BBC News’ take navel gazing to new extremes

I had to check this wasn’t some sort of late April Fool’s joke. It has to be up there in my list of the most Hugo-esque moments of madness of 2007 so far.

Are you sitting down?

The BBC have changed the way the radio news is introduced, and how it ends. And they invested in consumer research to validate the following change:

From: “BBC Radio Four, the news at two o’clock." at the start and "BBC Radio Four news" at the end.

To…cue drum-roll…:

To: "BBC News on Radio Four, it’s two o’clock."
at the start and "BBC News for Radio Four" at the end.

The rationale for this monumental change was discussed in detail on the BBC News Editors’ Blog by the head of radio news.This prompted a predictable, pissed-off response:

"This is thoroughly pointless – why did you waste licence fee money even
discussing it? Do you think radio listners are idiots?"

"The fact that anyone at the beeb spent time contemplating this change makes me very angry. What a waste of my license fee."

Another good example of wasting time and energy and money on stuff that people just don’t care about.