BBC News: Presenters & Rotas

Former Sunday Politics Midlands reporter Susana Mendonca also appears on the NC and Breakfast as well. Her day job these days is BBC Radio London's political reporter.

Incidentally after leaving Politics Live, Elizabeth was drafted in to cover present Politics Live today.

On a side note - With This Week being axed by the BBC in July this year, I had contacted Juniper TV who make This Week, and suggested the show could continue on another channel. Here is what they said:

"We have had fun making it. You should drop Channel 4 a line and ask them to commission the programme. If you are serious then email Dorothy Byrne at C4!"

So, if anyone wishes to see This Week move to Channel 4, email them. It seems Juniper are up for the idea of the show continuing on another channel.

I don't see Channel 4 taking it because it would rate poorly at 10-11pm especially against Question Time and they wouldn't waste a valuable primetime slot either.

I could see Channel 4 taking it but moving it to a different day like a Tuesday or Wednesday.

Does the BBC have a directory of all their correspondents and maybe bios? Sometimes I don’t catch a persons name but I’d like to look them up. Even something as simple as a photo gallery index page of all their on screen talent sorted by role or region would be nice. It doesn’t have to include once in a blue moon freelancers but the permalancers and those under contract.

It used to have those kind of pages in the days when the BBC had bespoke websites and pages, but the teams who created that kind of content disappeared in cost-cutting years ago. You may find some regional operations keep 'presenter pages' up to date.

Keeping that kind of content up-to-date is time consuming, and doesn't really fit into anyone's remit these days AFAIK.

The closest thing today are probably the correspondent pages linked to from articles by the likes of Laura K

I would have thought that LinkedIn made the correspondent page redundant

This seems pretty up to date, with a few exceptions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BBC_newsreaders_and_reporters#Foreign_correspondents

She also appears on the radio at the weekend covering political stories which are not always London linked.

Today's dreadful news of the burning of Notre Dame and the coverage by the BBC had led me to writing this.

I've no idea how pres scheduling works at the BBC these days.. (I did in the 90's)... but in recent months it's been beyond acceptable.

Lets's start with Geeta Guru Murphy. Totally unacceptable to cover today's awful events, she was terrible. I always turn to the BBC, but having lived in the US, I usually have CNN domestic on at home in London and so stuck with that and made a good choice.

Sean Lay - seriously?
Lukwesa Burak - She is entirely dreadful at breaking news, last weekend being one prime example.

Where on earth are Gosling, Hill, Gracie, Owen, anyone... (even Bland albeit a new face.. though totally competent). I just don't understand how the BBC can schedule such dire presenters for a channel that can switch from an hourly 'normal' running order to a serious breaking news story and not replace people who to 'US' a small minority of the viewing public, are a dire mess.

It looks like the News channel have cut down on the number of freelance relief presenters generally, as a whole. For example the likes of Vicky Young, Rebecca Jones, Julian Worricker, Lukwesa Burack and Shaun Ley regularly cover these days. Carole Walker occasionally pops up. Then there's the likes of Ben Brown, Rita Chakrabati and Carrie Gracie who don't have assigned 'slots' per se but pop up from time to time. I've not seen the likes of Gavin Gray, Chris Rodgers or Nicholas Owen on the channel for ages.

Jane Hill, although notably absent from the channel and national bulletins for some time, I don't believe presents any standard news channel hours these days (outside of the Five or Dateline). I've certainly never seen her covering Newsroom Live, Afternoon Live or the late/Papers shift before.

I'm quite surprised Tim Willcox hasn't been drafted back over to cover. There was a time many years ago when he was covering every spare hour going and not a day went past when we didn't see him somewhere on the channel.