Recipe for success: BBC backtracks on plan to cull 11,000 recipes and announces plans to migrate content over to Good Food website
In a good turn for peckish foodies and skint students everywhere, the BBC has backtracked on plans to cull 11,000 free online recipes and promised to migrate many of its popular recipes to the BBC Good Food site.
A massive public outcry, including more than 166,000 people signing a petition on the campaigning site Change.org by Wednesday morning, forced the BBC to speed up its plans to move as "much of the content as possible" currently on the BBC Food website to its Good Food site, which is owned by the organisation's commercial arm, BBC Worldwide.
Read more:
The recipe archive includes favourites from celebrity chefs such as Mary Berry and Nigella Lawson.
In a statement released on Twitter, the BBC's press office said there had never been an intention to delete all the recipes, but is planning to streamline its website down from two entities into one.
A statement to those who have taken an interest in #bbcrecipes today: pic.twitter.com/v6DeOjhJpu
— BBC Press Office (@bbcpress) May 17, 2016
The announcement that the recipes were under threat came after the government set out its plans for the future of the corporation in a white paper published last week.
Read more: Government stops short of "castrating" BBC with white pape
The BBC reported that the move is part of a plan to cut £15m from the online budget and focus more on distinctive public service content.