Leaving Bush

Aerial view of Bush House, home of the World Service

So last Friday brought to a close an amazing three and a half years of working for the BBC World Service. As a web developer, my writing qualities don’t hold a candle next to those of my colleagues in editorial, however I’d like to share a few things on having had the very lucky opportunity to be a part of the world’s largest international broadcaster and to have the privilege to work with some of the most amazing people you could meet.

I had applied for the job very early in the summer of 2008, back when I was still lapping up the sun in Malta. Truth be told, I didn’t really take it that seriously. Because let’s face it, the chances that the Beeb would be interested in someone who wasn’t based in London, only had a history with newspapers and spent most of his life on a small island in the middle of the Mediterranean, were pretty slim.

My cynical views were shot down quite quickly when I got called for a phone interview. True to form, I made a complete fool of myself by thinking that BBC World Service was the same as BBC World (yes, there is a difference). And being called out on it five minutes into my interview was not the best way to start. A complete facepalm moment, if there ever was one. And yet, despite that initial fumble, I must have done something right, as within several weeks, I was on a flight to a new home in London, still wondering what I signed myself up for.

Mistaking the World Service for World News turned out to be one of the best mistakes I could have possibly done. And I’m so glad I did.

First day on the job, I was faced with the imposing grand entrance of Bush House in Aldwych, whose inscription “To the friendship of English speaking peoples” above the main door couldn’t differ more from the whole ethos of the organisation. Beyond the reception, 32 separate language teams (back then, now it’s 27) gather news, produce original content and broadcast it to an audience of around 180 million people across the globe. That’s the listenership of Radio 1, sixteen times over.

Marble floors and staircases are found throughout the building

Wandering around the building is an experience in itself. You could easily be talking to a Chinese service producer, step off the lift, cross the hall to have a chat with the Vietnamese or one of the African services. Peek through a doorway, say hello to the Burmese crew, and then trek your way to another side of the building to find the Turkish service preparing for their news bulletin. Hop into the lift again, run into the editor of the Russian service on the way to the canteen only to be greeted by someone from the Urdu team. It is probably as close as you can get to a United Nations type of setup, and a very far cry from any place I’ve ever been before.

Led through a maze of doors and corridors and a lift piping the same radio station I was standing in, we finally arrived at my new office – a door sign reading “World Service Future Media” – with an intimidating list of around forty people underneath it – Remembering them all seemed impossible, pronouncing some of them would be even harder. It was first day at school all over again, and I just dropped myself right in the middle of it.

Doing the introduction rounds around the office, anyone would be hard pressed to find a more diverse group of people in one room, perhaps even more than the rest of the building: Chinese, Swedish, Indian, Australian, Turkish, Malaysian, Trinidadian, Romanian, Lebanese, Iraqi, Brazilian, Greek, Scottish, Filipino, Uruguayan, Kiwi, Vietnamese, Israeli, Canadian (and yes of course, English as well). Perfect! Let’s add Maltese to the list. If there was ever a gold standard on being inclusive, I think this was it.

The disciplines of this department weren’t any less diverse; developers, designers, operations, editors, producers, and project managers all sitting together, had the non-trivial task of looking after all the language websites of the World Service. Someone coined it a “high-bandwidth” communicative environment, in sharp contrast with other parts of the organisation which had the different disciplines sitting separately from each other. One project manager once described the environment as having “the feel of a startup”. Not having worked at one before, I wasn’t sure what this meant. And it would only become clear much later.

The buzz at work was undeniable, with a very healthy culture encouraging experimentation and new ideas. I was lucky enough to land in the middle of a very driven group of people, and can’t be thankful enough for that. It was infectious, and it made me push myself further. It wasn’t always rosy, sparks did flare up every now and then. Yet you wouldn’t expect anything less from people who genuinely care about what they’re doing. The determination to get things done the best way we could was in high gear.

Superpower Nation at Shoreditch Town Hall, where we attempted to use machine translation to get a multilingual chat going

The variety of projects we worked on were wide and varied – most of them are in production, some were for fun and some never saw the light of day. Possibly one of the most interesting was a machine translation project where we tried to get a global conversation going that cut across the World Service’s diverse language output, using Google Translate as an intermediary. Suffice to say, the results were far from accurate and more on the hilarious side…. but it did get people talking. A six-hour event happening out of historic Shoreditch Town Hall, broadcast on radio, television and online, it was truly something quite different.

Whilst that particular project was more experimental in nature, regular day-to-day work wasn’t any less exciting. I didn’t fully appreciate the challenges of different languages and cultures than when I worked on a content management system which has to deal with them. Or when the task is to build widgets that have to work both in Left-to-Right and Right-to-Left for languages such as Arabic or Persian. Or when the colour of a simple loading icon has to be changed because of possible connotations with a local political party in some regions. Or the hurdle faced by trying to display a complex script like Hindi or Urdu on a low-end mobile device, the solution to which was – web purists close your eyes – to publish the story text as images. In a less than ideal world, responsibly straying off standard practices is not always a bad thing.

Visual representation of the WS websites. Each dot represents a story page. Art installation courtesy of @ishmatt

There was also a flurry of side projects which surfaced the vast amount of content produced daily. These ranged from the totally wacky, such as a way to visualise our website portfolio as a universe of dots (I take the blame for this one), to more sensible ones which did content analysis on the news stories and plotted them on a global map. Another analysed daily radio output and automatically highlighted the trending topics. A podcast-tuner was also experimented with, as a different way to discover BBC podcasts. Then there was the “gratuitous eye candy” ones (as they were called), which made visual walls of images and videos as they were published throughout the day. The breadth of the content coming out of each language service is staggering.

The whole building runs to atomic clock precision (quite literally), and I have come to appreciate the immense amount of work which goes into setting a broadcast schedule….. and by appreciation I really mean “black magic which I won’t ever touch in my life”. When it comes to radio and television, schedules rule, and the World Service is no exception. Global broadcasting is quite an extraordinary feat. Think about having to deal with two television and a multitude of radio stations broadcasting in different languages with different schedules for different regions in different timezones for different networks with different broadcast mediums including radio, satellite, cable, online and mobile. The bi-annual summer/winter clock changes aren’t exactly the most anticipated events of the year, as anyone from operations and distribution will tell you. Compound that with the fact that you have transmitters around the world that power up or down according to the set schedule and you quickly realise why it’s imperative that a programme needs to end precisely on time, despite how heated an on-air discussion gets.

The time surgery. Clocks in Bush House are driven centrally by an atomic clock, and this corner is where they come for some love and care

Which brings me to the very heart of the whole operation, and that is news and story telling. None of which would be possible without journalists, editors, producers, studio managers and the entirety of the staff who keep it all running. The World Service is home to some of the most amazing people I’ve had the privilege to work with. You could sit downstairs in the bar and hear the most incredible stories, anything from war torn regions of Africa to the far away beautiful beaches of Indonesia. It’s quite sobering when you learn of journalists unable to return to their home countries, for fear of persecution – only because of their profession. Even more of a wake up call is when you hear of colleagues in the field getting caught in conflict, detained or worse.

So why have I decided to leave Bush House? Over the coming year, the World Service will gradually be vacating the building, and after 70 years, will return its operations back to Broadcasting House on Regent street. This means that for the first time, BBC News, BBC World, BBC London and BBC World Service will all be sitting together in one location. I am optimistic that this closer collaboration will give a much deserved bigger exposure to stories coming from the non-English services.

As for our group, preparations for this move meant that we needed to align ourselves closer with the rest of the organisation. This led to the disbandment of the online team into five separate entities. Sadly, the short-term effect was that the high-bandwidth environment very quickly came apart. In the grand scheme of things, it makes sense as the splintered group merges with the larger English news teams. However the culture changed into something very different to what it was when I started, with a feeling of a heavier bureaucracy. It is often said that culture eats strategy for breakfast, but in our case, the culture had been left bleeding. On top of that, following a number of departures, I felt this was probably a good time to brave the outside world.

The new BBC newsroom in Broadcasting House. Source: http://www.simonkennedy.net

The World Service had a particularly tough year with spending reviews resulting in the closure of five language services and the loss of staff members. Also, shifting a workforce on such a scale was never going to be easy and restructuring casualties are to be expected. The outcome however will be an impressive twenty seven language services merging forces with the English team in what will become the largest newsroom in the world, resulting in a much stronger, more unified and yet diverse news division with unique in-depth perspectives not seen anywhere else.

As for the much beloved Bush House, I’m sure there will be more stories emerging in the coming year, as more studios and offices throughout its wings get vacated. There’s currently a project to collate a book with anecdotes as well as recent radio programmes about the life that goes on inside, which without a doubt, will describe it a thousand times more eloquently than I have here. Originally planned as a trade centre with luxury accommodation, complete with a swimming pool in the basement (it’s hidden under one of the large drama studios), it truly is one of the most iconic places the BBC has operated from.

It will be missed dearly, but ultimately, it’s not about the building, it’s about the people, the events which surround them and more importantly, the culture which keeps it all together. And that’s one incredibly powerful combination when you get it right.