The Anglican Communion News Service (ACNS) will now publish weekly bulletins in French and Spanish. The new bulletins will be published each Friday on anglicannews.org – the official news website of the Anglican Communion. It is one of a number of changes being made to ACNS’ output. As part of the changes, the quarterly paid-for magazine Anglican World will become an annual publication, which will be free to download from the website.

The October edition of Anglican World will be the last in its current format before the annual publication is launched next summer.

In recent months ACNS has published an increasing number of article translations below the English version. Changes to the anglicannews.org website, which took effect today (Monday) means that there is now specific places for French and Spanish news articles. Other changes are planned in the coming months.

“I am very excited about the launch of this project,” the Anglican Communion’s Director for Communications, Adrian Butcher, said. “This is a small but significant step. Having regular news in languages other than English on ACNS has been a goal of mine for some time – I think it is absolutely essential for a worldwide organisation like the Anglican Communion.

“With more resources, we will expand this service in the near future to include other languages such as Portuguese.”

Other changes to the website include space for larger images and more flexibility over the placement of articles on the front page: this will include the ability to give greater prominence to video news reports.

“People receive their news in different ways today,” ACNS’ Editor, Gavin Drake, said. “ACNS is now much more than a text-based service. We have begun producing video news reports and plan to do more of these in the future; and we have expanded the number of bloggers we use on the site. In the weeks ahead we will begin a weekly podcast and we are looking to produce video blogs too.

“This isn’t change for the sake of change,” he said, “but rather to help us better serve our primary purpose: to tell the story of the Anglican Communion around the world to readers, and now viewers and soon listeners, all around the world.”

Today’s changes to the anglicannews.org website are relatively modest ahead of a partial redesign planned for later in the year.