Saturday, April 13, 2013

The BBC World Service Gets Less Worldly

I like to keep a weekly schedule for BBC World Service Radio by my bedside. I can receive this through my satellite radio, so I like to know what is being broadcast when I get up in the morning and when I turn in at night. For some time the BBC has been very good at providing this. I tell them the city in which they live; and they prepare a schedule that organizes everything with respect to my local time, giving the GMT in parentheses, since that is the time the broadcasters use. At the beginning of this week I discovered that I could not get my schedule. I figured this may have involved a software bug due to a time change somewhere, the result of a work action, or perhaps a state of shock in reaction to Thatcher's death.

When normality had not been restored by the weekend, I decided to poke around. It turned out that none of my explanations were valid. This was just another case of rampant redesign of the Web site without letting anyone know. The weekly schedule is a bit longer, because it now gives some more explicit summaries of content. That is the good news. The bad news is that it is now given only in GMT. Apparently, honoring the local needs of listeners around the world is no longer a priority for the World Service!

No comments: