Has the new ownership of the Telegraph steered the paper away from a cascade of anti-BBC articles ? A fellow blogger has noted a recent restriction in the pipeline of ordure from Danny Cohen and Robin Aitken.
The Sunday edition offers only "BBC ‘covered up claims male presenter attacked female colleague’", by 'Telegraph Reporters', a summary of a Mail on Sunday 'exclusive'; Saturday's edition featured "BBC spending thousands of pounds on riot training for World Cup staff" by Ben Rumsby.
Morale in BBC news teams in London, and around the UK, will not have been lifted by a piece in The Guardian. It reports a staff briefing by silver-tongued BBC News Content boss Richard Burgess:
“Most of our savings are people, frankly. [The cuts will be] 15% of our income. Our income is not entirely salary bill as we have other things as well, although it is the majority. Ultimately, [10% is] a figure across the whole of the BBC, but that doesn’t take into account that there are areas it’s just not possible to make cuts in.
“And so, as a consequence, in the areas where it is possible to make cuts in it ends up being a slightly higher figure. Across news, that 15% figure is fairly consistent in most areas of news.”
This news of other departments impossible to cut is made more joyous by another briefing reported by The Guardian.
"Kerris Bright, the BBC’s chief customer officer, was also asked which departments may be targeted more heavily. Bright, who is responsible for leading the marketing and audiences team and the licence fee unit, told staff that those teams bring in significantly more in revenue than they cost to run, when thinking about where cuts could hit the hardest."
He'll at least be pleased with extensive coverage in LadBible: "News of savings is hard. It's hard for us, it's hard for audiences, because everything we touch or try to change, or in some cases, close down, is somebody's favourite piece of the BBC's offer to them. So, it's not easy to make these choices, but we're working through plans and we said to our staff within news that we will be able to say more in June."
I'm sure he looked cheerful at some time in the proceedings. I was taken with a phrase by Royal Correspondent Sean Coghlan this week, which might be applied here: "King Charles sometimes has the melancholy look of someone who keeps getting disappointing phone calls."
Mr Munro is interim director because Deborah Turness resigned over the Trump edit on Panorama. For at least five months before that, both Ms Turness and Mr Munro held parallel views that a) the edit reflected a greater truth that needed making simpler and stronger for the audience to understand a particular narrative or b) it was standard practice to jump edit political speeches. In November 2025, the BBC apologised to Donald Trump: "We accept that our edit unintentionally created the impression that we were showing a single continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from different points in the speech, and that this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action".
I've spent a bit of time last night worrying over loose ends. Does it matter that BBC1 viewers of the Ten O'Clock News didn't see the video of the arresting policemen landing at least five kicks on the head of the knife-wielding thug in Golders Green ? Is a sharp kick to the head usual if police, as they say, were worried the suspect may have had a concealed explosive device ? For Six O'Clock viewers, who deemed what was to be blurred in that video ? Did someone in the edit suite actually say "Make the coppers' feet fuzzy ?"
Let's admire the 10 for coverage of the alleged Ukrainian arsonists, but was 25 seconds really sufficient for the revelation that Nigel Farage failed to declare £5m from an ex-pat crypto tycoon ? And let's note that the 'shotgun' carried by Trump's latest would-be assassin is now a 'rifle', and there's no indication the man in custody actuually fired a shot.
Still, there's always another bulletin....
A chart produced by Press Gazette puts BBC News at the top of a list of English language news publishers on YouTube this month, measured by numbers of subscribers. It has 19.7m in April, with 29k videos on the site, and has overtaken ABC News, CNN and Vice. A year ago, it had 17.8m subscribers and 25k videos posted.
Piers Morgan Uncensored is outside the Press Gazette Top 20, with 4.4m subscribers looking at 2.3k videos.
The BBC News site is not the only BBC product with a YouTube presence. "The BBC" has 15.4m subscribers, looking at 30k videos and clips; BBC World Service has 2m subscribers; BBC Earth has 14.4m subscribers; and BBC Ideas, the James Purnell Legacy, 684k.
I'd don't know who's dafter - the people running the BBC News website at the weekend, or the people reading it. Here's the top three 'Most Read' items at 08.51 BST today.
The Number One story is written by George Sandeman, in Salford, home of weekend website nonsense. This in-depth twaddle looks at relationships where one partner is much older than another. Burrowing down, we find the 'idea' behind the feature might be a reality dating show on Netflix called "Age of Attraction".
A new poll from Electoral Calculus included the following question: Who runs your council?
With local elections coming up on 7 May, we wanted to see how much people were aware of politics in their local area. We asked them "As far as you know, which political party currently leads your local council or local authority?"
Nearly a third of voters (30pc) admitted that they don't know which party currently leads their local council. Of those who gave an answer, 46pc correctly identified the leading party while 24pc were wrong.
Interim BBC DG Rhodri Talfan Davies tells us there'll be no salami slicing in achieving the next £500m of savings - but that's already what's happening. Cf Football Focus, Radio Scotland's presenter line-up (with yet another voice imported from Forth 1, Victoria Easton Riley's old patch), changing Strictly It Takes Two into a 'vodcast', linear BBC3 in the shedding ring (Have you seen the current schedules ?), it goes on...
Matt Brittin needs to overlay his own strategy and direction of travel asap. The remainder of Deborah Turness' management team at News are scaring the staff with the scale of cuts to come, without solutions. Their instinct remains to bolster 'newsgathering' at the expense of output teams. It needs a new Director of News to review the scale of the investment in Verify and the USA, and fast.
The re-merger of "Product" and "Technology" into Mediatech will produce savings. Ernst & Young's review of current BBC spending noted that, at 12% of revenue, the BBC spends more in these areas than Spotify or Netflix. But there remains a piecemeal approach to content for other platforms; each departmental hippo has a flock of oxpeckers tied to terminals making 45" clips of linear output for re-use on TikTok, Facebook Reels, Instagram and YouTube Shorts. Online has a small factory making weekend clips of The One Show for the front page of News Online. Radio 2 has just advertised for yet another "Social Media Exec, Radio 2 Publishing". Entertainingly, the tools they use are largely 'off the shelf', like Emplify, Adobe Creative and Social Flow. Put all the people engaged in this stuff together, and it's one hell of a cottage industry. Is is marketing ? Is it content ? Is it of value ?
When Sara Cox arrives at Radio 2 Breakfast in the summer, the network will offer listeners 5 and half consecutive hours of Bolton accents each weekday. Sarah was brought up in Little Lever, to the south east, and Vernon Kay in Horwich, to the north west - less than eight miles apart. Then comes posh boy Jeremy Vine...
Still, makes up a bit for EastEnders....
Over the years, this blog has chased viewing figures for BBC Alba, without much success.
MG ALBA is the operating name of Seirbheis nam Meadhanan Gàidhlig, or Gaelic Media Service, which was formed under the Communications Act 2003. MG ALBA delivers the BBC ALBA platforms in partnership with the BBC, from its HQ in Stornoway. I offer these paragraphs from MG Alba's submission on the Green Paper on the future of the BBC.
