Image copyright AFP Image caption A view of Pyongyang - a key focus of the service is North Korea...

The BBC has launched a Korean service as part of an expansion of its foreign language outlets.

The service, which began broadcasts on Tuesday, will provide news, sport, business and culture through a website and radio transmissions.

A key focus of the service is North Korea, where government censorship restricts access to independent news.

Korean is one of 12 new BBC language services funded by a £291m ($400m) grant from the British government.

The director of the BBC World Service, Francesca Unsworth, said: "BBC News Korean will build on the long-standing reputation for fairness and impartiality the BBC World Service has earned all over the world.

The service will be aimed at audiences in the Korean peninsula and Korean speakers around the world.

The service's journalists will be based in Seoul, London and Washington and will draw on the full extent of the BBC's global network of correspondents.

The BBC World Service is currently launching in 12 new languages - Afaan Oromo, Amharic, Gujarati, Igbo, Korean, Marathi, Pidgin, Punjabi, Serbian, Telugu, Tigrinya and Yoruba.</s>The BBC launched a new Korean language radio and online service on Tuesday that will be available to listeners in North Korea if the signal is not blocked.

The service, a part of the BBC's biggest global expansion since the 1940s, will have a dedicated team of journalists in Seoul, London and Washington.

"Audiences in the Korean peninsula and Korean speakers around the world can now hear radio broadcasts and access the latest news online," the BBC World Service said in a statement.

"BBC News Korean will build on the long-standing reputation for fairness and impartiality the BBC World Service has earned all over the world," said Francesca Unsworth, director of the BBC World Service.

A BBC World Service spokesman said without giving further details that monitoring by the BBC had shown that "at least part" of the new broadcasts were getting through to North Korea despite "jamming".

The service is broadcast on shortwave for three hours a day and one hour on medium wave, seven days a week.

The BBC in its statement provided the times for the transmissions both in Seoul and Pyongyang.

Listeners could face heavy punishment for tuning in in North Korea, which was ranked the second worst country in the world for censorship after Turkmenistan by US human rights group Freedom House.

Korean is one of 12 new BBC services being rolled out this year thanks to a £291 million (332 million euro, $393 million) grant from the British government, including broadcasts in Pidgin, Punjabi and Yoruba.</s>The BBC has launched a Korean service as part of an expansion of its foreign language outlets.

The service, which began broadcasts on Tuesday, will provide news, sport, business and culture through a website and radio transmissions.

A primary focus of the service is North Korea, where government censorship restricts access to independent news.

Korean is one of 12 new BBC language services funded by a £291m ($400m) grant from the British government.

The director of the BBC World Service, Francesca Unsworth, said: "BBC News Korean will build on the long-standing reputation for fairness and impartiality the BBC World Service has earned all over the world."

The service's journalists will be based in Seoul, London and Washington and will draw on the full extent of the BBC's global network of correspondents.

The BBC World Service is currently launching in 12 new languages - Afaan Oromo, Amharic, Gujarati, Igbo, Korean, Marathi, Pidgin, Punjabi, Serbian, Telugu, Tigrinya and Yoruba.</s>The BBC is to increase the pay of staff at World Service and BBC Monitoring in line with the rest of the news department after an internal review revealed significant disparities.

In a separate row to the gender pay dispute at the BBC, the corporation has faced growing frustration among staff at World Service and Monitoring about how much less they are paid than presenters, reporters and producers on the BBC’s network news.

Sources have told the Guardian that few if any news presenters on the World Service are being paid more than £50,000 a year and were shocked to find that presenters of the BBC’s network news, such as Huw Edwards, were earning almost £600,000. A freedom of information request earlier this year revealed that the average salary of a senior broadcast journalist at the World Service was more than 10% less than on network news – £38,037 compared with £44,023.

However, the increase is unlikely to quell all the anger among World Service and Monitoring staff. The BBC said it will only apply for off-air staff such as producers, with the remuneration of presenters and on-air journalists addressed as part of a wider review about how much the public service broadcaster pays on-air talent.

This wider review was sparked by the fallout from the publication of the BBC’s list of top earners in the summer, which sparked a row about a gender pay gap at the corporation because it revealed that just a third of its best-paid stars are women and the top seven earners are all men.

James Harding, director of BBC news and current affairs, said the organisation was increasing pay for staff at World Service and Monitoring, which tracks news from other providers around the world for BBC staff, the UK government and commercial subscribers, after a review by the accountancy firm PwC found there were “some differences in pay for some groups of people”.

The PwC review, which is expected to be published in full later on Tuesday, concluded that this gap existed due to “historic and economic reasons”. World Service and Monitoring used to operate separately from the BBC and were funded by the government. However, in 2014 they were integrated with the rest of the news department.

Harding said: “We are all keenly aware of our responsibility to the licence fee payer, seeking to provide the highest-quality services at the best possible value for money. So, we have considered carefully the argument that internal and external market forces should continue to be factors setting World Service and BBC Monitoring pay.

“We want a BBC where people move around and between our newsrooms. We believe a wider range of voices at work across BBC News will ensure we reach more stories and keep connected to everyone. To help make this happen, we have decided to align median pay.”

The World Service operates in more than 30 languages and has a weekly audience of 269 million. Tony Hall, the director-general, has described it as the “jewel in the crown” of the BBC and it is undergoing its biggest expansion since the 1940s. This expansion includes the launch of a controversial Korean service aimed at people in North Korea, which is opposed by the North Korean government.</s>A BBC logo is seen at the company's main offices, in west London, on the day the organisation announced one of the biggest shake-ups in its 82-year history, December 7, 2004. REUTERS/Toby Melville

LONDON (Reuters) - The BBC came under fire on Tuesday for botching a 100 million pound ($170 million) digital project in the latest of a series of reports to criticize top management for their running of Britain’s publicly funded broadcaster.

Public spending watchdog the National Audit Office (NAO) said BBC executives led by then Director General Mark Thompson, now New York Times Company chief executive, failed to realize in time that the Digital Media Initiative was in trouble.

The project, axed in May last year, was meant to allow staff across the BBC to create and share video and audio content on their desktops but technical problems and delays eroded confidence in the scheme.

The NAO found the BBC executive board led by Thompson was too optimistic about its ability to handle the project and did not have “sufficient grip” over an 18-month period, while the BBC Trust, chaired by Chris Patten, did not challenge it enough.

“If the BBC had better governance and reporting for the programme, it would have recognized the difficulties much earlier than May 2012,” NAO head Amyas Morse said in a statement.

Overall, the BBC lost 98.4 million pounds on the project which was cancelled by the corporation’s current director general, Tony Hall, a month after he took up the top job.

Thompson, who quit the BBC in 2012 after eight years to join the New York Times, is due to return before parliament’s public accounts committee on February 3 along with other past and present BBC executives to answer questions about the failed project.

A spokesman for Thompson said on Tuesday he would not be commenting until then.

The NAO report comes after a series of controversies that have rocked public confidence in the BBC, including criticism over large payments to departing executives, a child sex scandal involving ex-TV presenter Jimmy Savile, and workplace bullying.

Political oversight of the BBC, which has an annual budget of 5 billion pounds, has escalated, with management called in front of 18 parliamentary hearings in the past year.

The BBC’s handling of the failed IT project was also the subject of a damning report by accountants PwC last year that was commissioned by the BBC Trust. It found failings in the Digital Media Initiative could have been identified two years earlier.

The BBC Trust is charged with ensuring an annual license fee paid by all British households with televisions is well spent.

Margaret Hodge, chair of parliament’s public accounts committee, said the NAO report read “like a catalogue of how not to run a major programme”, with no senior officer having oversight of the project and no regular reviews on its progress.

“If the BBC had established clearer accountability and stronger reporting, it could have recognized the issues much earlier and set about minimizing the astronomic losses for the license fee payer,” said Hodge, who will chair next week’s parliamentary inquiry. “These failures go right to the top.”

Hall, who took over as director general at the BBC in April last year, has called for managers to take individual responsibility for their decisions.

The BBC’s director of operations Dominic Coles said the BBC had “got this one wrong” but defended the corporation’s record. He said the BBC’s chief technology officer at the time, John Linwood, has since left the broadcaster.

“DMI aside, we have a strong track record of successfully delivering major projects such as BBC iPlayer and the digital Olympics and we will continue to innovate to deliver new technology to the public,” Coles said in a statement.

Diane Coyle, vice chairman of the BBC Trust, said they were working with the BBC executive to ensure serious problems were spotted and addressed at an earlier stage.

“It is essential that the BBC learns from the losses incurred in the DMI project and applies the lessons to running technology projects in future,” Coyle said in a statement.</s>BBC iPlayer has seen a massive update to the amount of content available

BBC iPlayer has been given an impressive new update, with a treasure trove of classic television and radio programming uploaded to the video on-demand service.

Older shows from the likes of Louis Theroux, David Attenborough, as well as Concorde and Tomorrow's World will be added on the iPlayer in the coming weeks.

These shows will be included in a brand-new section in the video application – dubbed From The Archive.

According to the BBC, some shows will be available permanently via iPlayer, while others will be rotated with other classic programmes.

BBC iPlayer is slowly evolving from a simple catch-up service to a more comprehensive video service, fuelled by increased competition from the likes of All 4, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.</s>LONDON, March 17 (Reuters) - The BBC apologised on Monday to a leading British university for sending two undercover reporters to accompany an academic trip to North Korea, after an internal investigation found that it had failed to inform students of the potential risks.

The publicly funded BBC joined the trip to North Korea for students and post-graduates of the London School of Economics (LSE) in March 2013.

Two undercover journalists - including the respected reporter John Sweeney - attached themselves to the group to gain access to the secretive state and film a documentary for Panorama, a current affairs programme.

The general secretary of the LSE’s student union accused the BBC at the time of using the students as “human shields”.

The university said the students had been told “a journalist” would accompany them, but it had not been made clear the BBC’s aim was to use the visit to secretly record footage for Panorama, a current affairs programme.

James Harding, the director of BBC news and current affairs, wrote to the chairman of the LSE, Peter Sutherland, saying that he accepted the corporation had fallen short. “On behalf of the BBC, I would like to apologise to you and the LSE,” he said.

The BBC’s Editorial Standards Committee said the broadcaster had not adequately informed the students about the BBC’s involvement so that they would be aware of any risks posed by the presence of the journalists.

“This was a serious failing, and the BBC is right to apologise to the complainants,” said Alison Hastings, Chair of the Editorial Standards Committee.

The LSE and the father of one of the students on the trip made a series of complaints to the BBC after news of its involvement in the trip surfaced last year. (Reporting by Julia Fioretti, editing by Costas Pitas)
The BBC plans to launch a service in Korean.