerging field:

I think that’s one of the huge advantages. ... if you look at other organisations that
haven’t been successful online ... one of the principal failings has been the CEO that
didn’t understand it, wasn’t interested in it, didn’t signal his interest widely ... Birt
was not like that at all, Birt had a very, very clear sense of what he wanted the
organisation to do with it.

With Birt’s backing, the BBC had made a successful case to the government for
expanding into the Internet, arguing that its core mandate could be viewed as
encompassing Internet activities, in that it was required to be market leader on all media
platforms, to cater for all audience groups and to exact the maximum return from its
intellectual property investments. This interpretation was far from self-evident. There
were a range of organisation-specific issues which militated against Internet investment

8
- for example that the BBC was legally required to demonstrate responsible use of
licence-fee funds. This could have ruled out risky early investments in the Internet.

Interestingly, CNN also played an unwitting role in the development of Birt’s views:

the surprise to most people was that the Director General talked about [Internet
news] a greater act in public interest ... His moment of epiphany was on a trip to see
CNN … I think the end of 96 … and he was a far-sighted shrewd individual, and this
changed everything. ... he came back with the digital vision, and ... it was very clear
to him that news online would be a big deal.

Despite the parent organisation’s overall resource limitations, BBC News Online was
provided with a generous palette of assets, both tangible and intangible. First, financial
funding was plentiful. In the early days, which were, it must be remembered, a period
of general Internet hysteria, the BBC was, as one employee put it ‘throwing money at us
[News Online]’4. Non-financial resources were also abundant. The BBC had the
largest news journalism team in the world, producing 100 hours of radio and television
news and current affairs every 24 hours5 (although it must be remembered that at this
point the Internet was primarily a text-based medium and so there was only limited
potential for using this content directly). However the start-up was able to draw on the
expertise of this newsgathering operation. And of course, there was also the BBC brand
– perhaps one of the most prestigious and best-known news brands in the world.
Employees were clear about the benefits this brought:

without the BBC brand… we could pump in as much money as we wanted into this,
we wouldn't get anywhere.

On the Internet, the sheer volume of choice can paralyse users. In this context, the
specific brand values, or the qualities customers associate with the name ‘BBC’, were

4 Although the investment in News Online was relatively minor in comparison with the funds spent on News
TV, the new twenty-four hour cable news service.

5 The Times, March 9, 2001.

9
an important strategic asset for News Online, since when confronted by a jungle of
options, users tend to select the brands they know and trust:

people ... know that what they get from the BBC online can be trusted, can be valued,
is good value, is balanced, is fair.

BBC World Service Radio, with a radio audience of 153 million listeners in 43
vernacular languages, was also an important and unique asset. This built credibility
and drove international users to the site:

So if something happens, people go online, and where do they go to when something

really momentous happens? They go to the trusted news provider ... Who is that in
the UK? The BBC. Who is that internationally? The BBC World Service.

The start-up was therefore able to draw unhindered on a powerful range of

organisational resources. In addition it created one unique resource of its own, a
dedicated content production system (CPS) which was custom-built to meet the unit’s
specific needs. These were, first, that it should allow journalists to be journalists, freeing
them from the need to grapple with the technology underlying the Internet, and second,
that it should ensure absolute reliability for users, a feature judged as critical for the
online service of the world’s leading public service broadcaster:

basically when you’re the end user, you expect the pages to load, you expect the site
to work. You don’t want to sit there chucking bricks at the screen. ... they spent an
enormous amount of money making sure that’s right. You know, it’s the equivalent
of basically making sure that the TV set works. We … as far as I know, we’ve done
that better than anybody else.

While senior managers were internally recruited from the news division (on the basis of
‘if you use a laptop you can do it’), most journalists were externally recruited. This was
partly because at this point there were relatively few internal staff interested in the
Internet, and partly because the Web was a text-based medium while the BBC’s content
capabilities were concentrated on audio and video news formats. This represented the

10
development of a new competency for the BBC. In the words of the then Deputy Chief
Executive, News:

Five years ago we would not have thought of text as being one of our core
competencies.

Interestingly, the new text journalists adapted better and faster to the Internet than those
who had moved across from radio and television:

the people who came from the press and newspapers got on much, much better than
people who came from radio or from telly simply because their primary medium is
writing words to be read and not ... to be listened to or watched.

This brought advantages in that the new journalists were young, fresh and keen. But it
also brought disadvantages, since they were not part of the BBC’s unofficial network
and lacked the connections to the rest of the newsgathering organisation.

But just as News Online was recruiting new staff from outside, so too was it losing
experienced staff at a high rate and this was an ongoing source of exasperation. Online
journalists with a BBC pedigree were keenly sought by Internet start-ups, and
conversely, the journalists themselves were often keen to move to the commercial
Internet sector because it offered the chance to get ‘seriously rich’ through stock
options.

But while the BBC might have been disadvantaged in comparison with commercial
Internet start-ups because it could not offer stock options, it was also advantaged by
virtue of the fact that its income was guaranteed. Unlike the majority of Internet content
businesses, it had a fully functioning business model – the licence fee - and was
therefore free to concentrate on making its content as attractive as possible. And not
only that, BBC managers were unfazed by the strategic uncertainty surrounding the
sector as a whole:

11
 For most people a sense of uncapped, unpredictable costs in return for very vague
rewards financially is the worst kind of nightmare. It's only the BBC who doesn't
find this a complete terror.

The ‘information should be free’ ethos of the Internet was also complementary to the
BBC’s interpretation of the public service mandate. Indeed, News Online journalists
saw the Internet as a means of meeting their public service mandate better:

BBC is supposed ... to be doing .... is really about ... looking at all these big issues
and hitting them hard and then giving people the background and the understanding.
... it’s one of the reasons why the site has been so successful … the editorial
proposition that we have, which is … find a new role for the public service in the
online world, I think this really works and people have really gone for that.

A public service orientation also created a bias towards ease of use and absolute
reliability rather than technological wizardry:

the principle here has been that we never launched something, we never deploy a
new innovation until we’ve tested and tested and tested and we know it works,
because accessibility is part of that public service thing.

There was also a good match between the type of online news service the BBC was
seeking to provide and market needs. As the Internet matured, so too did demand for a
quality, in-depth, impartial, international news service. A gap that the BBC was well-
positioned to fill:

this public service thing ... also makes sense commercially ... because where is the
gap in the market? The gap in the market is for a quality, in-depth news service,
there aren’t any out there in English that don’t specialise in American news with
good analysis and breaking news. [Users] want the latest and then they want to be
able to drill deeper and … fill in the gaps, to access to archive and all those things.
And that’s what public service means to me… it’s… doing all of that in the interests
of the users without being … tainted by the fact [that] we’re doing that story because
such-and-such is going to put some money in.

12
Within traditional journalism there was a widely-held belief that the ultimate
consequence of the Internet would be to deskill journalists, to demote them to ‘content
providers’. However a surprise for managers and journalists alike involved with News
Online was that rather than de-skilling the task of journalism, the Internet actually
enriched it:

Journalists like to work for the BBC anyway, but the Internet empowers them. It’s
very quick, they can write, sub and publish simultaneously, they just press the
‘publish’ button.

Indeed, the sheer journalistic potential of the medium proved to be a powerful motivator
in many respects. First, there was the promise of unlimited space:

we are a non-linear medium. If [I were working] in a linear medium, i.e. radio or

television and, say, I were the editor of a programme, I say I’ve got a fantastic idea
but I need ten more minutes of broadcast time, well I have to cut it from somebody,
don’t I? If I have a fantastic idea here ... I just create a subsection and populate it.
Second, there is the potential to break down traditional media industry barriers and
work with different types of content simultaneously.

we were quite enchanted by the idea of actually taking what we were doing already
and then mixing that with the whole sort of broadcasting principle, bring[ing] in
audio and video as well.

And in addition, there was the benefit of direct feedback from users:

If we do [online journalism] properly, we enhance it. ... there are so many of us who
joined to do this kind of thing… I wrote five really, really high-quality features, ...
the kind of thing I’d ... do if I was writing for The Guardian or The Times. I did the
interactive elements ... and all the ... legal side, and I did the AV side as well with the
webcast at the end of it .... So you get all the elements coming together so … you get
a much more richer experience. Now the thing that really pleased me about it was I
got an enormous response from people outside the building, from punters.

13
Indeed it became clear that response from users had a huge impact on the motivation of
the journalist to produce good material:

this is the beautiful thing, I really know what my audience wants because I see what
they read.

End of Phase 1: Collective nervous breakdown

By the end of 1999, the positive environment that had characterised the start up phase of
the venture had begun to turn malign. The furious pace of the sector’s development,
and the explosive growth in both the size of the site and the News Online team were
taking their toll.

A ‘can do’ culture had become in the words of one manager ‘tyrannical’, driven by ‘a
mixture of adrenaline and testosterone’. ‘Holidays were for wimps’ - the project leader
himself had not had day a off in two years. The unit was becoming more and more
isolationist, with the project leader unwilling to spare any time for the rest of the
organisation, to the extent of ignoring emails and meetings. Communication with BBC
News and BBC Online was, in the words of a senior manager in the News Division
‘between poor and dreadful’.

The ‘macho’ work culture was reflected in the narrow product focus which had not
broadened in step with the changing market. News Online still essentially delivered one
product – online news for pc’s - and that product was heavily skewed towards male
users, leaving whole sectors of the audience – for example women and children –
underserved.

The internal systems were also overstretched. The department’s management systems
were designed for a staff of forty, when the actual headcount had reached over two
hundred. The ongoing ‘lure of stock options’ from dotcom start -ups meant that ‘senior
talent was being sucked out’, each manager taking a number of skilled staff with him or
her, leading to an annualised staff turnover for the period March-May 1999-2000 of
80%. The inevitable response was that relatively inexperienced staff had been
promoted to run the site. Further the underlying technical architecture that had once

14
been such an asset had become a bottleneck. A long series of short-term patches and
fixes meant it was ‘ragged and inflexible’ and technical changes were taking longer than
they should.

In November-December 1999 the situation descended into crisis. The trigger was a site
relaunch, which was to be accompanied by two additional technological changes, the
switch to a new database and the release of a new version of CPS, the content
production system. The result was, in the words of one team member ‘an utter disaster’.
The site design was badly affected and there were a huge number of complaints. Staff
needed to work non-stop for three weeks to sort out the difficulties, leading to physical
and mental exhaustion. Eventually the site was up and running again, but the new CPS
was shelved.

Phase 2: ‘Calm it down and make it sustainable’

By Spring 2000 it was clear to all concerned that News Online needed a change of
leadership. The department had been badly scarred by the site relaunch, and the culture
of workaholism and the refusal to cooperate with the rest of the BBC were no longer
sustainable.

The new project manager selected for the job was in many ways a surprising choice.
Before taking over News Online, Richard Deverell had been chief strategist BBC News,
and involved in early business plans for an online news service. An ex-consultant with a
background in strategy, marketing and business development, although he had a deep
understanding of the BBC and of news, he was nonetheless not a journalist or ‘creative’.

Richard saw his main task as to redress the ‘collective nervous breakdown’ that the
department had suffered through a series of unglamorous but necessary ‘housekeeping’
measures which would make the department sustainable. He created new management
structures, introducing a new layer of Assistant Editors to make team sizes manageable
and ensure ‘that all staff knew who their boss was’. He restructured the technical team
and set up a separate product development team. Human resource systems were
upgraded. There were initiatives to improve internal communications and rebuild
relationships with BBC News and BBC Online. In terms of the technical systems, a

15
focus was placed on ‘sorting out the plumbing’ to ensure the site had a reliable technical
backbone and was more flexible.

Most importantly, Richard sought to redress the narrow product focus. An online news
site funded by licence fees paid by the general public is failing in its duty if it serves just
one subsection of that public. While developments to add sports and a new service for
PDA [personal digital assistant] platforms were already underway, under the mantra ‘we
are not a one-produce department’, he pushed to ensure that the expansion of products
and services continued. In cooperation with the News and Online divisions An
emphasis was placed on developing services for interactive TV and to adding new
services for web and other platforms such as broadband. A separate children’s site was
launched.

A year later BBC News Online was a mature operation with over 210 staff producing a
site that was increasingly sophisticated and ambitious. The start-up phase and the
ensuing crisis were well and truly over. The same could be said for the Internet world
in general, where the dotcom bubble had burst and Internet hysteria had evaporated.
This created a calmer strategic environment:

nobody thinks there are quick wins very much now, so it’s become much more a
stable business and therefore I think it's easier to manage.

Turnover of journalists and technologists had also quietened down:

That issue is sort of vanished now because although good people are always hard to
lay your hands on, you know, the life of an impoverished dotcom is not appealing to
many people at the moment.

But while the external environment may have become less hectic, the internal one had
become correspondingly more challenging. For News Online, maturity meant an
increasing complexity affecting all aspects of their operations. Not only was the sheer
volume of pages and of separate sites increasing, but there were also foreign language
sites, as well as new media platforms coming onstream. This was compromising the
clarity that characterised the early days of News Online:

16
 it’s multi-lingual and… and it’s mad… the complexity is exponential. ... for example,
we provide the technical backup and we’ve given ... the finances for starting up ... the
three major language services, that’ll be Chinese, Russian, Spanish and we
technically support those. But ... in three years time this will be 13 languages ... and
how can you actually then co-ordinate all of those things and make all of those things
happen? ... so it’s all about systems, it’s all about predicting where you’re going. ...
But then if the PC doesn’t turn out to be what we expect… we have to provide all
those languages on PDAs and interactive television, or do we? ... those are some of
the things we’re wrestling with. ... we’ve actually made a huge amount of progress.
We have, I think, one of the very few PDA sites in… Chinese, Arabic and Russian.

A further complication came from the intrinsic tension between the speed of the
Internet, and the BBC’s reputation for careful and responsible reporting:

[the] BBC news brand stands for ... authority and credibility [but] speed ...is crucial
online. ... how do you manage that tension? Because [there] is a trade off ...
sometimes we have to be slower than other organisations to protect our credibility ...
in order to check the sources, or to take a little bit more time to make sure that we’ve
got the quote right, or whatever ... and the expectation from people is that that
information is going to be right there the moment that it’s finished or before it's
finished, while it’s going on ...and that’s the real tension.

Technological aspects were becoming more complex too. This was driven by two
factors. First was the need to develop simultaneously in two directions, namely launch
new services for consumers while at the same time develop the ‘backroom’ systems that
allow for a consistent, effective and integrated operation as a whole. The second factor
was the ongoing technological uncertainty, the seemingly endless proliferation of new
media platforms. From one perspective, staff recognised ‘we can’t develop a new
service for every platform that comes along because there’s going to be too many’. On
the other, they sensed it could be dangerous to concentrate too exclusively on the
Internet:

17
 everything’s swung back. The dotcom failures have made people think well, maybe
the Internet isn’t the future after all. ... maybe ... interactive television broadcast is
the future and… so ... let’s forget the PC and ... let’s take some money out of the PC
... And that is a huge challenge because when we started three years ago, people only
thought about Internet really and now it’s mobiles and PDAs and interactive
television.

Technological complexity engendered communication complexity:

It’s partly… well essentially it’s about the fact that people talk different languages …
and that’s partly true in other organisations as well, but they’ve been used to talking
different languages so ... ways of communicating of ... translating the different
languages have been worked out. I think in new media it’s all so new ... and
obviously technical people can’t communicate very well ... and so you’ve got sort of
journalists who talk a certain language, you’ve got designers who talk a certain
language, you’ve got technical people and there’s various shades of technical people
who talk a different language and so the trick is how do you get all those different
people to work together at a time when you’re expanding or you’ve a very, very fast
turnover of staff.

Increasing involvement with the rest of the organisation was also slowing things down.
While it was still somewhat independent of the rest of the organisation, News Online
had nonetheless made it onto the BBC’s central radar screen. Radio and television
divisions had begun, in the words of Online staff ‘to realise that online is the future’, to
‘see the success’, to say ‘we want part of this’. This, coupled with a requirement that
News Online operate more closely with newsgathering in order to develop interactive
television, meant it now had many more partners within the rest of the organisation. As
a result the BBC bureaucracy it had once been shielded from was becoming a problem -
it was ‘much harder to push things through and get stuff done’:

My particular goals [are to] free up this blockage that we’ve got in being able to get
anything done ... to pull together people who can really give a lot of time to thinking
it through... all these complexities of the interface, the privacy policy that might have

18
 to go behind it ... it becomes an absolute nightmare and those nightmares are
bureaucratic, those complexities in a bureaucratic organisation can mean that a
project that ... should need two months to get up and running as a service… could
take a year and a half and that ... just isn’t practical in a world which is changing as
fast as it is.

News Online is a very cohesive organisation. ... not quite single purpose but ...
pretty cohesive .... [but] the BBC is too old, there are too many little patches that are
ruled by little parents, like in any big organisation. This is not BBC specific, it’s
everywhere. It’s an organisational problem of maturity ... these people just are not as
easily moved.

Now we’ve reached the point where when we do things we need to bump into other
people and where we have to find compromises.

This growing interest in News Online partly reflected the fact that the Internet was now
clearly a mainstream media platform; it was also an offshoot of the direct feedback the
Internet provided for journalists:

I know of a very prominent journalist who was always very, very sceptical of the
Internet and one day we finally managed to browbeat him into writing something for
us. And he said he'd never had… so much feedback on any piece he did on the
Today Programme or the Ten O'Clock News, The One O'Clock News, The Six
O'Clock News as on this one piece he wrote for News Online. And because he is
very prominent, … it showed others the value of what we are doing here.

But complexity was having a negative impact on innovation:

I think there is still a, you know, real drive to… to do new things and… and to
innovate here and there. ... it’s not been stifled, [but] ... it’s been difficult to keep that
going ... When everything gets so complicated, it puts a lot of strain on people who
are trying to deliver because … those trendy new ideas go out the window because
all they see is ... [that] ... a great new idea means you’ve got to do it 25 times for all

19
 these different sites ... . So it’s just a lot of work, it’s better not to have any new
ideas.

there ... has always been a very different culture here, I think, in which … everyone
has spoken out and failure goes with the territory because the Internet displays it all
the time when something goes wrong. … I think there is still a ... real drive to… do
new things and… to innovate here and there. … it’s not been stifled but I think it’s
been difficult to keep that going.

Facing the future

As he surveyed the model of the new building, Richard Sambrook realised that the
challenges facing the ‘mature’ News Online could be crystallised into one core dilemma
– how much autonomy to give the venture from now on. Although it had started off as
a start-up managed independently from the rest of the organisation, it had, through its
success, become a prestigious and respected part of the BBC with a high international
profile. Richard recognised that the high degree of autonomy was one of the main
reasons the new unit had been so innovative and so successful so quickly. Yet this
situation could not go on forever. A growing understanding of the importance of the
Internet throughout the BBC, the need to manage all online content centrally to avoid
duplication and contain costs, plus a desire to ensure that the ‘organisational learning’
this unit had achieved should permeate the rest of the BBC, meant that there were
increasing pressures integrate News Online with the rest of the organisation. He also
worried that an ‘us against them’ culture might be taking root in News Online. In 2000
it had been asked to launch Sport Online, which it did successfully, but other proposals
from the rest of the organisation had been resisted – albeit for entirely valid reasons - for
example, to integrate News Online with Broadcast Online, for its technical team to be
made part of BBC Technology, or for News Online to develop a version of its content
production system for BBC Online as a whole. But while there were strong arguments
in favour of integration, Richard feared that this might threaten both News Online's
market success and all that was special in terms of culture, creativity and work
processes.

20
Richard was uncertain how to resolve this dilemma, but he knew one thing for sure: by
the end of the week he needed to brief the architects on his requirements for the News
Division’s new offices – including a home for News Online.

21