BBC News & BBC World News - Further Staff Cutbacks

Wonder if they will be moving some of the shows such as World News Today and others to the US in an effort to save money? They have several skilled presenters over here that seem to be underused.

Isn't there some rule that BBC Four must have some news programme?

Considering the strength of the BBC brand is having all these brands really necessary - for viewers scrolling through an EPG BBC News does exactly what it says on the tin. However if more programmes were to be simulcast hiding that behind branded programmes would make sense I guess.

Do you really need 9 senior management posts for news? No... here's just a few

Managing editor news
Controller of production news
Head of current affairs
Head of news gathering
Head of 24/7 & digital news
Controller daily news programmes

& of cause the big cheese Director of news and current affairs Harding - the problems started when he was appointed and subsequently he hired shed loads of directors and sacked the journalists.

Get rid of the duplicated directors jobs & spend it on the screen.

Are they duplicated jobs you've listed?

There is a difference between ensuring production and gathering, and current affairs is different thing to news, and news on a website or phone is different to TV news.


It's like saying why do they need a head of comedy and a head of drama and a head of factual?

BBC news should be more like that, different colour schemes, all great with World News, BBC News is just red with a tinge of purple for the ten.

Going slightly off-topic I see the BBC have quietly axed the management structure section of their website, with just http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/insidethebbc/managementstructure/biographies remaining, making it harder to see how many (high level) mangers are in each section. Previously each section had a page such as http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/insidethebbc/managementstructure/bbcstructure/bbcnorth.html. The pages for News and radio conveniently no longer exist, neither does the old 'vision'/television page which is now BBC Studios.

It's quite likely some of these roles are necessarily, it's just harder to work out as the job titles don't always use 'plain English' which makes it harder for the general public to understand. I seem to recall reading in Private Eye that some of James Harding's management appointments were direct recruited from outside the BBC instead of being advertised internally, which had caused some controversy.

You dont need all the senior posts when you are cutting the front line.

How do you manage a department that big without delegating the management to look after different areas?

BBC News has, what, 1000 something staff in it? Thats everyone from a presenter on World to a broadcast assistant on Radio Guernsey. They can't all be under a couple of senior people.

Also it doesn't work with the way that TV news is set up - intake (news gathering) is a different thing to output (producing the news programmes). They're usually seperately managed, and in a broadcaster where there's multiple outputs it has to be.

Then there's all the technical functions. Journalists are generally rubbish at technology, especially the senior ones. They're different animals to the people in the galleries or control rooms, getting a journalist to manage an operations department is always disaster

Then there's the sheer number of balls in the air that such senior managers look after. The person responsible for newsgathering shouldn't be having to decide whether to prioritise between a planning meeting for a big event, a meeting discussing the air con in the server room or the editorial meeting for the 1 O Clock news