BBC Confirms Job Cuts

LONDON, October 18: The
BBC Trust has approved Director-General Mark
Thompson’s six-year reform plan for the organization, including 1,800 job
cuts.

The emphasis of the
reforms is on turning the pubcaster into a “smaller but fitter” organization,
with every division focusing on savings in order to reinvest in original BBC
content that can be deployed on a variety of platforms.

Dubbed “Delivering
Creative Future,” the plan looks to focus on providing fewer but better
programs, delivering those programs whenever and however audiences wish to
receive them, and reducing the size of the organization.

“Media is transforming,”
Thompson told BBC staffers. “Audiences are transforming. It would be easy to
say that the sheer pace of this revolution is too fast for the BBC. That for us
to do what other media players are doing—integrating newsrooms, mixing
media, exploiting the same content aggressively across different
platforms—is just too radical…but I think we can see both here and
around the world the price you pay for taking what looks like the safe option.
I've devoted almost my whole working life to the BBC, much of that not as a
suit but as a rank-and-file program-maker. I love the BBC and what it stands
for. I care too much to see it drift steadily into irrelevance."

Over the course of the
next six years, efforts will be made to enhance the quality of the BBC’s
journalism, news, knowledge and comedy output.

The BBC will develop
enhanced on-demand news, sport and local information services for the digital
age. It will also build new content for under-served audiences and BBC News
will establish an integrated multimedia newsroom and multimedia programs
department. On the drama front, the emphasis will be on “high-impact,
distinctive” fare. In factual, the BBC will focus on producing history, arts,
science, religion and natural history landmark programs that span all platforms
and offer greater audience interaction with a strong online presence. And the
public broadcaster will continue to be the biggest investor of original comedy
in the British market.

In other measures, on the
cost-savings front, a 3 percent efficiency target has been set per year.
Original TV programming will be cut by 10 percent by 2012/13 in a bid to focus
on quality, not quantity. The BBC Television Center in west London will be sold
by the end of the 6-year plan. And a range of planned new activities, amounting
to £1.5 billion over the next six years, have been dropped, including budget
cuts at BBC Three and a new teen service.

The BBC will make
approximately 1,800 redundancies by the end of the period and expects to close
an estimated 2,500 positions between now and 2012/2013, with the areas of news
and factual production most affected.

—By Mansha Daswani