BBC News Online

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BBC News Online (more recently referred to as simply the BBC News website) is the BBC's news web site and part of bbc.co.uk. Launched in November 1997, it is the most popular news website in the UK, and one of the most popular news websites worldwide, with around 15 million visitors every month; between 60% and 70% of visitors are from the UK, the rest are worldwide. The website contains exhaustive international news coverage, as well as British, entertainment, science, and political news. Many reports are accompanied by audio and video from the BBC's television and radio news services, while the latest TV and radio bulletins are also available to view or listen to on the site together with other current affairs programmes.

There are two different editions of the site: a UK edition, which gives prominence to UK stories, and a world edition, which prioritises international news. All articles are archived indefinitely and can be retrieved via searching or by browsing the extensive Special Reports section, which contains collections of articles relating to major news stories. The previous seven days' top stories were formerly available through the Week at a Glance section of the website.

As well as pure news articles, the site also contains material to support BBC news, current affairs and factual programmes. In addition, the Magazine section contains features prompted by current news stories and a number of regular items, such as the weekly caption competition and reader's letters, which tend to be light-hearted (see Cabbaging), in contrast to the Have Your Say section, where readers can debate the news, and related issues.

A more detailed section of the web site is 'Special Reports, known as In Depth until August 2006. This brings together news articles of the same topic or incident and also includes many explanatory articles or diagrams.

BBC News Online has a small number of topic-specific columns written by journalists. Examples include education correspondent Mike Baker's Mike Baker Weekly column and technology commentator Bill Thompson's bill board (formerly bill blog). BBC News Online Science Writer Ivan Noble, diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour in August 2002, shared his experiences of cancer in Tumour Diary until his death on January 31 2005.

The site is funded by the television licence, paid by all UK households owning a television set, and carries no advertising. This has led to complaints of unfair competition from commercial rivals. Others note that large numbers of international visitors enjoy the site at the expense of the UK public, leading to suggestions that foreign users be shown advertising or charged subscription fees when accessing the site.

The founding editor of BBC News Online was Mike Smartt, followed by Pete Clifton. Clifton was subsequently promoted to Head of BBC News Interactive, and Steve Herrmann became the new editor. The site was originally designed by Matt Jones in early November 1997 and went through a series of version iterations before being completely re-designed in 2003, primarily by Paul Sissons and Maire Flynn. The editorial and management departments are based in BBC Television Centre, the development and site design teams are based in BBC White City - both in the White City area. The site scooped best news website at the BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Awards every year from 1998 to 2001 when the award category was withdrawn.

The site launched a set of semi-official RSS 0.91 syndication feeds in June 2003 and upgraded them to RSS 2.0 in March 2005. Every news index has its own RSS feed, including the in-depth sections.

Since June 2006 the site has been providing real-time user information on its most popular news stories.