About the Awards
The BBC Global Reith Awards have been created to celebrate what we do, to recognise excellence, promote high standards and spread awareness of good creative ideas across boundaries.
In 2010, we have introduced a new category, the Global News Craft Award to recognise all of the 'behind the scenes' work that goes into making our programmes. We have also introduced a 'people's choice' category - the One BBC Award will be voted for by you. More details about the voting will be available after the shortlist is announced in February 2010.
The BBC Global Reith Awards recognise achievement across the whole division, for colleagues in BBC World Service, BBC World News, BBC Monitoring and BBC World Service Trust. The awards are open to anyone who contributes towards BBC Global News, whether a member of BBC staff, a supplier or contributor. We are a multifunctional division, so this applies whether working in production, journalism, operations, technical support or professional services (HR, finance, etc). People working for Global News in the UK and around the world are all eligible.
In 1932, the BBC's first Director General, Sir John Reith, decided to go ahead with its plans for international transmissions, using money from listeners in Britain who had to pay an annual radio licence fee. He explained that the BBC would "transmit comparatively simple programmes to give the best chance of intelligible reception". But given the lack of cash, those programmes would be "neither very interesting nor very good".
The Empire Service went on air at 09:30 on Saturday, 19 December 1932, from a studio in the newly-built Broadcasting House in London. It opened with a two-hour transmission for Australia and New Zealand. There were four later broadcasts of the same live speeches to other parts of the Empire. Sir John Reith told the BBC's new global listeners that radio was "a connecting and co-ordinating link between the scattered parts of the British Empire".
Today, our broadcasts to the world are not only very interesting, they're also very good. The BBC Global Reith Awards aim to celebrate this excellence and recognise contributions of individuals and teams alike, who work in our global news and information division across all platforms, in all languages, on air or behind the scenes.
The first time our division marked the achievements of its staff was in the BBC World Service Awards 2007. That event was a great success and we've continued with this awards celebration ever since.
