A partnership with King's College London, Laura Johnson was awarded her PhD in 2013.
As the first full-length academic study of the BBC Monitoring Service, Laura Johnson’s thesis examined one of the earliest attempts to systematically manage and exploit publicly available, open source information for intelligence purposes. It utilised IWM’s rarely used collection of BBC Monitoring transcripts (now housed at the BBC in Caversham), in conjunction with traditional archival sources and interviews, to trace the origins, processes and institutional structure developed by the Monitoring Service during its formative years. This study further assessed the collection priorities of BBC Monitoring during the Second World War, traced the historic flow of monitored material around the wartime Government and BBC, and established the institutional role of BBCM in the conduct of Britain’s war effort.