BBC World Service axes five languages

AFP/London

A woman places a bunch of flowers during a protest in front of BBC’s Bush House in London yesterday

The BBC World Service yesterday said it would close five of its language services, shut down radio services for another seven languages and cut 650 jobs as it seeks to make drastic savings.

The Albanian, Macedonian, Portuguese for Africa and Serbian language services as well as the English for the Caribbean regional service will all be shut down over the next three years.

The cuts will also spell the end of radio programmes in seven languages including Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese, although multimedia coverage in those languages will continue.

The head of the National Union of Journalists, Jeremy Dear, claimed the measures were "an act of vandalism” which would do "irreparable damage”. "We are certainly surprised by the scale of it,” he told BBC radio. "For the very first time the BBC World Service will no longer be the leading international news provider by audience size. It will be overtaken by the Voice of America.”

BBC global news director Peter Horrocks said: "This is a painful day for BBC World Service and the 180mn people around the world who rely on the BBC’s global news services every week. We are making cuts in services that we would rather not be making.”

The seven radio services to be cut are Russian - apart from three programmes distributed solely online - Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, Ukrainian, Turkish, Azeri and Spanish for Cuba. The BBC said it will also cease all short wave radio services in Hindi, Indonesian, Kyrgyz, Nepali, Swahili as well as its Great Lakes service which takes in Rwanda and Burundi, although services will continue on FM radio and through the Internet and mobile phones.

The 650 jobs, a quarter of the World Service’s total staff, will be phased out by 2014.