BBC World Service which has announced plans to start its news services in four Indian languages of Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati and Punjabi, intends to recruit 157 journalists and other technical persons with the intention of garnering 80 million audience within India (28 million now) and taking it to 500 million globally by 2020.
It has earmarked a budget of 289 million pounds to reach out to the people of these languages, said Rupa Jha and Niveditha Pathak from the BBC, Delhi, at an interaction with the media at the Press Club on Wednesday. Emphasising that the BBC was not launching a news channel, they said it was going to be content capsules to be used in partnering news channels and other media digital and social media outlets.
The agency was looking for interesting stories from the regions to make it mobile first, be it in video or audio broadcasts, and was seeking persons across different levels like entry level reporters, broadcast journalists, video editors and others, proficient in these languages. At the same time functional and working knowledge of English was essential although having a degree or post-graduation was not necessary, they said.
“Anyone from absolute freshers to experienced journalists with news sense, creativity and believing in BBC’s impartial outreach can seek to find employment by applying online - bbc.com/careers/worldservice. There will be a written test followed by an interview. Jobs will be full time and on contract, based in Delhi while offices are likely to come up in regional centres too,” said Ms. Jha.
BBC Worldwide is into 28 languages and 11 new languages including the four Indian, would be launched soon. The organisation has partnership with ETV-Hindi and Daily Thanti in Tamil and was looking for partnering with the current news channels for content capsules.
The organisation has about 320 million audience worldwide with South Asia accounting for 42.8 million with 145 million coming from the Radio, 91 million TV and social media 19 million. Once recruitment is done, Delhi would be having the largest bureau outside UK, the duo added.
