News Broadcasting
BBC World Service’s English teaching initiative completes 10 years
MUMBAI: BBC World Service has announced that its English language teaching service celebrates 10 years online this month. The site receives 10 million page impressions a month – 19 million if one counts English Language Teaching material on partner websites.
Special features on www.bbclearningenglish.com to mark the anniversary include:
A mini retro site displaying classic pages from the archives
A specially commissioned piece by linguist David Graddol discusses who will be learning English in the future and how and what they will be learning
A blogging facility providing daily language support to individual bloggers via a teacher’s weblog
The website also features Flatmates – BBC World Service’s first interactive soap; Ask About English, where experts answer users’ questions; and Keep Your English Up To Date, in which Professor David Crystal discusses new words.
And there are interactive teaching games Back of the Net and Commentary Box and a range of short audio programmes with quizzes, glossaries and downloadable scripts on lifestyle and entertainment.
For teachers of English, weekly lesson plans based on topical news stories are available.
News Broadcasting
News TV viewership jumps 33 per cent as West Asia war draws audiences
BARC Week 8 data shows news share rising to 8 per cent despite T20 World Cup
NEW DELHI: Even as individual television news channel ratings remain under a temporary pause, the genre itself is seeing a clear surge in audience attention.
According to the latest data from Broadcast Audience Research Council India, television news recorded a 33 per cent jump in genre share in Week 8 of 2026, covering February 28 to March 6.
The news genre accounted for 8 per cent of total television viewership during the week, up from 6 per cent the previous week. The spike in attention coincided with escalating geopolitical tensions involving the United States, Israel and Iran, which have kept global headlines firmly fixed on West Asia.
The rise is notable because it came at a time when cricket was dominating television screens. The high-stakes stages of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, including the Super 8 fixtures and semi-finals, were being broadcast during the same period.
Despite the cricket frenzy, viewers appeared to be toggling between sport and global affairs, boosting the overall share of news programming.
The surge in genre share comes even as the government has enforced a one-month pause on publishing ratings for individual news channels. The move followed regulatory scrutiny of the television ratings ecosystem.
While channel-level rankings remain temporarily out of sight, the genre-level data suggests that when global tensions escalate, audiences continue to turn to television news for real-time updates.
