Director Of BBC World Service Group To Leave In The New Year

Director of the BBC World Service Group, Peter Horrocks, has announced that he will be leaving the BBC in the new year.

Mr Horrocks has been Director of the World Service since 2009 and has worked at the BBC for 33 years.
Under his leadership weekly audiences for the BBC's global news services – BBC World Service, BBC World News and BBC.com – have reached a record 265 million.
Mr Horrocks has led the World Service through some of its most challenging times, responding to funding cuts by modernising the World Service for the digital age.
He successfully oversaw one of the biggest changes in the history of the World Service as it moved from Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) funding into the licence fee, leaving its historic headquarters of Bush House for the BBC's New Broadcasting House.
BBC World News has undergone a creative renewal that is being appreciated by audiences around the world and bbc.com/news now regularly achieves one billion page views a month. BBC News is the most retweeted news source in the world.
Mr Horrocks said: "It has been a privilege to be Director of the BBC World Service, which is loved and trusted by hundreds of millions of people around the world.
"I am hugely proud of the dedication, the creativity and the reinvention shown by my team. The World Service now has its largest ever audience, an expanding number of languages, and is modernised and transformed for a digital age.
"Having overseen this recovery and taken the World Service into the new era of licence fee funding, it is time for me to move on to my next challenge. I will miss the BBC but am confident that the BBC's global news services are in strong shape for the future."
(CD/JP)