The Gardeners' World Blog

There's a story I was told when I joined BBC Sport about the time a few years back when someone in our website team complained to a manager that they were being treated as third-class citizens. "Well, you are third-class citizens" was the alleged reply - which let us hope was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the dominance then of our television and radio output. But if anyone had any doubts that the new media era is now firmly entrenched, the response to our Ashes coverage leaves no room for argument.

My colleague Alex Gubbay set out what we were trying to achieve in his blog when we announced we'd won the rights to online highlights. We want to offer a service 24x7, and it's the latest example of the BBC trying to use all its platforms - TV, radio, online, mobile - to serve people with the sport they want when they want it. Internally, the buzz phrase is 360 degree commissioning: which simply means taking ideas from being narrow, single media offerings and turning them into something much bigger and more ambitious...