BBC News: Presenters, correspondent & rotas

In peak times/breaking news situations, yes, but off-peak/weekends it's actually quite commonplace:
-Sky News presenters present 12-6am daily
-Bloomberg's Shery Ahn until June presented 1-2pm, a segment at 4.50pm, then 6-9pm ET (now only the latter two)
-BBC's Singapore presenters on Newsday present 11pm-2am, then the Asia Business Reports , then a segment at 5.30am
-In France, Fanny Conquy used to present 11am-7pm (8 hours!) on weekends until last year (then the shift was shortened and she left)
-In Spain, many breakfast presenters present approx 6am-noon (usually in duos/trios)
-On RT, presenters usually present 6 hour stints (no back half hours)

I suppose scheduling in TV news right now takes precedence over "staffing"?

Honestly wish Mishal Husain did more, more often! She’s brilliant.

Yes I know, she’s great on it too.

Also some years ago back in BBC Television Centre, Maxine Mawhinney regularly did 6/7 hour shifts on air on both Saturdays and Sundays. Peter Sissons also did the same when he was on the News Channel.

I think Tim Willcox has shown himself to be excellent at doing The Papers recently. Would love to see him take up the evening slot on the NC permanently after all this is over

It feels like we’ve gone back about 5 or 10 years!

I doubt the evening shift will get a fixed presenter again (as it’s very rare now for Clive to do it) and once this is all over, whenever that will be, it’ll just be back to a different presenter every night as it was before.

I can’t see it coming back. I don’t know why, but I just can’t. It’s not Clives anymore. He’s moved to the big boy stuff. Martine has pretty much moved to the peak hours.

I agree on Tim’s versatility. You can throw anything at him (in the studio or out in the field) and he’ll handle it.

He’s not on screen anywhere near as often as he used to be (it was always a standing joke around here that he had a camp-bed in TVC/NBH). Whilst predominantly on World these days, I’ve noted periods of weeks on end when he’s not on air at all.

Freelance.

The articles about Eades, Willcox and Gosling and their "sub-contractor" employment status indicated that the BBC was going to transition them to employees. Do we think that actually happened?

Being ‘employed’ doesn’t mean they’re not on zero hour contracts where they’re paid only to work the shifts they agree to take on, potentially on an ad-hoc basis. A ‘freelancer’ can technically be contracted to provide full-time services, and an employee be employed to provide no guaranteed services. The significance is largely in taxation, holiday provision and other employee benefits. I would imagine that, in reality, many of the presenters who were freelance before will still be in all but name now.

Without wishing to get into rota territory it does feel noticable that the evening shift hasn’t had a frequent presenter for a while (it’s Clive’s slot in the same way Sophie’s bulletin is the 1 O’Clock news - both these mainly do other shifts and it’s more of a surprise when they appear in their official role) when there does seem to be a surplus of morning presenters. Victoria, Annita, Joanna and Carrie seem to all regularly do the morning slot so surely move one so there’s at least a fairly frequent evening presenter - of course maybe none of them want the evening slot.