140 journalists face the axe at BBC news

First round of job cuts in five year plan announced.

By Press Gazette Published 28 March 2012
BBC to cut 140 jobs
BBC Television Centre in London. Photograph: Getty Images

The BBC has announced that 140 journalists are being cut.

This is the first round of cuts announced at BBC News as part of the Delivering Quality First programme and more are expected as the five-year plan is rolled out.

According to the NUJ today’s journalism cuts include:

  • Three Newsnight reporters, three Radio 4 news reporters and 17 posts across Radio 1 and 1Xtra news services
  • 28 posts in the Newsroom, including nine studio staff. The News Channel will lose a presenter, the Radio Newsroom two senior broadcast journalists, with six posts to go in online
  • Editions are being cut from Radio 4’s Law in Action, and The Report, while Beyond Westminster and Taking a Stand will come to an end
  • The axing of 31 posts in national TV current affairs has already been announced and as a result there will be no current affairs programmes on BBC 4. There will be a cut of about nine hours per year of ad hoc current affairs series on BBC2
  • he BBC plans to halve its spending on party conferences and dramatically reduce programme presentation from them. Six jobs will go at Millbank, including four posts in Live Political Programmes
  • International news coverage will be affected with a number of reporter posts around the world to go. Some will be replaced with locally recruited staff on local terms and conditions.

As part of the DQF cuts announced last year the corporation said it was cutting 2,000 jobs overall including around 500 in news over the next five years. This from a total pool of around 8,000 journalists.

To read more visit Press Gazette.

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2 comments

Andrew Chapman's picture

Wed, 2012-06-13 15:19 — Andrew Chapman (not verified)

This is quite a good article. Many new questions emerge to the surface, all you need do is to read further information about the issues. Only then one can form a final view on a particular subject. Otherwise everything is seen only in the dimension of how to cum more black and white. The natural logic of pr agentura evaluating things before catering they were properly cognitively processed is a horrible mistake, made by those less intelligent. People should not throw away their common ubytovanie na slovensku sense easily. Anything and everything deserves appropriate time for making judgements.

Indu Pendent's picture

Tue, 2012-04-17 19:20 — Indu Pendent

Good.
The BBC is too big.

8,000 journalists is a mind bogglingly large number of journalists. Its obvious that the BBCs processes arent as efficient as they could be e.g. would it be cheaper to buy in some of the news from freelancers rather than trying to capture it by employing full time journalists who are only busy for part of the time?

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