BBC to close recipes website as part of £15m saving

BBC to close recipes website as part of £15m saving

The BBC Food website carrying more than 11,000 recipes is to close as part of a plan to cut £15m from the corporation's online budget.

All existing recipes will be mothballed, although the commercial BBC Good Food website will remain.

The proposals, announced by James Harding, director of BBC news and current affairs, include closing the Newsbeat website and app.

They set out savings of more than £15 million, around 15% of editorial spend.

The announcement on Tuesday follows the publication of the government's White Paper on the future of the BBC last week.

What is the BBC White Paper about?

What is the government proposing?

The online proposals, subject to approval, include:

• Close the iWonder service, redeploying its formats across BBC Online

• Close the BBC's Food website. BBC Worldwide's Good Food site will remain

• Focus on distinctive long-form journalism online under a Current Affairs banner and close the online News Magazine

• Integrate Newsbeat output into BBC News Online, but close the separate Newsbeat site and app

• Continue to offer travel news online but close the Travel site and halt development of the Travel app

• Stop running local news index web pages, offering instead an open stream on our rolling guide to BBC and local news provider stories, 'Local Live'

• Remove ring-fenced funding for iPlayer-only commissions

• Reduce digital radio and music social media activity and additional programme content that is not core to services

Mr Harding said "no decision" had been made on the future of the BBC News Channel, but that the closure of the rolling channel was not an option.

Among six options on the table, to be decided on by the executive board in July, were a single news channel offering "a global agenda from London".

Dan Lepard, a chef whose recipes appear on BBC Food, said the website was an "extraordinary, world-class archive" and asked where were "our rights" to preserve such a "library".

"With the BBC recipes, you know they work. I can tell you that loads of recipes out there, don't work, will fail. The BBC ones work," he told BBC Radio 4's Today.

Xanthe Clay, a food writer for the Daily Telegraph, said it was a "fantastic archive" of largely British recipes which come directly from chefs, and was "part of our cultural heritage".

 

 

Article Source: BBC News