Eaves dropping

A new boss for BBC Monitoring - Sara Beck, the BBC's Deputy Head of Newsgathering, comes out from the penumbra of lustrous Jonathan Munro, and joins in February. She'll continue the hunt for £2.5m in additional income at Caversham - or oversee more post closures. If she gets through that, she may have to move the whole operation, to make more property savings.

Sarah joined the BBC straight from university in 1991, as a producer with the Russian service, and became Moscow bureau editor in 1998, covering both Chechen wars and the resignation of Russian president Boris Yeltsin. She moved to Jerusalem in 2000 as editor of the Middle East bureau and then Singapore two years later, covering the Bali bombing while heading the Asia bureau.

She shares the honour of co-editing The Battle for Iraq, published in 2003 - essays on the second Gulf War by BBC correspondents. Her emails also made the 2012 Pollard Report - taking the proposed Newsnight investigation into Jimmy Savile off the Managed Risk Programmes List, and telling Newsnight ‘Just so you know…. have taken Jimmy Saville [sic] off for now and will put back on when it’s imminent. The document goes quite far – in Vision etc – and we thought it might be best to keep [it] off just for now".