The BBC has announced swingeing cuts to its English local services, barely a week after it magicked £100 million out of thin air to fund creative diversity.
According to the BBC, it's operation in England needs to make savings of £25 million by the end of the financial year 2021/22. This means 450 job losses from the English Regions, which currently employ more than 3,000 staff. BBC Local Radio will account for 139 of the job losses.
Helen Thomas, the Director of BBC England, said: "I'm proud people have turned to us for trusted news and information in huge numbers during COVID-19, proving the importance of our local and regional services. But those services were created more than 50 years ago, have changed very little and need significant reinvention. That has meant taking some difficult decisions.
"We are in the age of the Facebook community group and the WhatsApp neighbourhood chat. We must adapt to better reflect how people live their lives, how they get their news and what content they want.
"We're going to modernise our offer to audiences in England by making digital a central part of everything we do. We'll take forward lessons from COVID-19 that will make us more agile and more in touch with communities, while also ensuring we’re as efficient as we can be. I’m confident we can evolve our local and regional services while improving our impact and better serving our audiences."
BBC England's modernised offer will include:
- Increased local politics coverage;
- The 11 regional Sunday morning politics programmes being reinvigorated;
- A streamlined schedule across BBC Local Radio. Each station will have three daytime programmes, each with a single presenter. There will be a new late show with content syndicated across the whole English network;
- A reduction in the number of on-screen regional news presenters. The main evening regional news programme will be fronted by only one presenter;
- A new weekly investigative journalism programme, which will replace current affairs programme Inside Out. The new programme would be made in 6 English regions instead of the current 11;
- A digital pilot of a new political programme in Yorkshire and the Midlands.
As mentioned in its Annual Plan, the BBC is seeking to lessen its stereotypical London-centric image by bolstering its activities in the Midlands and north of England.
Michelle Stanistreet of the National Union of Journalists said: "These are huge cuts which will inevitably have an impact on the BBC's ability to sustain the breadth and depth of news coverage throughout England which truly reflects the diversity of the nation.
"The Covid-19 crisis has shown more than ever the need for an effective public service broadcaster and for trusted, quality journalism in an era of disinformation and fake news.
"We cannot allow the BBC to sleepwalk into a death by a thousand cuts, which will inevitably see people switch-off because they aren't getting the service they want."
Already this year the BBC has announced 450 job losses from its news division and 150 job losses from the nations excluding England.
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1 comment:
"We cannot allow the BBC to sleepwalk into a death by a thousand cuts, which will inevitably see people switch-off because they aren't getting the service they want."
That is the most tin-eared response imaginable. People are already switching-off in their droves because:
- payment via the regressive and outdated TV License (a hypothecated tax) serves the BBC by guaranteeing a revenue stream of £3.7 billion a year without having to worry about bothersome customers like Netflix and Amazon Prime. That DOES NOT serve the interests of the TV License Payers, nor the legally unlicensed.
- Ordinary people don't like the left-wing, biased, nanny-state propaganda along with the frankly unrepresentative twaddle dished out by the BBC which is more geared towards virtue signalling from BBC staff and management that meeting the needs of the British public that is forced to cough-up for it.
The only people the BBC is serving is itself. I suspect when they finally start attempting to gouge money out of the over 75's (which it has deferred twice), the chickens will come home to roost and the already falling numbers of licenses will plummet like a stone.
Good.
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