BBC set to announce job losses after overhaul of news reporting overhaul
The BBC is expected to announce hundreds of redundancies as it overhauls its news reporting.
The overhaul will see heavy cuts to high-profile news programmes and an increasingly centralised system for producing the corporation’s journalism said the Guardian on Wednesday.
A key aim of the plans was to reduce duplicated efforts with journalists pooled and working on investigations or original reporting before releasing it across the corporations various channels, TV, radio or digital.
Many BBC reporters feared the proposed system could be hard to operate in practice, given the different demands of outlets such as the Today programme or the BBC News website.
Fran Unsworth, head of news wrote to staff saying that there would be a meeting on Wednesday to explain how the corporation planned to put the BBC News mission statement of being “distinctive, trusted, engaging everyone, every day” into action.
Already on Tuesday, the BBC told production staff who make non-news or sport programmes for the corporation’s national radio stations that about 60 redundancies were on the way.
“Rising costs mean we shall end this year with a deficit of around a million pounds,” said Graham Ellis, the BBC’s controller of radio production.
Ellis said that while management would do their utmost to avoid compulsory redundancies, they could not be ruled out if not enough people chose to take a voluntary payout.
In response, the National Union of Journalists was getting ready to battle management over potential redundancies.
The BBC was facing a turbulent journey in the short-term, with the news of redundancies arriving just a week after Tony Hall, director general, announced his decision to step down.
However, the timing of his exit meant that his successor could be appointed before the BBC began negotiations with the government over the rate that it can charge for the licence fee from 2022 onwards.
Hall also criticised the corporation for contributing to a toxic discourse around political journalism, which he said was aimed at trying to “catch out” politicians.
Hall said at an event on Tuesday: “I’m a great believer in the long-form political interview where you can explore at length, not in soundbites, the real policy decisions that politicians are making. Exploring those sort of nuances is an important part of what we should do.”