This week viewers to BBC World News have been watching a series of reports focusing on the Arab uprisings, two years after they first began. Correspondents have been in Damascus, Tunis, Cairo, the Syria-Lebanon border and elsewhere. Their eyewitness TV reporting is accompanied by further explanation and analysis on our website, bbc.com/news. These are expert journalists, with years of experience and knowledge, living the story on behalf of the audience. They demonstrate our commitment to reporting the world, and bringing clarity to complex events.

Until now, however, viewers in the world's biggest TV market, the US, have found it hard to access BBC reporting of this kind. The market is saturated with TV channels, but for the past couple of years we've been very focused on securing widespread carriage on the distribution systems which bring TV into most homes.

So today the BBC is delighted to announce we have agreed to a partnership with the US cable giant - Time Warner Cable - and through this and other deals, a further 10 million homes in the US will have access to BBC World News 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

This means by the end of this year we will be available in 25 million homes, including those in most of the major markets - New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston. There is still some way to go before we can say we have reached everyone - but 2012 has been a year of significant breakthroughs for us in the US.

The BBC is already well-known in America through its partnerships with public radio, through the success of our website BBC.com/news, and because of our nightly broadcast on public television fronted by Katty Kay. We believe our brand of high-quality, intelligent and non-partisan journalism has something to offer US audiences, and we're determined to make access to our services as simple as possible.

The timing could not be better. We're just a few weeks away from the first broadcasts of BBC World News from our brand new headquarters in central London. Three new studios, a big investment in production and journalism, and working more closely with BBC journalists working in English and 27 other languages - it's more than just a new home, it's a new start. We're delighted to share that even more widely.

Richard Porter is controller of English at BBC Global News

BBC World News will soon be available in Burma. Those are words that, even six months ago, I would not have imagined writing. But Burma, a byword for media censorship and repression, is starting to open up.

In September I visited Burma to begin the negotiations which led to this breakthrough in BBC distribution. I was struck by how rapid the media changes are for a country where state media had been long stuck in a repressive timewarp.

A World Service team visited the state broadcaster. We saw the most surreal newsroom I have ever visited. There were no journalists there. "Why not?" we asked. "We don't need them yet. The news hasn't arrived."

We learnt the news is literally delivered once a day by the state news agency. The job of the journalists was to read it out, word for word, unaltered.

But those journalists and editors are now keen to have the BBC's help in learning about open and balanced journalism. It will be a long road, given the ingrained habits of censorship and self-censorship.

But the BBC, through its pioneering media development charity BBC Media Action, is able to offer training to editors and journalists to teach them what independent journalism is. Even officials from the Ministry of Information, the former censors, asked if they could go on BBC journalism courses. Alongside the desire for training, the opening up of Burma to international broadcasters is naturally to be welcomed.

However, there is a long way to go. The massively popular BBC Burmese service, which we estimate is listened to by more than eight million people a week, is not yet allowed to broadcast within Burma. It is transmitted only on shortwave, faithfully listened to, as Aung San Suu Kyi has done for so many years. We urge the government to fully open its airwaves.

And we told the Burmese government that the BBC would continue to scrutinise the country closely. Indeed, as it becomes possible for our journalists to travel within the country, reports such as Fergal Keane's recent searing Newsnight film on human rights abuses in Rakhine state, will form a key part of the BBC's role in the country.

We will also continue to report the progress being made in the political and economic spheres.

At this early stage of opening up, it is hard to know if the hopes of media freedom will be fulfilled, but it is at least an encouraging sign that the BBC can now report from and to the country in English.

Authoritarian governments everywhere are asking themselves if they can and should hold back the free flow of news any more. And, as they ask themselves these questions, politicians, officials and journalists are looking to the BBC as the international exemplar of quality, impartial and independent journalism.

Peter Horrocks is the director of BBC Global News

Moving BBC World News, the BBC's largest television channel, from west London to New Broadcasting House in the centre of the city is a huge project that has taken years of planning.

Relaunching and rebranding every hour of its 24 hours of output to give audiences around the world a new exciting polished HD product has made that huge project even more challenging.

Hopefully on Monday at 1200 GMT, the hard work of our 100 dedicated staff will give our audiences a bolder, brighter, more engaging look for the channel they trust to give them independent, objective news and analysis from more correspondents, in more locations, than any other international broadcaster.

Meticulous planning began about three years ago - everything from the new look of our studios to bicycle parking. We tested our studio systems - literally to breaking point - then fixed them and began the dual-running piloting that has split our newsroom teams between those keeping us on air back at Television Centre and those training and developing our programmes in our new home.

We're calling our new location The World's Newsroom because it truly reflects the world we report. We now work with colleagues from 27 language services who report for us from far flung bureaus and in London, allowing us to celebrate their unique expertise - something no other broadcaster can offer.

Audiences have also told us they want to engage more with the stories we tell - to feel closer to the issues we report. We're going to help you "live the story" with us. It's our new channel ethos.

Our correspondents - expert, brave, tough, determined - live and work where they report, and we want audiences to understand their passion for the stories they cover. So expect a new style of reporting from the field. And we'll be everywhere for our relaunch with live and exclusive reports planned from Syria, China, the US and Burma to name just a few.

In the studio, trusted and familiar presenters will be sharing the day's top stories - with a sprinkling of new faces on air. We'll have a more dynamic look, with robot cameras whizzing around our studios, improved graphics and high definition screens to enhance our ability to explain and analyse. We even have some virtual reality surprises planned.

We're also developing new long-form programmes, so expect to see new hard-hitting and timely documentary series. There'll be fresh new editions of favourites such as HARDTalk with Stephen Sackur (our interrogator-in-chief), Click for the latest on tech and Health Check for medical breakthroughs.

BBC World News has come a long way since it launched as a shoestring commercial operation in a backroom at Television Centre more than 20 years ago. Our audiences have grown massively. We're required viewing from the President's White House in Washington to the President's Blue House in Seoul. And in an era when bad mortgages in the US can trigger a global economic meltdown, we know there is a huge appetite for world news delivered fast, accurately and objectively.

We hope you'll enjoy our new look. And we hope you'll join us in the world's newsroom.

Andrew Roy is head of news for BBC World News

It is no secret that recent Arab uprisings have placed enormous burdens on the shoulders of BBC Arabic journalists responsible for reporting news from the region.

Covering the Arab world is not always an easy task - we need to mix sensible caution with a dose of courage in covering political issues that attract so many disputed views among Arabic-speaking audiences.

Our guiding principles are the BBC's values, its editorial guidelines, its ethical code, which are our reference points to maintain impartial, balanced and accurate reporting.

Across the Arab world - whether it's Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt or Libya, Bahrain, Syria and Iraq or the many other countries in the region - we know that audiences want access to objective and independent news, far removed from an agenda that favours one party, religion or sect against another. That is why audiences are turning to BBC Arabic.

Last year, our latest figures show that overall audiences to BBC Arabic have risen by more than 17% to a record high of 25.3 million adults weekly. That includes a big surge of 2.9 million in Saudi Arabia and 2.7 million in Egypt, where TV viewers in particular turned to the BBC to better understand the events happening in their own country. Our radio audiences are also holding up despite the reductions in transmission. Online is proving to be more of a challenge, but we are working hard to understand the needs of digital audiences and those for whom social media plays an increasingly important part in their lives.

In 2011, following the fall of the Mubarak leadership, we watched as ordinary Egyptians carried banners saying "Thank you, BBC!" But meeting the high expectation of audiences has a price and sometimes it's been a heavy one.

March 2011 brought a strong reminder of the risks that our staff face in covering the news - one of our reporters was arrested and tortured by Muammar Gaddafi's forces during the Libya uprising. In early 2012, our reporter in Yemen was beaten and received death threats from supporters of the outgoing president.

We are also challenged by those who disagree with our coverage. In countries such as Syria and Bahrain, BBC Arabic has been accused of bias.

The criticism comes from opposition and government alike. It may be a valid argument to say that getting criticism from both sides, in the case of Arab world certainly, is an indication of balanced coverage.

On Syria, for example, we had a series of documentaries looking at the civil war from a number of perspectives.

The first one, exploring what it's like to work for a Syrian television channel that's the mouthpiece of the government, was the butt of criticism and threats from Syrian opposition quarters. We followed it up with a programme charting a day in the lives of six Syrian women, five of whom were anti-government activists.

In our day-to-day news coverage, presenting a variety of voices from Syria is essential to us. And that is what distinguishes BBC Arabic from many media outlets in the Arab world which promote political views and agendas, and that is what we are determined to keep.

BBC Arabic marked its 75th anniversary in January. Arab politicians and ordinary people have expressed their appreciation of our track record of impartiality and trusted news. I am confident that the coming years will see further achievement on all our platforms - TV, radio and online.

We've had a huge response to our class calculator this week, particularly across social media, following a major survey by BBC Lab UK. The survey suggests that traditional categories of working, middle and upper class are outdated and we all fit in to one of seven new classes.

The class calculator - which lets you work out where you might fit in amongst the new categories - has attracted about six million page views on the BBC News site, making it the second most popular article of 2013 to date. (The most viewed article this year has been the helicopter crash in Vauxhall in January.) Nearly 1.9 million of those views have come from those of you accessing the site on mobiles and tablets.

But one thing that really stands out is how widely the story has been shared across social media, with more than 300,000 shares so far. More than a quarter of links to the calculator have come from social networking sites.

More than half a million referrals came from Facebook alone, and about 107,000 from Twitter. This is a much higher number than we usually see shared across social media. If you compare the class calculator with the other top stories of the week, usually about 5% of known referrals come from social media sites.

So why has it proven so popular with our audience? Michael Orwell, a producer at BBC Lab UK, worked closely on the survey and said one of the best things about the project was that the audience contributed to new research with top academics.

The calculator itself, produced by the BBC News Visual Journalism team in collaboration with BBC Knowledge and Learning, lets everyone engage with the new model and discover where they might fit in.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website.

As of Thursday, the Editors' blog will move to a different address on the BBC News website.

While this page will no longer be updated, it will stay here for reference.

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