BBC.com plans to launch Canadian bureau this year

The British are coming! The British are coming! With a total of three job offers, that is.

In a week where BuzzFeed Canada and Global News announced they were cutting positions, Canada’s media industry got a little bit of a jolt Thursday afternoon when the world’s largest broadcaster, the BBC, announced it will be adding an editorial bureau in Toronto and launching a version of BBC.com tailored for Canadians.

The Canadian bureau will launch with a video journalist, an online journalist and a social media producer.

According to a release by the BBC, the Canadian edition of its website “will see a range of enhancements to the BBC’s online news offer, including the curation of the international and news home pages to offer Canadian audiences better targeted, more relevant content from the BBC’s global coverage. There will also be an increased editorial focus on news and features to give Canadians better insight into the world around them and their role in it.”

The broadcaster said it plans to launch the localized edition of the site later in 2016. It says it already has a digital audience in Canada of 5.6 million monthly average users.

The BBC is funded by an annual licence fee paid by British residents who own receiving devices such as radios, TVs and computers. The licence fee can go as high as £145 for a colour screen. In 2014, that gave the BBC £3.7 billion to spend in addition to the £1.3 billion it brought in commercial income. That year, it spent £254 million on its BBC World Service global news hub.

Its budget is considerably larger than that of the CBC, which is funded by government revenues and will receive an estimated $1.1 billion in the 2016 fiscal year, according to the federal government’s March budget.