The Trust has concluded that 15 programmes broadcast in our weekend schedule breached the BBC's editorial or sponsorship guidelines.

The programmes concerned were acquired by the channel at low or nominal cost, and around half of them were funded or partly funded by charities, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or other similar groups.

The Trust found breaches of guidelines in seven programmes relating to conflict of interest; the promotion of a sponsor's activities; the prohibition of sponsorship for current affairs programming; and the way in which funding was credited to ensure transparency for viewers.

The remaining breaches concerned programmes made for the BBC by an independent production company, which failed to disclose to us that it had a financial relationship with the Malaysian government, while producing programmes with a "heavy focus" on Malaysia.

The Trust classifies this as "serious breaches" of its guidelines, and BBC World News fully accepts their findings. We share the Trust's view that the integrity and independence of the BBC's editorial decisions is of paramount importance. We welcome their conclusion that none of the programmes breached requirements for impartiality. But nevertheless, we are determined to learn the lessons from what has gone wrong.

So how did it happen? There is no single, or simple answer. The cases involving Malaysia were serious because we transmitted programmes without being made aware of a conflict of interest by the supplying production company. Eight programmes were broadcast between 2009 and July 2011, with references to Malaysia. Following reports in the Independent newspaper, the production company admitted to the BBC that it represented the Malaysian government through another division of its activities. We didn't know this at the time, and we have now terminated our relationship with this company.

A second conflict of interest arose in another programme about carbon trading, where an association was found between an organisation featured in the programme, and a company which funded the programme production. This conflict was not declared to us at the time of transmission - had we known, we would not have broadcast it.

In the remaining cases examined by the Trust, the issues were primarily related to how we interpreted editorial or sponsorship guidelines. This, again, is something we take very seriously, and today we are announcing new procedures which take full account of the findings.

The Trust did say that no BBC staff had intended to breach guidelines, but there seemed to be a lack of knowledge or genuine confusion about the relevant guidance. Clearly we need to tighten our procedures so that it doesn't happen again.

As a result, we are taking steps to tighten our list of supplying production companies, and to put in place a more rigorous process to approve programme commissions - including further checks on any potential conflicts of interest. We have also undertaken no longer to commission or acquire programmes sponsored by non-commercial organisations, and have stopped taking programmes at low nominal cost. We have re-affirmed that sponsored programming will only be allowed in non-news and current affairs genres, and we will act on the Trust's guidance to take a "strictly prudential view" of what amounts to sponsorship.

These are complex cases, but the principles underlying them are simple. We must not damage the audience's trust in what we broadcast. We know we have some hard work to do to make up for this, but we are determined to do so.

Richard Porter is controller of English at BBC Global News.

It's the start of a new partnership between us and KCET, the Southern California public television station, with a simple aim. To offer American viewers something they can't get anywhere else.

Fronted by Mike Embley in London, the two programmes are a showcase for the BBC's unrivalled international newsgathering power.

On day one Richard Galpin reported from Georgia as EU monitors arrived to begin observing a Russian withdrawal. From Brussels, our Europe Editor Mark Mardell explained how pressure on European banks was forcing countries to find new ways of safeguarding depositors' money. In Iraq, Hugh Sykes reported on the rise of the Awakening movement - former insurgents now fighting alongside rather than against US forces. And Jon Leyne in Tehran reported on a US phenomenon taking off in Iran - blogging.

The first day also posed us some challenges. How much should we be focussing on events within the US, given that we've pledged to offer something different to the US media? And how much coverage should there be of live events or breaking news? With the Senate debating the "bail-out Bill" while we went on air, both issues came together.

The answer - well if we're putting together a bulletin of the day's main global stories, then it would be perverse to leave out US stories. However, you can expect us to place them in a different context - so last night's Senate coverage was immediately followed by the story out of Europe, which I doubt was receiving much attention elsewhere in the US media. As for live coverage - given that we're offering PBS viewers a speedy round-up in 25 minutes, we won't devote much time to lengthy live coverage of events, but you can expect to see breaking news reported as fast as any other network.

Will the programme prove as popular as before? The early signs are good. More than 80% of US viewers will have access to BBC World News through PBS and we hope the revamped programme will actually deliver a bigger audience to us.

Plus we'll continue to broadcast Matt Frei's World News America programme on BBC America, which is the other part of our two-pronged strategy to best serve the US audience.

By coincidence, it marked its first anniversary on air on Wednesday. In its inaugural year, the programme won a prestigious Peabody Award, signed veteran newsman Ted Koppel as Contributing Analyst and had correspondents reporting first-hand from the scene of numerous international breaking news stories, from the assassination of Benazir Bhutto to the current economic crisis hitting markets across the globe.

But this is a significant change, for two reasons really. One, because a surprisingly large number of viewers we questioned in surveys found it hard to categorise exactly what we are; what we stand for. And second, because we want to be in line with all the changes happening across the BBC - bringing together our news output in radio, TV and online to share one common identity (see Peter Horrocks' blog entry on this subject). In the increasingly-crowded global market-place, it's critical to have a clear brand which stands out from the competition.

Over the years, the mixture of programmes on BBC World has changed significantly. We used to broadcast much more features and other programming (including University Challenge India not too many years ago).

But in the past three years - in response to the clear demand of our viewers - we've gradually increased the focus on to more news and topical programming. For example we now run four editions of the hour-long World News Today, as well as World News America presented from Washington. Later this year there'll be more, and we've also expanded World Business Report and Sport Today.

So for us, the name change is a public declaration of what we have become, and where our future lies. We'll be keeping our most popular programme brands on the channel - Click, Fast Track, Our World, HARDtalk, and the rest. But by changing our name we hope we're just a little bit more clear about what we do, and the values of BBC News we represent.

So what happens when the pictures or the interviews aren't available straight away? We've had two examples this week of stories where we wanted to provide detailed coverage, but where the logistics or the politics made it much harder to do so.

First, Iraq. The reports started coming through on Tuesday evening that there had been a series of explosions near the city of Mosul. A curfew had been imposed so no journalists were being allowed to enter the area. None of the local news agencies were providing pictures, so throughout Tuesday night and much of Wednesday morning, our coverage was restricted to showing graphic maps of the area, and talking to our team in Baghdad.

Eventually some pictures of people being treated in hospital did emerge, but at the time of writing, there are still no pictures from the scene of the attack. And yet it looks as though it's led to the worst loss of life in Iraq in any incident this year, so we have a clear need to give the story a great deal of prominence.

In our flagship programme World News Today we interviewed our correspondent in Baghdad, Richard Galpin. He was able to pull together information from local sources, and we've also been speaking to the BBC World Service Middle East analyst Roger Hardy, who has briefed us on the Yazidi minority group which has been the target of the attacks. But our staff are still trying to get hold of people who can give us direct eyewitness accounts and paint a more accurate picture of exactly how many people have been killed or injured.

The slightly easier task is to place the event in some sort of context - who might be behind the attacks, what they are hoping to achieve, what reaction has there been from the Iraqi government and from the White House. But first-hand accounts of what happened are vital to our reporting.

The same is true of the floods in North Korea. The problems for us are similar - we know there has been a major loss of life, and unusually the North Koreans have asked for help. That in itself is seen as an indication of the seriousness of the situation. But North Korea is a closed country and Western journalists are rarely allowed to report from there.

We have a team based in South Korea, and we're trying to get people into the North. But for now we have to rely on pictures emerging either on North Korean television or from any news agencies which are able to operate there.

We have no real idea of how many people have died, or how the rescue effort is progressing. Our journalists continue to push for new information - and these days we also routinely appeal for information on air and on our web pages. But once again, we're struggling to give the story the kind of coverage it probably deserves.

And then there's BBC World.

We've been broadcasting in India longer than nearly all of them and at one stage we used to produce output specifically targeted at the sub-continent. Question Time India; HardTalk India; Wheels (a motoring programme), even a version of University Challenge featuring Indian students.

But in such a competitive market, you need to be clear about what you stand for, what your strengths are. We know that ours is international news made relevant to South Asian audiences. Which is why on Monday (at 9.30pm IST/10pm PST), we're launching a new edition of our flagship programme, World News Today, specifically targeted at viewers in India and Pakistan and other countries in south Asia where we know we have a loyal following.

The programme will be presented by Nik Gowing, who is very well-known to BBC World viewers and who has been reporting from Asia throughout his years on the channel. He makes it his business to have first-hand knowledge of the stories he's reporting from, and hops on to aeroplanes the way most of us hop on to a bus or a train. So he's just back from his latest trip to India to promote the new programme and he'll be there again in a few weeks to report on the 60th anniversary celebrations.

His new programme will report the world to South Asia and south Asia to the world - how does the extraordinary economic success of India impact upon western nations? How does America's support for President Musharraf impact upon his popularity in Pakistan? What do British Indians feel about the performance of the India cricket team during the tour of England? These are the sorts of areas which come under our remit, and we're confident we can provide audiences in South Asia with a depth and breadth of coverage that no other broadcaster can match.

We'd love to know whether you agree, and what suggestions you have for the kind of coverage we should be offering viewers in the region. It's an exciting few days for us...

They have also attracted quite a bit of attention elsewhere on the internet - here, here, here and here, for example.

So here you are - please let us know what you think.

Yesterday the latest stage of those plans became public when we announced who would be the Executive Producer for our new newshour to be broadcast at 7pm EST (midnight in the UK). Rome Hartman joins us from CBS News, where his previous role was launching Katie Couric's "Evening News"... and prior to that he had worked for many years at the legendary 60 Minutes.

So why do we think we can do well in one of the most crowded television markets in the world? Rome put it neatly yesterday when he said: "More and more Americans are seeking smart and sophisticated coverage of the world; coverage the BBC is uniquely capable of providing." So it's that combination of a demand (among a certain section of the audience) for a greater level of international coverage at a time of globalisation and complexity, combined with the scale of the BBC - we have more than 40 news bureaux around the world and a fantastic tradition of providing high-quality, independent journalism for global audiences.

The new programme will air on BBC America, our sister channel in the US which reaches 55 million homes, and around the globe on BBC World, where we reach more than 270 million homes.

Rome starts with us in a couple of weeks, and then the real planning will begin. The formula will be largely familiar to audiences of BBC World - we'll be taking the best of our international coverage and presenting it in a way that we hope will be closer, more relevant to American audiences. It will be a programme of real substance, but it will also have style and energy. It'll be broadcast from our Washington Bureau, from where we already do two nightly newscasts aimed at US audiences, but expect to see contributions from our correspondents in Delhi and Beijing and Nairobi and Brussels and all the other places which don't often make it on to the US news agenda.

So what do you think? What will make you watch? We'd love to hear what you think...

From tonight it has a new name, World News Today, and a new slot, 7pm. But some things stay the same.

Its focus remains on putting global events into context, explaining and analysing significant stories using the BBC's huge network of correspondents around the globe.

It's unashamedly serious; but that doesn't mean it's not engaging or stimulating. And it's still going to be presented by Zeinab Badawi, who is an outstanding presenter and interviewer.

The reason for the change? Well the programme has always been produced by BBC World on behalf of BBC Four, and we've been gradually developing the concept of World News Today across our key hours of the day.

It made sense to extend it to the programme we make for BBC Four, using essentially the same structure and taking the opportunity to refresh the graphics and music which identifies the programme.

We will soon have four editions of World News Today on air, sharing the same structure and appearance, but each targeted at a slightly different audience. Tonight's programme will be for BBC Four viewers in Britain and, simultaneously, BBC World's audiences in continental Europe. Others are (or will be) aimed at the USA, South Asia and the Far East.

At a time when foreign news coverage is under pressure in many areas of the British media, we're proud to produce a programme which aims to produce a truly international perspective on events, and we think there's demand out there from among you, the audience.

As a taster for tonight, we'll be looking at sanctions against Sudan, the crisis facing the leadership of the Israeli government, and the closure of one of the biggest TV stations in Venezuela. We'd love to know what you think, whether you're watching in the UK or elsewhere.

Five and a half years have passed so it's quite difficult to answer every outstanding question. But we do know quite a bit more than we did on Tuesday, as a result of checking the BBC archives and what other media were doing at the time. I've also read through some of the reports published after 9/11 to help put together the sequence of events.

Back to 11 September itself. The Twin Towers had collapsed. Other buildings were known to be damaged. Building 7 was on fire. But this was also a very confusing picture - remember we had started the day with reports that a light aircraft had struck the first tower, and at one stage there was talk of ten hijacked jets in the air. It's in the nature of rolling news that events unfold in front of you and confusion turns to clarity. It's important to remember that context when looking more closely at what happened between about 4.10pm (EDT) and 5.20pm when Building 7 finally collapsed.

CNN's chronology of events published at the time confirms they reported the building on fire and a clip from a CNN bulletin, widely available on the web, hears from a reporter at about 4.15pm EDT, 9.15pm in the UK, who says: "We're getting information that one of the other buildings... Building 7... is on fire and has either collapsed or is collapsing... now we're told there is a fire there and that the building may collapse as well."

Other American networks were broadcasting similar reports at this time and the reports from FEMA and NIST both make it clear the building was on fire during the course of the day.

One senior fire officer was quoted in a subsequent interview as saying there was a "bulge" in the building and he was "pretty sure it was going to collapse". During this time, our staff were talking directly to the emergency services and monitoring local and national media… and there was a fairly consistent picture being painted of Building 7 in danger of collapse. Producers in London would have been monitoring the news agency wires - the Associated Press, Reuters, etc - and although we don't routinely keep an archive of agency reports, we're sure they would have been reporting the same as the local media.

At 4.27pm, a BBC reporter, Greg Barrow, who is in New York, appears on our radio news channel, BBC Radio Five Live, and says: "We are hearing reports from local media that another building may have caught light and is in danger of collapse." He then responds to a follow-up question by saying "I'm not sure if it has yet collapsed but the report we have is talking about Building 7."

At 4.53pm, on the same radio station, the programme's presenter, Fi Glover says "25 minutes ago we had reports from Greg Barrow that another large building has collapsed just over an hour ago."

At 4.54pm, the BBC's domestic television news channel, BBC News 24, reports the same thing. Presenter Gavin Esler says: "We're now being told that yet another enormous building has collapsed... it is the 47-storey Salomon Brothers building."

And then at 4.57pm on BBC World (according to the clips available on the web) presenter Phil Hayton says: "We've got some news just coming in actually that the Salomon brothers building in NY right in the heart of Manhattan has also collapsed."

Because three BBC channels were saying this in quick succession, I am inclined to believe that one or more of the news agencies was reporting this, or at least reporting someone saying this.

At 5pm, News 24 repeated the news in its top-of-the-hour headlines sequence and then at about 5.10pm (again according to the clips on the web), Phil Hayton on BBC World says "More on the latest building collapse in NY - you might have heard I was talking a few moments ago about the Salomon building collapsing and indeed it has... it seems this wasn't the result of a new attack but because the building had been weakened during this morning's attack."

Some of the respondents to my earlier blog have suggested this must mean he had inside knowledge - that not only did he know the building had collapsed, he knew why.

Well in one sense that's true - for about an hour, it had been reported that the building was on fire and in danger of collapse. But he did qualify it by saying "it seems" and once again I think there's a danger of reading too much into what I believe was a presenter merely summarising what everyone had been saying during the previous hour.

Of course, with hindsight we now know that our live shot showed the building still standing in the background. But again I point to that confusing and chaotic situation on the ground - the CNN reporter who had talked about the building "either collapsed or is collapsing" also had it clearly in shot behind him, but he acknowledged he couldn't see very clearly from where he was standing. As we know, the building did collapse at 5.20pm, with the first pictures of that being broadcast on News 24 at about 5.35pm.

So that's what we know we reported. To me it paints a consistent (and reasonably conclusive) picture.

I should also mention the missing tapes. As you'll see from the details above, the absence of the BBC World tapes hasn't made much difference to our ability to look back at what happened. We have all the tapes of other BBC channels (and I now know that quite a few of you have your own copies of BBC World, which is an interesting discovery... ).

Some of you find it hard to believe we didn't keep the BBC World tapes... but we had several streams of news output running simultaneously on the day, both on radio and television as well as online and we have kept all the tapes from BBC News 24 and Radio Five Live, as well as all the BBC One bulletins. Obviously I wish we'd kept hold of the World tapes alongside all the others, but we didn't... and I don't know whether they were destroyed or mislaid. But as a result of this week's events, I have asked our archivists to get hold of copies of our original material from the organisations which do have them.

And just to be clear, the BBC policy is to keep every minute of news channel output for 90 days (in line with the Broadcasting Act in the UK). After that we are obliged to keep a representative sample - and we interpret that to mean roughly one third of all our output. We also keep a large amount of individual items (such as packaged reports or "rushes" - ie original unedited material), which we use for operational reasons - such as when we come to broadcast fresh stories on the subject. We do not lack a historical record of the event.

I've spent most of the week investigating this issue, but this is where we have to end the story. I know there are many out there who won't believe our version of events, or will raise further questions. But there was no conspiracy in the BBC's reporting of the events. Nobody told us what to say. There's no conspiracy involving missing tapes. There's no story here.

Until now, I don't think we've been accused of being part of the conspiracy. But now some websites are using news footage from BBC World on September 11th 2001 to suggest we were actively participating in some sort of attempt to manipulate the audience. As a result, we're now getting lots of emails asking us to clarify our position. So here goes:

1. We're not part of a conspiracy. Nobody told us what to say or do on September 11th. We didn't get told in advance that buildings were going to fall down. We didn't receive press releases or scripts in advance of events happening.

2. In the chaos and confusion of the day, I'm quite sure we said things which turned out to be untrue or inaccurate - but at the time were based on the best information we had. We did what we always did - sourced our reports, used qualifying words like "apparently" or "it's reported" or "we're hearing" and constantly tried to check and double check the information we were receiving.

3. Our reporter Jane Standley was in New York on the day of the attacks, and like everyone who was there, has the events seared on her mind. I've spoken to her today and unsurprisingly, she doesn't remember minute-by-minute what she said or did - like everybody else that day she was trying to make sense of what she was seeing; what she was being told; and what was being told to her by colleagues in London who were monitoring feeds and wires services.

4. We no longer have the original tapes of our 9/11 coverage (for reasons of cock-up, not conspiracy). So if someone has got a recording of our output, I'd love to get hold of it. We do have the tapes for our sister channel News 24, but they don't help clear up the issue one way or another.

5. If we reported the building had collapsed before it had done so, it would have been an error - no more than that. As one of the comments on You Tube says today "so the guy in the studio didn't quite know what was going on? Woah, that totally proves conspiracy... "

This week there was a very clear example of how the world is changing. The Sun newspaper obtained the cockpit video from an American aircraft involved in a "Friendly Fire" incident in which a British soldier in Iraq was killed. Every media organisation picked up on the story, and The Sun was very happy for us to use their video - which had the newspaper's logo "burned" on to it throughout.

However, the Sun also insisted that no other organisation could use the video on their website. They knew their online traffic would increase massively since it was the only place web users could (officially) see the video. A newspaper which clearly understands the power of news video.

So where does that leave us? Already the BBC has taken big strides forward in its provision of news video on its websites - so far the domestic offering is far more advanced, but we'll be further expanding our international offering this year. But as an editor, I'm wondering more about the consequences for our agenda.

We can see from the daily stats the kinds of stories that online viewers like to watch - and they're not always the same as the ones we've give most prominence to in our televison bulletins. Here are Wednesday's most viewed videos from the international pages of BBC News:

1. Airbus A380 campaign takes off
2. Airbus shows off the A380
3. Astronaut's murder plot charge
4. Hydrogen motorcycle launched
5. Annual Empire State stair race

All of which were stories we'd covered (with the possible exception of the stair race) on BBC World, but not with the kind of prominence that web users apparently gave them.

So how should that inform the decisions we take about running orders for our television news bulletins? Obviously we'll continue to make judgements about the significance and relevance of stories to our audiences, but how much should we be taking into account the trends we see from the web stats?

The captions, which we use for identifying interviewees and also for giving information about stories, have new colours and a slightly different font. And we've also moved the "locator" - ie the strap which tells you where a correspondent is - up to the top left of screen.

The overall effect is much crisper and cleaner, and I think gives the channel a more contemporary feel. We operate in a very competitive environment and it's important that we support the substance of our journalism with the style of our presentation and production. For that reason, we've also made a number of other changes. There are new titles sequences, with remixed music....and these will appear on all the BBC Television News programmes, so that means the One, Six and Ten O'Clock News on BBC One in the UK as well as News 24 and BBC World.

On World we've also changed the way in which we do headlines at the start of each hour - there will be more of them and the first thing you'll see will be the image from the story, rather than the presenter appearing in vision. Again, a very small change, but one which we think will give us a little more punch.

And lastly on BBC World, we've made some changes to what we call the "running orders" of our news bulletins. From now on, there'll be a clear structure which starts with a core news bulletin in the first one-third, has space for analysis and discussion in the second third, and finishes with Sport and Features in the final third. Partly this is the result of what you, the audience, have been telling us during extensive research over the past year.

Many viewers said they were confused by our structure and wanted us to label things more clearly. I also wanted to bring a bit more pace to our news bulletins and ensure we cover more stories from more parts of the world - taking full advantage of the BBC's global reach.

So from 0500 GMT this morning that's what we're doing. And we very much hope you like it.

We've been hearing from a group of eloquent, passionate and idealistic students in Tehran as part of School Day 24, the centrepiece of our season of programmes called Generation Next.

The idea was been to link up students in Iran with students in the UK and the USA, and get them to ask each other questions and share their views about each other's cultures.

We've had some fascinating discussions about the nuclear issue, the conflict in Iraq, freedom of the media, even the wearing of headscarves. One young Iranian said, "I have an experience I want to share with everyone in the world". And because of the BBC she can, since she is being broadcast across the UK and to more than 200 countries and territories around the globe.

All of this supports one of our key objectives on BBC World, which is to connect and engage audiences by facilitating an informed and intelligent dialogue - we call it a global conversation. And that's happening with School Day 24, where dozens of schools all around the world are connecting with each other - students in Jerusalem talking to students in the West Bank, Russians talking to Georgians, Indians to Pakistanis - all of these, and many more, broadcast by our radio colleagues at BBC World Service in addition to our TV broadcasts.

But as I said, our experiences off air have also taught us something about life in Iran. The university we've been filming at, the Islamic Azad University, could not have been more helpful. Our correspondent Frances Harrison and her dedicated team have spent many weeks negotiating the arrangements and the university has pulled out all the stops to help us. And when it came to the filming, no one was monitoring the students or telling them what to say - they were left on their own to say what they think.

Contrast that with the attitude of Iranian TV, which agreed to let us rent one of their satellite dishes so we could broadcast all of our links live from the university. Then, as it came closer to the big day, it became clear that someone, somewhere had cold feet. Suddenly the dish we'd been promised was needed elsewhere and, eventually, we finally realised we weren't going to get it. Instead, Frances would have to record all her interviews and feed them over to us from her office.

It meant we couldn't get live interaction between the students - and maybe that's what somebody wanted to stop from happening. But the university was clearly pretty cross about the whole thing and was determined to let us go ahead with the interviews.

So perhaps that tells you something about the nature of Iranian society. That some people are more relaxed about engaging with the West than others. That perhaps they are suspicious of the BBC and the Western media - or worried about what their own students will say. Perhaps there's just too much red-tape. But the students know where they stand - they want to keep the conversation going and have been busy signing themselves up for various chat sites to enable them to do so.

Even without the live link-up, it still feels like we've started something...

Either way, AJI - or AJE as we now know it - looks like it's going to be a serious competitor for the two established global channels, BBC World and CNN. They have put together an extensive network of correspondents and bureau, and have invested heavily in four broadcast centres in different parts of the world. And they are making some grand claims about how they intend to bring a new perspective to the market. They're going to be reporting the south to the north, they say. They won't follow the traditional agenda.

I welcome their arrival. Competition is good in any market, and certainly since we've known the date of their launch, we've been looking at our own programme plans for this period to make sure we'll be looking our best.

We've also been asking ourselves some tough questions about our own agenda. For example, although we're proud of our British heritage, we don't aim to cover British news - unless it has some international significance or resonance. So today, 20 minutes before the new channel goes on air, Queen Elizabeth will be delivering her annual speech to Parliament, in which she sets out the Government's proposed legislation for the coming year. Do we carry live coverage, in the knowledge that nothing could be more British than the Queen surrounded by all that pomp and ceremony? Or do we say "There's no international significance... it's not for us?" The answer is we will carry it because it's actually one of the more important set-piece events of the year, and because The Queen will be addressing significant issues such as security, migration, and climate change, all of which have a resonance to the viewers around the globe who get their news from BBC World.

Today though we'll also be carrying extensive coverage of the Nairobi summit on climate change, with reports from the conference itself supported by background reporting from our correspondents in Africa. We have a very powerful piece from Fergal Keane on the effects of climate change on the Turkana tribe in Kenya. Much as I respect al-Jazeera's ambition to shed new light on some parts of the southern hemisphere, it would be unfair to say they have a monopoly in doing so. We have correspondents throughout Africa (indeed we also have many in the Middle East, al-Jazeera's home territory). And we think it's important to reflect events and opinions in these parts of the world, as much as we do the events in Brussels or Moscow or Washington.

Where we appear to depart from al-Jazeera is in our attitudes to reporting what happens in the West. One of their London correspondents says in an interview today he won't attend briefings at Downing Street because "that's typical of the Western way of doing TV News where you take something seriously simply because a big statesman is saying things."

That can't be right can it? I think it's wrong not to challenge and test what people in power have said, but you can't dismiss it simply because they've said it. It's an important part of our role to explain events in the most powerful countries in the world.

But now you have your own chance to judge. We'll be trying to show that the range and depth of journalism, and our ability to present all sides of the story will be qualities which audiences still greatly value. CNN and AJE (as well as Russia Today and the soon-to-be-launched France 24 and Press of Iran), will be promoting their strengths. And at midday today we'll all be able to make our own judgements.