Proliferation

Let's try to be helpful about 'duplication' at BBC News, and whether there are ways of getting more bang from fewer bucks.

Type "BBC Science" in Google search and the top response is an archived re-direct page. BBC Nature takes you to a BBC2 programme page; BBC Science takes you to a page marked "BBC Science and Technology Programmes.

Try again; type "BBC Science news" and you get to the BBC News page headed "Science and Environment". Within that, you get pieces by Helen Briggs (Are house plants bad for the environment ?), Roger Harrabin, Paul Rincon, Matt McGrath, Hazel Shearing, Helier Cheung (in Washington), and a handful of uncredited pieces. There are video clips from Tulip Mazumdar, Justin Rowlatt, the Victoria Derbyshire show, a 'vertical video' on iguanas falling from trees in Florida, and an other on an Egyptian mummy in Belfast.

The main 'programme link' in the side bar is to Top Gear. There is no link to the BBC2 flagship science show, Horizon. There is no link to the weekly BBC Radio 4 show, Inside Science, nor to the weekly World Service programme Science Now. There is equally no link between the two radio programme sites, or back to BBC Science and Environment News. There's no link, to or from, Jim Al-Khalili's Radio 4 interviews, The Life Scientific. There is no link to the BBC Sounds Science & Technology page, which highlights a podcast of The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread, highly critical of The Goop Lab on Netflix; and The Infinite Monkey Cage with Brian Cox and Robin Ince; the BBC Sounds Science and Technology page does not highlight The Life Scientific.  On none of these pages are links to the BBC's Natural History Unit's output, or to the BBC Bitesize site helping those sitting science exams.

For understandable commercial reasons (though not obvious to us punters) there are no links to BBC Science Focus magazine's website; nor to BBC Future, the Global News commercially-funded site covering science and the environment.

The embarrassing thing is that Science and Environment is exactly where BBC News says it's been running a pilot on reducing duplication and centralising commissioning.......