91Èȱ¬

The 91Èȱ¬ launches its latest TV channel today - 91Èȱ¬ Persian. It will be a daily eight hour service, for audiences in Iran, Afghanistan, and the wider region, broadcasting at peak times for the market. It will run from 1700 to 0100 local time in Iran (that's 1330 to 2130 GMT).

The backbone of the schedule will be news, together with a rich mix of current affairs, features and documentaries, culture, science, business and arts programmes - all broadcast in Persian from a new newsroom in central London.

Iran is obviously geopolitically important with significant influence across the Middle East. And Afghanistan is a high priority for 91Èȱ¬ World Service, with very large radio audiences. The 91Èȱ¬ has been providing news and information on radio in Persian for six decades. But these days, TV is the preferred news medium for Iranian audiences.

The 91Èȱ¬ is well respected by opinion formers within Iran and brand awareness is high - despite government media restrictions. Media freedom is severely limited - so we hope 91Èȱ¬ Persian TV will build a following by providing free and independent news and information - the traditional role of the 91Èȱ¬ World Service over the last 75 years - and provide a window for Iranian viewers to the rest of the world in an open and unbiased way.

The Iranian authorities have been a little apprehensive about the launch, describing it as "an illegal channel", refusing us permission to work within Iran and suggesting anyone found working for it will be arrested as a spy. However, we hope once they have seen the service they may recognise the independence and quality of the channel - and hopefully take part in its programmes.

Persian TV is aimed at audiences in Iran, Afghanistan and - totalling around 100m Persian speakers. The potential audience in Iran is young, highly educated and outward-looking. The projected audience figures for Persian TV are 10m within 3 years - with a total tri-media reach (radio, TV and online) of close to 20m by 2012.

The channel will cost £15m a year - funded by the Foreign Office via Grant in Aid.

The launch is much anticipated within the region and is already being within Iran, Afghanistan and beyond. Clips have appeared on YouTube (see below). It will be available globally, streamed on the 91Èȱ¬ Persian website.

Richard Sambrook is director, Global News.

I gave a presentation this week to a group of journalism students at City University, London about The Future of News. You can read a summary of what I said below. In case you're wondering why I'm talking about commercial funding, as I've explained before outside the UK the 91Èȱ¬'s English TV and internet services are commercial and supported by advertising as of course are most other news services.

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In Sidney Lumet's 1976 Oscar winning movie Peter Finch, playing deranged news anchor Howard Beale, rails at his audience about the banks going bust, environmental crises, crime on the streets, politicians and the media. "You've got to get mad!" he tells them. It seemed an appropriate way to start a talk to a group of students about The Future of News.

Because 32 years later we are still dealing with many of the same issues (economic crises, political apathy, a crisis of trust in the media) and anyone setting out now for a career in journalism needs to motivate themselves to overcome a vast array of forbidding problems. I didn't tell them anything new - the themes are now familiar.

Technological change is transforming how news is produced and consumed. Audiences are fragmenting and undermining the economics of commercial news operations and the more open, interactive and inclusive nature of the internet is challenging the culture and conventions of traditional news organisations. The media pages and blogs are full of counsels of despair about the future of serious journalism. But I prefer to side with Tom Curley, the President of the Associated Press news agency who :

"The adjustment we're being asked to make is to a world of increased access, new competition and different business models. It's not about easing onto the obit page."

We are only at the beginning of the transformation of the industry - in much the same way as the music industry is also being changed totally by digital technology. As for the future, in , it's full of known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. It seems to me the known knowns will be a continued need for information about an ever more interconnected world; an appetite for storytelling in a way that engages interest, a need for analysis and explanation and an opportunity to debate and discuss.

But these things will increasingly be delivered through an internet that is more tailored and personalised thanks to data-driven services, video-rich and live (in the way we can on some issues for example) and more open networks of people and information rather than closed systems offering limited and pre-determined choices.

But there's a paradox here. Just as the number of global channels and news sites online explodes, what it hides underneath is a contraction of international newsgathering. Costs are being cut, , staff laid off.

[pdf link] said that only the agencies, Reuters, AP and AFP plus the 91Èȱ¬ now maintain extensive international newsgathering resources. , like The Drudge Report, for all its interest and benefits, is no substitute for original reporting. New models are emerging - like and - but it's early days.

There's just that troubling issue of how commercial organisations get an audience and advertisers to pay for it. Newspapers and broadcasters have lived for decades by selling audiences to advertisers. Now the number of eyeballs per page or per programme is falling - but we have much greater detail and granularity about where they are going and what they are doing online. Media organisations have to find a way to extract the value from that.

The risk otherwise is that long standing newspapers or stations will disappear.

Those students just setting out on their journalistic careers will need to be multi-skilled, commercially savvy, creative and confident. They need encouragement - their generation has to reinvent the business of journalism.

The events of last week show us the courage and bravery of many journalists. Outside Bush House, and across the 91Èȱ¬, we paid our respects to our two colleagues who were killed in Afghanistan and Somalia in the space of just two days. This was terrible news for so many of us, but it reminds us of so many others who have also given their lives in seeking and telling the truth to audiences around the world.

Today, 16 June 2008, sees an about to light up London's night skyline. The 91Èȱ¬ will be unveiling a major work by Jaume Plensa - Breathing - an exciting and innovative light sculpture on the top of the new wing of Broadcasting House, dedicated to the memory of journalists around the world who have lost their lives.

Attacks on journalists and others working in news continue to increase, with more than 1,000 killed in the past 10 years. In 2006, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1738, which condemned acts of violence, including deliberate attacks, in many parts of the world against journalists, media professionals and associated personnel in armed conflicts, and called on all parties to put an end to such practices.

The 91Èȱ¬, as the world's leading public service news broadcaster, is strongly committed to the safety of journalists. We recognise the Resolution and today's inauguration of the light sculpture is our recognition of the lives of so many killed. Ban Ki-moon, Secretary General of the United Nations, will be unveiling the sculpture tonight.

You can find out more on the memorial website.

As we remember once again Abdul Samad Rohani and Nasteh Dahir Faraah, please join me in thinking about those who have died and all the journalists who today are working in some of the most dangerous places in the world to tell the story to the world.

UPDATE, 17 JUNE 12:11PM:
Watch the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon journalists unveil the memorial to journalists.

I'm delighted to see the Bangladesh Boat Project amongst the 91Èȱ¬ World Service prizewinners at the Sony awards. This fantastic journey won the newly-created . Here, my colleague Ben Sutherland, who was onboard the boat itself, will describe its success in more detail.

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By Ben Sutherland.

"Among the prizes given on 91Èȱ¬ World Service's astonishingly successful night at the Sonys was the inaugural Multiplatform Radio Award, handed to the Bangladesh Boat Project.

It was richly deserved. Although of course I would say that - having personally been on the boat for two weeks , writing and editing stories and pictures detailing each step of the journey - it is the truth. Nodi Pothe Bangladesh - Bangladesh By The River in Bengali - was one of the most extraordinary efforts ever attempted in 75 years of the radio station.

At its heart, the project was about climate change, and specifically the sharp realities of having to live with the consequences of a heating world.

If predictions about sea level rises come true, much of Bangladesh will simply be erased from the map. Our aim, therefore, was to hire a boat and use it to travel the long, wide rivers of the country to meet the people most at risk.

There were amazing stories - , of , of people living on . And then, of course, halfway through there was , which turned the whole operation on its head. Suddenly we were no longer talking about a potential threat, but a huge disaster that we were right in the middle of.

But not only was the method of getting these stories remarkable, but so was our way of getting it out.

We weren't just using tri-media, and we weren't just World Service. We were on Radio 5 Live, News 24, Radio Scotland - and on Twitter, iTunes, Google.

In the words of the judges, "it embraced everything from podcasts to GPS and Googlemaps to add value to the listener/user experience and met those listeners where they really lived using third party sites such as Flickr."

The project was the brainchild of James Sales, the man whose idea the whole thing was and who instantly and outrageously successfully went from studio manager to project manager.

To some, the words "91Èȱ¬ World Service" still conjure up images of evening dress, stuffy studios and plummy accents. But this award comes hot on the heels of the for Best Radio Website, and highlights how a radio station celebrating its three-quarter century is showing the way in broadcasting innovation."

91Èȱ¬ World Service launches a new channel tomorrow morning - will be adding television to the mix. Initially it will broadcast 12 hours a day, moving to 24 hours later in the year.

Together with our radio and internet services in Arabic, it will form part of the first multimedia offer to the Arab world with programming scheduled across all three media - from the web, to radio, to TV.

Arabic was the first language beyond English the World Service launched 70 years ago. It was also the first language to have its own website. That track record means the 91Èȱ¬ is well known and well respected in the region. Since then, of course, the Arab media market has exploded with many hundreds of channels now available. So why should the 91Èȱ¬ offer a TV service and what will it be like?

The Arab world is one of the most important regions of the world. Events there affect all of us in some way, from terrorism and war, to oil prices and trade. It is natural therefore that the World Service should seek to reach as many people as possible with its broadcasts - and today that means being on TV which is now the most used medium for news and information.

We won't, as some have suggested, be seeking to get more viewers than broadcasters like or . As an international broadcaster that is unlikely. However we believe we can be distinctive for Arab audiences offering an international, not just Arab, perspective on events and an objective approach to issues. It will have the same standards and values as any other 91Èȱ¬ service, reporting on the rest of the world as well as the region. In surveys in the region, 85% of those asked said they would watch the 91Èȱ¬ channel. We hope some 35 million people will be using the service in 5 years time.

Like the rest of the World Service, it is being funded by Grant-in-Aid from the - not the UK licence fee - which has led some of our competitors to suggest the channel will simply be Western propaganda. It won't. As with all World Service programmes, it will be editorially independent - something clearly written into our agreements with the Foreign Office - and will represent the same standards which have made the 91Èȱ¬ one of the most trusted broadcasters in the world.

So the 91Èȱ¬ Arabic newsroom is ready, the teams are recruited and trained, the pilots are over and from 10:00 (GMT) we go live. Wish us luck.

Here's how to watch:

91Èȱ¬ Arabic television will be free-to-air across North Africa and the Arab world on satellite TV via and , and also visible in the UK on (Transponder 50). It will also be streamed on

On Tuesday, when the new channel goes live, we'll post details here about how to watch online.

Update, Tuesday 11 March: To watch 91Èȱ¬ Arabic's live stream online, go to and click on the red button (as pictured here).

Seventy five years ago this week the 91Èȱ¬'s first director general, Lord Reith, launched what was then called the 91Èȱ¬'s Empire Service with these words:

"Radio is an instrument of almost incalculable importance in the social and political life of the community. Its influence will more and more be felt in the daily life of the individual, in almost every sphere of human activity, in affairs national and international… It has been our resolve that the great possibilities and influences of the medium should be exploited to the highest human advantage… The service as a whole is dedicated to the best interests of mankind."

When he spoke, radio was a relatively new technology, much as the internet is today. In the 75 years since, 91Èȱ¬ World Service, as it is now called, has attempted to live up to the high aspirations behind its launch.

It is no longer focused on Empire or Commonwealth of course. Its purpose today is to connect Britain and the world with a modern, genuinely international, service of high quality news and information. Global broadcasting is undergoing unprecedented growth with new international channels opening almost every month - , , , from Iran and many more.

So it is an achievement that today more than 180 million people each week listen to the World Service - the highest audiences there have ever been - and tell us it is still the most trusted international news service anywhere.

That's testament to the extent the service has developed during its lifetime. During World War II, "London Calling" was the iconic station identification - highly valued by audiences across Europe. Today, we have interactive discussion programmes like World Have Your Say, taking calls, texts, e-mails and letters from people in regions as disparate as Chennai and California, Kampala and Kuala Lumpur. Globalisation and international issues from terrorism to climate change, from failed states to economics and trade, to sport and entertainment link countries and cultures more than ever before.

The programmes are available in 33 languages including English, on traditional short wave, re-broadcast on FM stations around the world, on the internet, with sites in all 33 languages, and from 2008, on television in Arabic and Farsi.

To mark the 75th anniversary, there is a season of programmes about free speech debating the principles behind freedom of speech, looking at how news is produced, and discussing how international media can connect people around the world.

A , released today, shows that opinion around the world is divided on free speech. While an average of 56% across all countries think that freedom of the press is important to ensure a free society, 40% believe that controlling what is reported may sometimes be necessary for the greater good. Of the countries where press freedom is most highly valued, Western developed countries are more critical of how honestly and accurately the news is reported. This suggests that the broadcasting of news and information around the world is as important - and contentious - today as it has ever been.

Many thanks for your comments - we take note of all of them.

In response to two of the most frequently made points:

• We do intend to offer a subscription service for international users in the next year. However this will sit alongside the ad-supported service - so subscription-paying users will not see ads if they are logged in, but will do if not logged in. Most news organisations who have adopted a subscription only service are closing them in favour of ads. We would like to offer both, but have to ensure the business plan is robust and we have to undertake some further technical work before we can offer this.

• For UK licence fee payers who wish to access the ad-free site when abroad I'm afraid we don’t yet have reliable technology which would enable this. As with TV, for example, the 91Èȱ¬ internet site will be ad-supported when viewed outside the UK.

91Èȱ¬.com will be launching later this month.

Among its decisions about the future of the 91Èȱ¬ yesterday, the 91Èȱ¬ Trust also approved the launch of 91Èȱ¬.com - which will mean international users of our website will see advertising on selected pages in the near future. There will be no change and no advertising for UK users. 91Èȱ¬.com will encompass all types of content, but news will be at the heart of the site.

There are a number of reasons behind this decision. The bulk of the 91Èȱ¬ is funded by the UK licence fee paid by every household with a TV in Britain. However, under the new 91Èȱ¬ charter, we are not allowed to use licence fee funding for the benefit of international audiences. The 91Èȱ¬ website has a large number of international users and advertising seems to be the obvious way for them to contribute to the costs of the site. In addition, profits from the site will be reinvested in the 91Èȱ¬'s journalism and we believe will enable us to more strongly develop the site for international users.

Advertising around 91Èȱ¬ News is nothing new for international audiences. TV news has been a commercial channel since its launch 16 years ago. Some World Service programmes are re-broadcast on commercial FM radio stations. As with both those examples, 91Èȱ¬.com will carry the same public service journalism as it currently offers, but distributed on a commercial platform.

We will not be offering highly intrusive advertising and are taking significant steps to manage any potential conflict of interest between advertisers and editorial content to ensure our journalism is not compromised in any way.

We recognise that some users will be unhappy with this change. However in tests and surveys in advance of this change the majority of international users did not express a strong objection and a majority of those surveyed in the UK agreed with the principle of advertising for international users.

In the first phase, advertising will be introduced, probably next month, on selected high traffic pages visible only to those logging in from outside the UK. In a second phase, advertising will be rolled out across more of the site, again only when viewed from outside the UK.

This week we start some special coverage of Turkey in advance of the . We have sent freelance journalist Ben Hammersley on a journey through Turkey to report on the issues and debate in the country.

But as well as conventional reports on 91Èȱ¬ News 24, 91Èȱ¬ World, the World Service and he is also reporting unconventionally.

As an experiment, he will also be filing his impressions through a range of of other sites including his , - the photo site, - where you can already see some material, - the bookmarking site, and . The idea is to extend his reporting and possibly reach new audiences in new ways.

It's not something that every 91Èȱ¬ reporter could or should do. Ben is particularly experienced at the use of the internet and social media sites of this kind. So it will be interesting to see what he is able to offer beyond normal news reporting in this way. He is also filing background material on how he has gone about his assignment - how he selected his interviews, what decisions lay behind his reports, and making his source material and notes available. We hope it will open a window on how international reporting is carried out. It won't be perfect, but it will be interesting and will break open the conventional mould of foreign correspondent. and let us know what you think.

CAPE TOWN: of the discussions here at the had the surprising headline that the 91Èȱ¬'s director of global news got his news from the social networking site rather than the 91Èȱ¬'s own news services.

Well, not quite. But sites like Facebook, My Space and Twitter are presenting the editors of the world's newspapers and broadcasting stations with a real challenge. I was invited here to talk about the 91Èȱ¬'s approach to what's awkwardly called User Generated Content or citizen journalism.

In some ways it's simple. News organisations have always interviewed eye witnesses to events and used their pictures if available. Technology now means people can e-mail their experiences and pictures in their thousands to us, and they do. Equally, for decades the phone-in has been a staple format for many radio stations, allowing the opinions of the public to be given a platform. Today, the same thing can be achieved by running blog comments alongside news coverage online.

It's in the area of what's called networked journalism that the biggest opportunities may lie. Whatever subject we choose to report, someone in our audience - let alone the collective wisdom of the audience - will know more about it than we do. If we can use the new technologies to embrace their expertise it can only strengthen our journalism, and hopefully our relationship with the public.

But doing so is more complicated. Editors at this forum are worried about how to verify what they are offered, and how to pay for it, let alone how to make enough revenue to support their organisations. Looking ahead there's wide agreement that where today they are talking about blogs, tomorrow it will be the networking sites like Facebook which is currently enjoying huge growth. And yes, last weekend I did join it.

And in 48 hours I had connected with the editor-in-chief of Reuters, two internet entrepreneurs in the US, a couple of newspaper columnists and a number of the 91Èȱ¬'s own staff. My colleague Rory Cellan-Jones, the 91Èȱ¬'s technology correspondent, has also joined in the hope of understanding this new phenomenon although, as , with mixed results. For news, however, I will still rely on the 91Èȱ¬.

The US Project for Excellence in Journalism has just published its annual . Always worth a read - trends identified there tend to play back across the rest of the world as well. Headlines this year:

• News organizations need to do more to think through the implications of this new era of shrinking ambitions.

• The evidence is mounting that the news industry must become more aggressive about developing a new economic model.

• The key question is whether the investment community sees the news business as a declining industry or an emerging one in transition.

• There are growing questions about whether the dominant ownership model of the last generation, the public corporation, is suited to the transition newsrooms must now make.

• The Argument Culture is giving way to something new, the Answer Culture.

• Blogging is on the brink of a new phase that will probably include scandal, profitability for some, and a splintering into elites and non-elites over standards and ethics.

• While journalists are becoming more serious about the web, no clear models of how to do journalism online really exist yet, and some qualities are still only marginally explored.

The detail is worth reading....

We've launched the report of the into the deaths of journalists around the world. Killing the Messenger: The Deadly Price of News has been 18 months' work involving regional inquiries in Asia, the Middle East, North and South America, and Europe. It was launched on World Press Freedom Day in 2005 when I was asked to chair it. The School of Journalism at Cardiff University has worked with us to analyse all the available data on the deaths of journalists and support staff going back ten years. The headlines:

• More than a thousand have been killed - an average of two a week.

• Only one in four is killed in armed conflict - the majority are local journalists working on stories in their own countries.

• More than 670 of them have been murdered - and the majority of killers are never identified or brought to justice.

• There is a widespread culture of impunity in many countries where killing a journalist is risk-free.

In addition, the report makes a number of recommendations for greater safety and for taking the issue out to the international community for them to understand the impact on free speech and economic and democratic development. When a journalist is killed we all hear and see a little less.

A PDF of the report is (warning it's over 100 pages long).

We have announced today that the for Iran in early 2008. It will be broadcast in Farsi (Persian) and will be distributed free by satellite.

It's the latest in a number of initiatives to develop the 91Èȱ¬ World Service from a radio-dominated operation into a multi-media service for key international audiences. Last year we closed 10 radio language services to be able to re-invest the money in an Arabic TV channel and in improved internet services. This time the British government is paying the full cost of Farsi TV.

Television is increasingly the dominant way people in the Middle East, Iran and many other parts of the world receive their news. We have had a successful Farsi radio broadcast to Iran for more than 60 years and, more recently, on the internet as well - although recently the Iranian authorities have sought to block the internet site. However if we are to continue to maintain our audience reach in the region, it is essential we move into TV.

The service will reflect the 91Èȱ¬'s core editorial values of impartiality and fairness and crucially bring a broad range of international reporting to an audience which cannot always get access to free and independent information.

Although the service is funded by the British Government, as is the rest of the 91Èȱ¬ World Service, the new channel will of course be editorially independent. Since the launch of the World Service in 1932, successive British governments have recognised that for the 91Èȱ¬'s international news to be credible, trusted and respected by diverse audiences around the world, it must be truly independent.

The 91Èȱ¬'s Global News services comprise the World Service in English and 32 languages, the internet news site accessible overseas and 91Èȱ¬ World TV news. Altogether 210 million people each week get their news from the 91Èȱ¬ - and that number continues to grow. We live in a more complex, interconnected, world than ever, wrestling with issues like international terrorism, climate change, globalised trade and economics. As a result, we are finding more people want international news than ever before.