Richard Porter, Head of News, BBC World

Richard Porter began his journalism career in local newspapers before joining the BBC in 1989. He worked for BBC Nations and Regions in Bristol, Newcastle, Leeds and, finally, Manchester, where he was News and Current Affairs Editor. He joined BBC News 24 in 1997, six months ahead of its launch, and edited weekend and breakfast programmes. Two years later, he was made Senior Editor of BBC News 24, responsible for 10 hours of news coverage daily.

In 2001, Porter was made Editor of BBC One's Breakfast programme, and during this time, covered major news stories such as the British General Election 2001, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Iraq war.

In 2004, he joined BBC World as Editorial Director, overseeing its editorial strategy as well as all its commissioning and scheduling. Late last year, he became the channel's Head of News, taking responsibility for expanding and modernising its live news output. In this interview with exchange4media's Noor Fathima Warsia, Porter compares the difference between Indian news and international, the challenges that a News Head faces, and the impact of the growth of technology in news. Excerpts:

Q. There is a whole set of guidelines on your site that one has to follow if something has to be done on BBC World...

That is really more for marketing and communication, when they are getting information out. We used it when we redesigned the website. Some things are absolutely fixed and you cannot change them in style, so you have to get that right, and develop what you want around it. Today, BBC World content is going out on platforms like YouTube. This branding will help people identify the BBC content even out of the BBC environment.

If what you are covering is somebody's speech, and there is only way of covering it, then there is hardly anyway of differentiating it. However, it is the before and the after that would matter, and again, things here would depend on your sources, to get you more and inside details. That is where differentiation comes from. Then the quality of analyses, the quality of your presenters, the visual element -- all becomes important.

When Al Jazeera was launching here, people asked us what we would do now, with the increased competition. And the answer was really simple. We are going to do nothing. Not because we are arrogant or complacent, but because we are proud of what we do; we innovate all the time anyways, and we are not going to just begin doing something because of competition.

We do want to see what competitors are doing. I watch a certain amount of competitive channels everyday, and see what their lead story, how their features coverage is, and so on. I see what the domestic channels here are doing, what SKY News is doing. When I am in India, I take a good look at what news channels there are doing. So we keep eyes open for competition.

Our record of getting stories at international level is better than anyone else. Not just in the context of news item, but also documentary series that have very high-quality investigative journalism. Sometimes, yes, competition may have a story we would have wanted, and ignoring which would be a huge disservice to our viewers. In that case, you swallow your pride, and get on with it. Sometimes, you just feel 'Ha, I don't see why they are making such a fuss about it,' and you just let it be.

In the BBC somewhere I suspect, having been here for so long. I am interested in the way the media is developing but I really haven't thought about this. I would quite like to be in my garden with my children, but that doesn't count, does it?

There has been amazing expansion in India that continues, and is becoming more ambitious in production quality, live content. There is tough competition in India, and in a bid to reach more people, I think Indian news channels are more tabloid in their approach than we are. What isn't breaking news? This may be driven from competition but people have to rethink this. Breaking news would lose impact if done in this fashion, what is the next level then… double breaking news?

It would be interesting to see what happens from here though. If you see what happened in the US, news channels have moved more to personality and anchor-driven content, that just news. When there are so many channels, you have to find things that would make you stand out ahead of the others. We can be in international news, which is our differentiation because we have scale, media and more than 40 bureaux worldwide. Al Jazeera can do something close to that, but not many others. I know NDTV has global aspirations but it would cost them awful lot of money to be present in 40 countries, and have over 100 correspondents worldwide.

It is a very high-pressured job, and high-pressured in different kinds of ways. You have to make decision on stories, and do it very fast, ensuring all accuracy. As a manager, you are running after a big department; looking after the staff, budgets; constantly developing the content so that it is not getting stale -- but that is the excitement. You cannot be doing the same thing everyday, and still be good at what you are doing. The challenge is also to constantly reinvent yourself, and the way of looking and presenting things.

As BBC World, we are addressing a particular kind of audience, which is an upmarket audience. At the same time, we are trying to produce television for people who are watching it. So yes, if the number of viewers in India is larger than that of another country, we would tend to focus on India related developments.

I think in a competitive landscape, you have to be very clear about the brand, because that will help you differentiate. You have to live the values of the brand then, and I say that from a happy position of working for a very strong brand. But it is a strong brand because it does all of those things. There is absolute clarity on what BBC stands for. People who work for it know that it means, and they have strong connections to what BBC does. The on-screen appearance, the way we market ourselves, everything is very consistent.

How I approach this is, I absolutely believe in the BBC's job of being impartial, independent, accurate and being trusted. As it happens, that is our brand.

…But that is not what the brand is at all. BBC created a website 10 years back. Some of the other technological developments that BBC has made are not that of a sober and conservative organisation. True, we are seen as serious, but there is a lot of contemporary news and presenters on BBC today. We just treat their audiences as adults.

One reason why people come to news channels is to get the breaking news, news as it happens. From an Indian dimension, however, it feels to me that almost everything is breaking news. Here, there is not so much material that is labelled as breaking news. The threshold of 'breaking news' is higher in the way British news channels tend to work. When you think about BBC World and our news, because it is addressing to more markets than one, the standard for breaking news is even higher. It has to be a development that would have an impact on a much larger audience base, than just a domestic base.

About the debate that you mention, we are getting information out so fast today. Audiences expect us to share information with them as soon as we receive it. Not only they expect to hear what we know, but they also place a lot of trust on the credibility of that information. It is in such cases that experience of the people makes all the difference. If something doesn't possibly seem true, chances are that it is not. By better news, the audiences are looking at more than just the development; what went behind it. So I think the scene is changing to breaking news and better news today, than breaking news versus better news.

BBC World reports on how the world sees India, and India sees the world; and is not just a catch phrase, but also the reality. We see the developments and their relevance to the audience we are broadcasting to. People who watch us have something in common -- they travel, work, are intelligent, and are people who are looking for international news. We are not broadcasting to Asia or India, we are broadcasting to real people in these places. What does someone in Delhi have in common with someone in Singapore, and I think we can find the connections. We can tell you what impact would a development in Singapore have in India. A local channel can't do that, and I don't think we can replace local channels. We work alongside them and offer additional value to them

You have to be as open as you possibly can be, and leave people to make up their minds after that. For some people, being honest and open is not enough, but that is all that you can do. BBC, through the editor's blog or other means, is dedicated towards this. Sometimes being open gets you in trouble because there are people who are not used to it, and the moment you have given an explanation on something, the attitude is sceptical. But I think over time they would learn that this is something we are really committed to. In my view, blogs and UGC can exist alongside what we do. We do take a lot of content from audiences, like pictures that viewers submit. Audiences want to do that today, and they expect you to let them participate. This is fine, but you shouldn't forget your basic journalistic training, and you have to check what you have been given. Today, it is basic journalism with these new technologies. Our communication with the viewers is on in many ways -- individual programmes have their own diaries, we have email newsletters. We can also use all this for feedback as well.

Blogs do change the media landscape to some extent. I'm looking at all of this today. Some blogs are doing something similar that newspapers have done over time, and that is creating a reputation for themselves through the quality of writing, good stories and good analyses. A large majority out there, however, are unnoticed, and not making any difference. I have no problem co-existing with them. Most of them don't enormously worry me.

When I joined, I thought that BBC was the world's best broadcaster, and I think that now too. BBC is one organisation but it is really many media organisations working together. I have stayed in the news area, and in terms of BBC journalism, I have worked in all three areas -- I currently work in international news, which is for people outside the UK; before that I worked in national news; and before that in regional news. There are a lot of opportunities here and that is typical about BBC -- that you get experience in different areas. For instance, working on the breakfast programme on BBC One and working on BBC World are very different kinds of job with new challenges.