³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

In his speech, The Trouble with Trust, the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ director-general Mark Thompson called for greater transparency in the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's dealings with political parties:

"There are steps we should take to make our own dealings with politicians and other public figures more open to scrutiny. When A refuses to debate with B or sets other conditions before an interview or debate, there's often a case for letting the public know - for example, via the Editors' Blog..."

So here goes. This week, for the first time in my three years as executive editor of Question Time, we were told by Downing Street that a cabinet minister would only appear on if another member of the panel was replaced. According to No 10, a senior member of the cabinet was available to do Question Time but only if Alastair Campbell was replaced by a member of the shadow cabinet.

Very obviously, we refused and as a result no minister appeared, meaning that the government was not represented on the country's most-watched political programme in Queen's Speech week - one of the most important moments in the Parliamentary calendar.

No 10 stated that the objection to Alastair Campbell was that he was not an elected Labour representative or a front-bencher. Not only is Alastair Campbell one of the most senior and influential figures in the Labour movement - an architect of New Labour - but Labour ministers regularly appeared on Question Time panels when the then opposition was represented either by someone outside of the front bench or by an unelected panellist - sometimes even a prospective Parliamentary candidate. It is not an argument or an objection that bears scrutiny.

It is a fundamental principle of our independence that politicians cannot dictate who sits on the panel. It is for Question Time, not for political parties, to make judgements about impartiality and to determine who is invited to appear in the interests of the audience. Parties are free of course to accept or reject those invitations, but they do not have a right of veto over other panellists. Licence fee payers rightly insist that the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ must be free from political interference.

Gavin Allen is executive editor, Question Time.

Going through the latest audience research in the wake of the election there are some very eye-catching and perhaps surprising results.

A staggering eight out of 10 16-to-34-year-olds watched, listened or read ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ election news during the campaign.

Previously, I've blogged about apathy and the young, but there's no doubt for some reason, something has changed.

So what's the evidence?

2.7 million 18-to-34-year-olds watched the third debate on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and, anecdotally, we heard the format was appealing to younger audiences - with many praising Nick Clegg's performance in particular.

Millions of young Radio 1 listeners listened to our leaders' debates on Newsbeat, followed it online or heard coverage on the Chris Moyles Breakfast Show and across the day led by our politics reporter Robin Brant. One in five young people heard our coverage in the last week of the campaign.

on 5 May reached 186,000 people in the same age bracket and the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's drive for clear, engaging, coverage seems to have hit a positive note with younger audiences with six in 10 agreeing that our explanations and reporting improved their understanding.

On Radio 1, we invited Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg to meet some of our listeners - all first-time voters, all unsure how, or even whether, to vote. The Radio 1 boardroom - more used to the legendary weekly meeting to decide the station's playlist - was transformed into a studio to record three special editions of Newsbeat. The leaders faced the listeners - chaired by our presenter Tulip Mazumdar.

If ever we thought this would be a tame exercise in polite political repartee we were wrong. What followed was politics with the gloss removed - real, young, working people getting stuck in on the issues that engage them day in, day out: jobs, immigration, petrol prices, a feeling of disconnect from the political machine in Westminster. Deference didn't make an appearance on our agenda.

So what did we get right for young voters?

The clarity? The immediacy? The gritty up-close-and-personal nature of the story, the leader debates and the sense that politicians were facing real voters outside their perceived Westminster comfort zone. I bet you'll have your own views, let us know.

Rod McKenzie is editor of and 1Xtra News.

How should the new government cut its cloth in regard to Britain's role in the world?

The coalition has started work on identifying where to reduce public spending to get the rising deficit under control, and it's clear the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence will have to shoulder their share of cuts.

On Wednesday, The World Tonight held a special debate at the leading foreign policy think tank, Chatham House, to debate the foreign policy options a straitened Britain faces.

Why do this now? Well, the new coalition has just taken office and needs to define its foreign policy. Chatham House is in the middle of a . And we thought it was an appropriate way to mark The World Tonight's 40th anniversary.

We brought together an international panel with , and , together with the and - the man who coined the phrase "punching above our weight" to describe the British approach to the world.

The main conclusions from the debate were:

• Budget cuts and the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan will make it much less likely the British military will be involved in intervention overseas in the future
• Britain should play a more central role in Europe to ensure the EU has a stronger voice on the world stage
• Lord Hurd said the "special relationship" with the US works only when London can be useful to Washington, and the panel seemed to agree that anyway President Obama is more focussed on China than on Europe
• The key foreign policy issue at the moment is the emergence of a multi-polar world where the new powers - first and foremost China, but also India and Brazil - have a different approach to international relations to the traditional Western powers and, for obvious reasons, prioritise relations with Washington over relations with London

The other question debated was whether the Tory-Lib Dem coalition could remain united on foreign policy when their basic instincts differ, especially over an EU which, faced with the euro crisis, could end up deciding on closer integration in order to save the common currency.

During the election campaign, foreign policy was little discussed and there is a large degree of consensus across the parties on many issues, so it will be interesting to see whether the new government does make any big changes to Britain's role in the world.

Alistair Burnett is the editor of The World Tonight.

We're all in new territory: government, opposition - and broadcasters. Coming to terms with the "new politics" of coalition sets us some new challenges, just as we're trying to recover our breath from the extraordinary events of recent weeks.

There's already been much speculation about the question of "balance". Especially during the campaign, we're used to hearing the views of the different parties on any given issue and seeing them represented on programmes such as Question Time and Any Questions. So if the Conservatives and the Lib Dems are in together, what happens? Do they both get a say?

Firstly, it's important - if obvious - to register that we're no longer in the run-up to a general election. And there is no mathematical formula for deciding what constitutes "balance". Neither is there a requirement for the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ to think about its coverage in that way once voters have had their say. The key obligation for us has to be due impartiality - which means taking account of the present political context and making good editorial judgements about fairness, reflecting the different strands of all the main arguments.

And those judgements will vary from programme to programme, genre to genre.

Clearly, in our normal news journalism, reporting on what the government is saying or doing, it will normally not make sense to have both government parties saying the same thing. Where the "Liberal-Conservative" administration is speaking with one voice, that's what we will reflect, along with the different voices of opposition parties. Of course, on some issues, we may want to illustrate the different emphasis and nuance the partners bring to a particular story.

For the more set-piece formats, such as Question Time and Any Questions, where politicians are speaking more broadly across the range of political issues, then it's worth stepping back and considering some first principles. Editorially, such programmes look to have contributors who approach issues from different perspectives and encompass a breadth of arguments. But they are also often discussing issues which are not necessarily just about government and opposition - and not just about the politics of Westminster.

One of the fascinating aspects to these new arrangements will be how far the respective leaders are able to carry their own parties with them. In capturing the range of views, it will be particularly relevant to hear the voices of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats outside the government - including, as well as "dissidents", those who operate outside Westminster, where the shifting political relationships are different - Scotland, Wales, the European Parliament and local government. These are places where parties working together - yet standing against each other in elections - is now rather old hat. And in Northern Ireland, the complexities of representing different political views from parties sharing the responsibilities of government are, to say the least, rather more challenging than the new ones at Westminster.

Mostly, then, in discussions or packages the coalition will only need one representative - Conservative or Liberal Democrat. But where it's the party being represented, taking a different (though not necessarily opposing) stance, it may well be perfectly in order to have representatives from both Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties.

Either way, we will still want to make sure that all political parties continue to get fair representation, in relation to their electoral support, across our output.

We need to look at where the pivot of argument lies - sometimes it will, of course, still be between the political parties. But sometimes it will be between front-bench and back-bench; sometimes between Westminster and other political structures; sometimes between different factions of the same party.

So we should not make hard-and-fast rules, or try to construct formulas for the "new politics" - not least because we are, for the government of the UK at least, in unchartered waters heading in an uncertain direction. What we should do is to carry on making good and fair editorial judgements according to the particular circumstances and the many different sorts of journalism we do. Not such new territory after all.

Ric Bailey is the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's chief political adviser.

We've been so busy with election coverage in recent days that I neglected to stop by here to thank anyone who voted for us in the Webby People's Voice awards this year.

and we have won the website category for News, which we've had the privilege of winning for several years in a row; this year, we also won .

Congratulations to , which won the judges' award in both categories. It is an honour for us to have been voted winner of the News People's Voice Webby. We hugely appreciate it, and your support.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the .

OK, things can't always go quite right. Notwithstanding record traffic to the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News website and the as I write, we had a small glitch earlier today when we inadvertently published a page template which carried the headline "What is Gordon Brown's legacy?". And nothing else. This caused a bit of mirth on Twitter and .

What we actually meant to publish was this rather more detailed and informative round-up of what commentators are saying on that subject. The inadvertent blank page has been removed. Apologies.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News website.

As post-election events continue to unfold, we've just got some preliminary figures in for traffic to the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News website across the whole of yesterday, Friday 7 May. So, according to the data we have in so far:

• We had 11.4m individual users to the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News website on Friday - approximately - so that breaks our previous record of 9.2m (that was on 5 November 2008 for the Obama election victory)
• There were about 30m page views for the
• Over 100m page views in total
• About 6.5m page views to the
• The search for your result by postcode peaked at about 36,000 searches per minute, and we scaled it up to cope
• The search by name peaked at around 36,000 searches per minute too
• So a total of around 1,200 searches for a constituency result were happening every second at peak
• The mobile election results pages had more than 1m page views
• Finally, and the figure is still a rough one, it looks as though there were more than 9m requests to play video over the course of the whole day.

As the story of the election continues to unfold, we're seeing unprecedented levels of traffic to the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News website - it's looking like more than five million users since midnight according to the data we have so far, and thousands of searches every minute on our constituency result pages.

For such high usage, it's all been working pretty smoothly on the technical front, and we're working hard to make sure it stays that way. If the site is a bit slower for you at any time today, that's why.

Oh, and our journalists are also flat out bringing you the results, reaction and looking at what the outcome means across the UK. It's all at .

Update, 21:00: We've had the highest ever level of traffic in a single day to the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News website today - according to our provisional data so far, at the time of writing this, there have been more than 10m users on the site since midnight. Our previous day record was about 9.2m unique users, on 5 November 2008 for the Obama election victory.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the .

Every general election is special. There's something extraordinary about tens of millions of people coming together and deciding who should run our country.

However, some general elections go beyond the extraordinary and become truly historic.

I wasn't quite 10, but I'll never forget when and said "Where there is discord, may we bring harmony." Similarly, Tony Blair saying "A new dawn has broken, has it not?" was clearly going to be a historical moment.

Whatever the result, this year's election will bring a sea change. Will David Cameron become the first Conservative prime minister for 13 years? Will Nick Clegg break the mould of UK politics? Or will Gordon Brown defy the polls and secure an unprecedented fourth consecutive Labour victory?

The opening titles of our Election 2010 programme, we hope, recognise this sense of history. The programme begins at 2155 BST on 6 May on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ One, the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News Channel, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ HD and of course and you can see a preview of the titles below.

The idea came from looking and listening back over the many election nights the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has covered. As election editor, I have often made a date with ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Parliament - which has shown many past elections in the past year - and found myself drawn into the intrigue and excitement of a particular night.

I realised that if you ever want to get a sense of the country at a specific time, you could do a lot worse than watch the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ election results programme. February 1974 is a particular favourite - not just because it helped with my understanding of the last time we had a hung Parliament, but also because it reveals the UK as such a different country.

A full ashtray can be seen on the desk at the beginning of the night; some of the men have hairstyles that could have been in a science-fiction film; the presentation team has no women and for any woman standing for Parliament, the graphics helpfully add a "Mrs" or "Miss" in brackets after her surname.

The only black face to be seen on the programme is a man in Trafalgar Square being interviewed by Desmond Wilcox, who seems to assume he mustn't be used to democracy - the interviewee politely points out that he has lived in the country for some time.

1979 is equally interesting. The country seems a colder, greyer place than 1974 - and many of the reporters speak as though they have a plum in their mouth. I wonder what the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ election editor in 2046 will make of the country presented in Election 2010.

I am sure they will see a fantastic team, headed by David Dimbleby presenting his eighth general election. Nick Robinson will give us the sharpest analysis; Emily Maitlis and Jeremy Vine will bring clarity with exceptional graphics and Fiona Bruce will keep us up to date with regular news bulletins.

We'll be on air just before the polls close at 2200 BST, when we'll release the results of our exit poll. Most importantly, we'll bring you all the results as they happen - with our reporters at many more seats across the UK than any other broadcaster.

Our colleagues in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will have their own programmes - with the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ UK programme on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Two in those areas. Radio 4 and 5 live have been
working closely with us, sharing expertise and resources, and they will have their own results services. We've also worked extremely closely with our colleagues online, so watching us with your laptop or mobile open on should be a great experience.

The last three elections were extremely important - but during each campaign, the polls pointed to only one outcome. As I write this, no-one is certain what will happen this time. Pollsters and political analysts are as bemused as they are excited, saying they've never seen anything like this in their lifetimes.

6 and 7 May 2010 look to be days that historians will write about for generations. I hope you take the opportunity to grab the best front-row seat with the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ as history is made.

Craig Oliver is deputy head, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ newsroom.