Francesca Unsworth became Director, News and Current Affairs in January 2018. She was previously Director, BBC World Service Group, a post to which she was appointed in December 2014. In this role she led the BBC's global news services - BBC World Service, BBC World News and BBC.com - as well as BBC Monitoring, and she chaired the BBC's international development charity, BBC Media Action. The BBC's global news services have a weekly audience of 394m. In this role, Fran was also deputy to the Director of News and Current Affairs. Fran began her journalistic career in 1980 in BBC Local Radio, joining Radio 1's Newsbeat. She spent some time as a network radio producer in Washington DC, and later joined Radio 4's The World At One and PM.