News Broadcasting
BBC World to produce six programmes on nominees of ‘The World Challenge’
MUMBAI: BBC World will produce six 30-minute programmes on each nominee of the The World Challenge – a global competition seeking to highlight and reward outstanding examples of community enterprise and innovation. The programme will examine how the initiative began, its inspiration and why it is socially and environmentally successful.
For The World Challenge competition in 2006, BBC World and Newsweek, the weekly global current affairs magazine, have joined with Shell to search for, highlight and reward individuals or groups that have used enterprise and innovation to the benefit of local communities.
In an official statement issued, the six programmes will feature two finalists per programme and will be broadcast to BBC World’s weekly global audience of 65 million viewers in October and November 2006. The channel’s viewers will be invited to vote online for the most commendable and inspirational project. Full details are available online at http://www.theworldchallenge.co.uk.
Newsweek will mirror the programmes’ content in a six-part series of advertorials on the 12 nominees, aimed at driving its readers to the online voting site. The campaign will reach 1.5 million weekly readers across Europe, Asia and Latin America.
The World Challenge has attracted more than 800 nominations, nearly double the amount received last year.
Nominations for the 2006 competition closed on 7 June and a total of 816 nominations were received – a 79 per cent increase on last year’s nominations of 457. This year’s competition attracted the greatest numbers from India (159), Philippines (56), Nigeria (47), USA (34), Kenya (32), South Africa (32), England (20) and Uganda (20), states an official release.
A panel of expert judges will now shortlist the nominations to 12 finalists that show the best examples of community-based business, development or environmental projects. The finalists will then be announced at the beginning of July.
During The World Challenge in 2005, more than 120,000 votes were cast from around the world. The winning project, Coconets from the Philippines, was presented with a US$20,000 grant from Shell, which has been invested in further developing their system to prevent landslides using waste coconut husks.
Once voting has closed, the winner of World Challenge 2006 will be announced at an awards ceremony in The Hague in December 2006. The winner will again receive a US$20,000 grant from Shell to invest in their project, plus the two runners-up will each receive US$10,000.
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:Â 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.
