BBC for democracy

BBC launched yesterday a new political website, Democracy Live, which enables the public to keep up with TV coverage of political debates.

Democracy Live offers video coverage of the UK's national political institutions (the Commons, the House of Lords, Scottish Assembly, Northern Ireland Assembly, Welsh Assembly) and the European Parliament. New website offers also guides to how the different institutions work and who sits in them. The homepage shows a "Video Wall" with a choice of footage of debates and speeches in the various assemblies and committees. The video content is searchable. BBC Democracy Live links to the BBC’s political blogs and guests are encouraged to leave the comments on the site. The website, according to Econsultancy.com, costs £1m and took 18 months to develop. Pete Clifton, the BBC's head of editorial development for multimedia journalism, quoted by the Guardian, describes new project:

The underlying thinking was that it was something the BBC was uniquely positioned to do, that as a public service provider we would want to be doing more than anyone else. It's right at the heart of what we should be doing, in presenting as much as we can of our democratic institutions and explaining how they all work.