BBC Food website is closing down
BBC Food website is closing down – here’s how to make sure you don’t lose all your favourite recipes
The BBC may be archiving thousands of its beloved recipes, but fear not! There is still a way to get hold of them online
The BBC announced today that is closing its Food website, as part of a £15 million cost-saving plan.
More than 11,000 recipes will be “archived or mothballed“, and no new links to the site will be created, the BBC confirmed.
The news has led to a public outcry, with a petition on Change.org entitled “Save the BBC’s recipe archive!” garnering over 100,000 signatures.
“This is a much loved and used website and a precious resource for people across the country providing easy, free and importantly independent information on a vast range of foods and recipe options,” the petition states.
“When the Government is trying to promote healthy eating, surely it is madness to remove such a comprehensive archive which has taken years to create, not to mention time and money.”
The BBC has responded, claiming that the recipes will still be available in archived form, so if you know the URL for a recipe, you’ll be able to get to it by typing it into a browser.
TV recipes will remain online for 30 days after each show, and the corporation will also migrate as much of the content as possible to BBC Worldwide’s Good Food website, which is available for free in the UK.
“We are glad that so many people care so much about all our content. But just to be clear, we have never said we’d delete all the recipes and nor will we,” a BBC spokesperson said.
“We currently have two websites and we’ll move to one. The recipes you love will still be available and we’ll migrate as much of the content as possible to the BBC Good Food website. So you’ll still be able to carry on baking and cooking with the BBC.”
So if you rely on BBC for some of your favourite recipes, here’s what you can do to make sure you don’t lose them:
- Look up your favourite recipes and bookmark the pages, so the URLs are saved in your browser
- Check the BBC Good Food website to see if the recipe has been replicated there
- If all else fails, the Internet Archive has a record of almost all the BBC Food recipes, (11,282 to be precise), available here.
Web pages disappearing from the internet has long been a contentious issue. In November 2013, for example, the Conservatives were criticised for deleting an archive of speeches from the internet.
The Internet Archive is an online library that aims to preserve web pages in their most recent form for posterity. It contains millions of free books, movies, software and music, as well as 484 billion web pages.
The archive of the BBC Food pages was last updated in May, and will be updated again in the near future. The archived pages cannot be easily searched, but can be sifted through manually.
Source: Mirror.co.uk