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A Visit to Bush House
by Ed Mayberry
Bush House, housing the offices
and studios of the BBC World Service.
Tours are not generally conducted at Bush House, the historic headquarters of the BBC World Service on the Strand in the Aldwych area of London. So I welcomed the opportunity to drop by on a cold Thursday afternoon in early December of 2002, at the invitation of business correspondent Mark Gregory. I had met him while I was covering the Arthur Andersen trial for Houston NPR affiliate KUHF-FM. The BBC had been closely following the Enron story over the previous months, and flew Mr. Gregory to Houston to cover this lengthy trial. He was filing reports by satellite phone. Over the weeks, I even interviewed Mark for a KUHF news feature about the interest the world's press was showing in all the Enron-related legal proceedings. As often happens with these stories, reporters were in a pool situation on the day the verdict was announced. We ended up sharing some audio tape, because the World Service and some of the UK domestic BBC networks needed actualities of jurors speaking to the news media. He made the mistake of saying "if you're ever in London, come see Bush House." And on December 5th, I was in the lobby!
The statues at the top of the Bush House entrance (left), and the lobby entrance (right) to the BBC World Service.
Bush House was built section by section between 1923 and 1935. The BBC moved in beginning in 1940, gradually taking up more space. With broadcasts going out in 43 languages, every bit of space is used in Bush House. Read Dan Atkinson's history of Bush House, from a tour he took on September 18th, 2000.
Mark first took me upstairs to his desk in the business section of the newsroom, where he introduced me to his colleagues. Several reporters were working on business news stories at their computers or working stories on the phone. The BBC has a massive computer system that links all the bureaus. Reporters can click and bring up news items being produced by, for example, BBC in Manchester--the audio and the scripts are just a few clicks away. There are feeds from the wires of dozens of news organizations from all over the world. Reporters can check out the working line-up of stories in Roger White's upcoming World Business Report. So Mark writes business stories at his computer in Bush House (unless he's in another city or country covering a story) and then saves it into the system for the use of all BBC outlets. Broadcasts are going out somewhere in the world all around the clock.
A search for stories by Mark Gregory on the BBC World Service web site will, as in this example, show how his contributions are being used. Scripts are pulled up by various language sections of the World Service and translated for foreign news transmissions on shortwave. They appear on the BBC web site in various places and in various languages. Here's an example of how one of his stories ended up on the Albanian section of the World Service web site.
World Business Report editor Martin Webber explained why the Enron story had been one of the top stories on all the language services of the BBC World Service quite often in 2002. "The whole world seemed to turn to America as the icon on how to create wealth. You know, the economy was booming, the stock market was going up and people seemed to get rich easily. It seemed to be a system that worked. The stock market was going up 25 percent a year, and then suddenly, Enron showed that it was an illusion. Webber says "We had the dot-com bubble, and obviously there had been all the skepticism anyway that computers could really generate that income. But here was an energy company delivering power to people, supposedly--the world's biggest energy trader--and it suddenly went from being a huge multi-billion dollar corporation to nothing. And, you know, that's a great story. A leading accountancy firm everyone had heard of--Andersen--was checking up on their books. You have a company putting its stamp of approval on so many companies around the world. How could it happen? And so we sent Mark down to Houston for a large number of weeks to try to find out!"
The BBC World Service is funded by the British government--actually funded by grants from the Foreign Office--making it possible to send Mr. Gregory to Houston. He covered the opening and closing weeks, and another reporter covered the middle section of the weeks-long trial. Even for the World Service, it was a major financial commitment to assign resources for that length of time, but they got lots of mileage out of Mr. Gregory's reports. Webber says "As a BBC reporter, Mark finds everyone calling him, from the regional stations like Radio Scotland, or the two or three speech networks in Britain. Mark was on the phone to them all the time, as well as all the World Service programs--24 hours of news has to be filled, and obviously, there was an absolute fascination with this story. Was Andersen going to be found guilty, or not?" Britain has seen similar scandals, such as the death of newspaper mogul Robert Maxwell, who died under mysterious circumstances, apparently falling off his yacht. Later, it was discovered he had raided pension funds to save his core company.
The newsroom of the BBC World Service is manned 24 hours a day seven days a week,
with reporters gathering stories for use by all 43 language services.
The business unit is across a hallway from the main newsroom of the BBC World Service. That was our next stop in this visit. It's the creative center of all BBC World Service news and documentary broadcasts. I give away my age by saying that I've enjoyed the output of this room--and earlier versions of it--for better than 35 of the more than 70 years the Beeb has been on shortwave!
World Service newsroom editor Steve Titherington says it's his job "to keep things running smoothly in the Bush House newsroom, help decide the editorial agenda and encourage the people to do a good job." He says reporters track and write about a hundred different stories a day, and within those there are what he calls the "core stories" with an international resonance that mean something to people around the world. "In a 24-hour seven-day activity, the world is always changing, it's always waking up, and there's always new news coming along, and the job here is to sort of digest that news, turn it around, broadcast it, but also try and give it some weight--where did it come from? Where's it going? Explain it, give a context, give it a background." That process is reviewed three or four times a day in editorial meetings with representatives from the 43 language services. All news is translated for use by all the other services. "Of course, they have their own takes on stories, and have their own stories they're finding. They also let us know the impact of a story in their particular part of the world, and give us a sort of perspective. How's that story playing? What are the questions people are asking about it?" He says those meetings give reporters a chance to think about what questions need to be asked.
A room off to the side of the main World Service newsroom is called "News Intake," pictured below. Chris Murphy, left, is assistant senior studio manager in news, and one of his jobs is taking feeds from correspondents around the world. Gone are the days of reel-to-reel tape! The audio is loaded from telephone, satellite or FTP onto a computer for editing and mixing. Correspondents can also just come by and record their stories in one of the studios. An assignment board keeps track of material that's expected--a package from the Indian subcontinent, a reporter from Poland, another correspondent from Germany. Murphy says "Anyone anywhere in the system can draw it up and edit it to there own requirements." He's been at the World Service for 13 years--long enough to remember "the good old days of rotating rust (magnetic tape)!"
Sound technicians (top left) gather audio feeds from BBC correspondents from around the world, putting them into the computer
system for editing (top right). The stories can then be called up on computers from anywhere throughout the BBC system.
Newsroom editor Titherington says having the business unit on the same floor is handy when something in the business world crosses over and becomes general interest news, such as with the Enron and Andersen stories. "Almost with any story you have times when the story is absolutely Center Stage. Everybody wants to know about it. There are implications almost for everybody, or there's a curiosity to find out sort of how did that happen? Where's it gonna go? What does it tell us about, you know, how things are being done in our own country? So the advantage of having people like Mark working next to the newsroom is that they're following the stories when they're not the number one story. But when it becomes the number one story you've got someone who knows the background."
Mr. Titherington is grateful for his father getting a magazine called The Listener, with transcriptions of articles by BBC correspondents from around the world. "And that was just something which came in the house, and I always remember he got it for years and years and years, and then one day there was an article that actually had me in it, but unfortunately he had cancelled his subscription the week before!" So he never actually got around to seeing his son's name in print! "But I'm very grateful he bought that magazine, because it was a great example of what I'd call carefully thought-through journalism."
This is a look at one of the broadcast studios used for a typical news program from
the BBC World Service. An engineer and producer keep track of the line-up, as the
presenter in the booth links the segments of the program together.
The final destination of all this news gathering is one of the broadcast studios at Bush House where the news is delivered. This group of three photographs are from the 1800 GMT transmission of World Briefing on December 4th, 2002, with presenter Debra McKenzie (brown jacket) behind the glass. The BBC's Mark Gregory (with the red pen) watches, as producers and sound engineers bring up the audio from various reports introduced by McKenzie and news reader Dee Sebastian, who is seated next to McKenzie in the second picture, lower left. The third photo below on the lower right is McKenzie, taken from inside the news booth, as she links the segments of World Briefing.
On the left, the presenter scrolls up to the next segment on the screen, as the newsreader to her left reads five minutes of
news bulletins. On the right, the presenter is seen from inside the broadcast booth, tying together a package that in this case is
reaching millions listening to the BBC World Service English Service to Africa.
Newsrooms are exciting places in any broadcast outlet, and news reporters are allowed to witness great events and meet great people as they chronicle current events. But in the case of the BBC World Service, input is coming in from all around the globe. Studio manager Doreen Birkeland in the news intake area says she enjoys "being here when things are happening. After 9-11, we were doing rolling news programs, and you were getting people on the line at hospitals in New York City, and you just didn't know what to say. Because you're trying to get a program together, and trying to be professional and polite to everyone and get the story out, and as quickly as possible, but you just wanted to say 'God, I'm really sorry, guys' and 'you must be going through hell' but, you know, there just wasn't time for that kind of thing, and you just had to be very sensitive in the tone of your voice. But still, you had to keep your head and get the program going. It was quite difficult. It was emotionally quite traumatic."
The huge number of correspondents the BBC has around the world all file stories for radio, but also file material for the web. Each department shares information with all other departments. World Service newsroom editor Steve Titherington remembers "it was after September 11th when, you know, there was this terrible big story coming, sort of as a huge shock. But in the newsroom we had maybe three people who were former Kabul correspondents, who had worked in Afghanistan, who knew in a sense some sort of background, so as the days and weeks went in on the situation in Afghanistan needed to be explained and explored, we had people who had that expertise to provide context."
Robin White is editor-in-chief of the quarterly BBC magazine Focus on Africa and the evening shortwave program Focus on Africa, as well as Network Africa, which is heard on that continent in the morning. "Somewhere there are statistics on the number of people who hear the programs on the internet," White says, "but you know the listenership on the internet is minute, compared with what we're listened to on shortwave and FM stations in Africa. I mean, in Africa, 15 million people listen to us. On the internet, a few hundred." Focus on Africa and Network Africa are heard in the BBC World Service webcasts, and are also available on demand through the BBC web site, as well as through links from International Listener. Africa is one of the regions of the world where shortwave is still one of the predominant radio bands. "Indeed, enormously, says White, "and that's why happily the BBC has not cut down on shortwave transmissions to Africa yet."
BBC African Service senior producer Josephine Hazely agrees. "I think 80 percent of the listenership in Africa listen on shortwave radio. And it's amazing. You can go to the most remote village in Sierra Leone or Kenya or Madagascar, and you'll find maybe some man on the farm who you least expect to be listening, you know, getting that dial right and putting that radio right up to their ears, just so they can catch the broadcast, whether in English or in Swahili or in Hausa or in Portuguese or in French, they will be listening." She says this is also true of her parents, back in Africa. "You'll find them trying to dial in to the African service of the BBC World Service to catch the news or some other programs. And they wouldn't get the position right. So they'll get out of the house, and go out and stand in the veranda and begin to manipulate the dial just so they can catch the signal. But we do have FMs now in major cities. That's the new strategy to get quality audio in these big towns and cities across Africa. But still shortwave is the means by which a big number of our listeners listen to us."
Hazely says the good thing about working in the BBC's African service is that she gets to travel to Africa quite a bit. "You go at least once a year. If you're lucky, you go twice. It depends when an event is happening. I was last in Sierra Leone in May 2002 to report on the elections there. And the way our listeners identify with the personalities is just also amazing to behold. I mean, one of them said to me 'Josephine, if you were standing for an election I would vote for you!' You know, it is that sort of intimacy." Hazely says "We also gets lots of letters from out listeners. In fact, our program Focus on Africa, which is the afternoon African program broadcast in English and the morning program Network Africa broadcast in English and, of course, the other language services, we all get letters, and we use them in our letters slot--the letters part of the program. You know, when you had the terrible 9-11 terror attacks in America, people felt 'Africa will not be interested.' Well, you would be amazed--the amount of letters we got, week after week after week. So we do interact with our listeners, and we have competitions."
Although the African service of the BBC is independent of other sections in the building, an African service editor joins the news meetings in the main newsroom, and its output is available to the African section. "Of course there are some BBC World Service reporters in Africa, but they're not in every single country. But the African service has people in most of the countries in Africa, and a lot of the news is most of the time drawn from the reports we have from our stringers. That is why a lot of the time we come up with news very quickly."
Even though I'm in the radio business in Houston, the fourth-largest city in America,
it's still a thrill watching a live broadcast go out on shortwave to millions of people around the world.
Roger White is a business news presenter on the World Service, shown in the photographs above and below delivering World Business Report from the studios in Bush House. On this day in early December, the lead story was about financial troubles at United Airlines. His producers played back interview segments recorded earlier over the telephone with David Field from Airline Business magazine, as well as other pre-recorded segments in other stories. After the broadcast, White told me the broadcast is made available online. "Yeah, you can get it on the web five or six times a day. We do different editions, and they're all up there on the web, or they should be."
White came to the BBC after living as an "ex-pat" in the Arabian Gulf for a few years. "And as you know, you earn quite well out there. And it was amazing how, suddenly having a bit of money for the first time in my life increased my interest in investment and business. Funnily enough, when I came back, I got very interested in the stock market. I got very interested in how companies make money or don't make money, from my investment point of view. I worked a few months here at the World Service in general programs--current affairs--and then crossed over to business, and this was about 12 years ago."
White worked in regional radio for a few years before the World Service. "I worked in Northern Ireland at the height of the troubles, when it was really quite rough in the early eighties. I was a reporter there. I did some very silly things, though, I can remember, which you look back, when you're a little bit younger and a little bit more naive, and you wonder how on earth you did these things. Like walking up to people for interviews in the middle of an incident. And the street was completely cleared. There were armored land rovers everywhere and police hugging the buildings because they didn't want to get shot at, and I just thought 'I want to go and get the story' and walked straight up to the street. The policeman just looked at me as though I was a complete idiot, which of course I was, you know. But you don't do those things, do you, as you get a bit older!"
A producer and a sound technician help World Business Report presenter Roger White (pictured
at right from inside the booth) send out the 1730 GMT edition of the live program.
White works long shifts back-to-back, which he says explains his wrinkles and the color of his hair! "I work right through the day, coming in at about six in the morning, working through 10:30 at night, London time. Each edition is focused to a different audience, so the first program I do is an East Asian program. The second program I do is for a South Asian audience. I do a short program for the Caribbean--these are all within an hour or two of each other. Then you're on to the European edition. The New Zealand edition comes on in an hour-and-a-half's time from now--that's the European edition we've just done. And then we have our big program which is the half-hour American program, which is carried on some National Public Radio stations. And that's at ten o'clock tonight, so you're continually changing your focus and trying to look at a story that will be more relevant to that region. Whether you succeed or not is another matter, you know."
White followed every turn of the Enron/Andersen story on the air, as it unfolded. "I think although we hadn't had the same dot-com and internet explosion and craziness that you had in America, or it caught on much later here, probably a couple years later. But otherwise, we went through the same kind of things--the start-ups, the crazy prices, the people making millions overnight. And then when the bust same, it was definitely relevant to us, you know. It had happened over here. Somehow, all those questions people had been asking themselves but not expressing--how can this be going on, how is this money being made. Is it real money? And somehow some of the Enron situation seem to sum up and answer a lot of questions, I think, that people had in the back of their minds, about whether it was all an illusion, whether we'd all just gone mad, really. Maybe we were being fooled. And I think that summed up an awful lot of questions in the back of people's minds about what had gone on."
White also runs a small vineyard in the West Country. "It's my main interest, so I have to cram in as many shifts as I can to, you know, keep the winery going!" He has short breaks of about an hour between shifts. "But it's a tough life here at the BBC, you know!"
A Visit to Bush House originally appeared as a two-part feature in the January and February 2003 editions of International Listener Shortwave News.
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