Olwyn Hocking feels that the North-East is the best place to live and bring up a family.

So she's pleased that her new BBC post allows her to stay in the region. She'll still be based here after quitting as the BBC North East and Cumbria's head of regional and local programmes, although her new job will take her all over the country.

Her role as Project Manager for BBC New Media aims to develop those services and expand the audience. "It's a moving brief where I can develop specific new services that will appeal to people who haven't been tempted to use the web so far," explains Hocking, who has children aged 13 and ten.

"It will cover the whole country but the crucial element is that I'll still be living in Newcastle. I don't want to leave the North-East, and certainly some of the new services will be tried out up here."

The new media job is one that she was instrumental in creating. It followed Hocking, who moved from Tyne Tees Television to the BBC seven years ago, taking advantage of a BBC scheme that enables staff to take leave of absence to learn about topics outside their normal roles.

"I was beginning to realise that new media was developing so rapidly that it wasn't giving me sufficient time to consider what is working for the audience on the Internet," she says.

"I had a couple of months out when I learnt a huge amount and ended up suggesting new initiatives. I felt I wouldn't mind carrying them out myself. It's changing from one year to the next, and now is a great time to be on the inside."

She'll take up her new post once a replacement for the BBC North East and Cumbria post has been appointed.

Her basic aim is to narrow the digital divide. There are, she points out, so many places people can log on free of charge already. Many sites can make people's lives easier in a number of ways. What concerns her is whether the content offered by the BBC and other providers is tempting enough.

"I'm certainly keen on making sure there's more on offer for women. There aren't as many women as men using the net," she says.

"And I want to improve what we offer to youngsters. They are obviously very web-savvy, but we should be offering more than games and competitions.

"There's so much potential. It's just working out how to harness it, and one way to do that is to spend more time listening to audiences."

She's already made a start on considering new ideas before officially taking up her new job. She spent a recent weekend talking to groups of children and adults about projects of interest to them.

"It was just fantastic, the feedback we got," she says. "It was most enjoyable and creative. Children are very aware of the web. They just sit down and find what they want, so they don't need any instruction."

Hocking has always championed local services, notably in a Ceefax service dedicated to the region. That helped when new media blossomed.

'Ceefax led the way for the Internet and how people look for information and the way they want it - tightly presented and at their fingertips," she says.

The BBC has three Where I Live sites covering Tyne Tees, Cumbria and Wear which illustrates how the web can be more local than the BBC's countrywide services. The two can exist together side by side.

Hocking came to Tyne Tees Television in Newcastle from 11 years working at BBC Manchester. The eventual decision to leave the ITV broadcaster entailed much long and hard thinking because she was enjoying the job.

"It was great to have an audience that likes programmes about their area. There's a sense of regional identity, and it's a real privilege to service that interest. We had a huge range of regional programmes at Tyne Tees," she says.

"The BBC was a different mix and, since I joined, we've moved increasingly rapidly into a multi-media world. It's been a great place to learn, to be somewhere you can look across a range of media and see what's going to serve people the best."

What she's enjoyed about the past couple of years at BBC North-East is an increasing recognition from the very top of the BBC that licence fee payers value local services. "Greg Dyke has put the money where his mouth is and put tons of money into regional services", she says.

There's also been a desire to increase programme-making across the UK. This combination of local and national talent shows the BBC at its very best, she feels.

The most notable success for Newcastle was the revival of Auf Wiedersehen Pet (although, of course, much was filmed in Middlesbrough). This raised the region's profile as well as giving BBC1 some of its highest Sunday night ratings for some time.

She's proud that the Great North Run received its biggest-ever coverage last year, and will get even more in 2002. Live coverage of the junior run will be carried on the BBC's children channel and tie in with a huge party on Radio One.

Overall, she believes this region will have an even higher profile on TV and radio this autumn.

She's aware that the remorseless change in the TV world is splitting audiences across more and more channels, and people are choosing to spend more time on the web. That makes the challenge of winning audiences ever more difficult, although radio attracted an extra million listeners last year.

"What's striking has been the quite big changes in the way people have been using this scarce resource - their time," she says.

"The increase in radio audiences is reflective of people spending more time on the web. Your eyes have been spoken for, but you can combine that with listening to the radio.

"We are all competing for people's time. You simply have got to take that into account. You can't say it's not happening."