The retrenchment of the BBC’s news behemoth has been a long time coming but is no less welcome for all that. The Corporation has been forced by financial considerations to take a long, hard look at what its core news functions should be.
The cuts announced by Fran Unsworth, director of news and current affairs, envisage slimmed down news schedules and greater pooling of reporters to end the practice of separate teams of journalists covering the same stories for different outlets.
The award-winning Victoria Derbyshire morning magazine show has been axed and others are to be reduced in scope. Newsnight will make fewer films.
The aim is for the news operation to save £80 million out of the £800 million in overall savings earmarked by the BBC by 2022. It will involve the loss of 450 editorial jobs which the Corporation hopes to manage mainly through voluntary redundancy.
There is an old saying at the BBC that whenever there are difficulties, “deputy heads will roll”. The sense that the legions of managers earning six figure salaries are always immune from such economies runs deep. It is essential that other parts of the Corporation take a lead from the news side and weed out duplication and inefficiency. But the strategy behind the cuts is hard to discern.
Ms Unsworth told staff that they had to move away from traditional broadcasting towards digital. This in order to attract a youth audience who the BBC data say once watched the news but don’t anymore. But it is questionable whether they did so in the past or were waiting for something else to come on the television while the news was on. The younger generation today no longer watch the BBC at all let alone its news output.
But they will as they get older, which is why the BBC needs to produce good quality programming that appeals to anyone of any age. It must be possible for the Corporation to cut its spending without reducing the quality of its output. Setting out in pursuit of a youth audience, whose digital interests are often fleeting and demotic, risks replacing good journalism with “click-bait” stories that are of no interest to the audience that is interested in news.
Whatever reforms the BBC makes to save money, though, cannot be uncoupled from the bigger debate about the future of public service broadcasting and the licence fee.
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