Written evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, about BBC World Service cuts, is now out, with full details of the 480-odd post closures coming in 2011/12. Two big numbers stand out - 60 gone from Arabic (how many left ?), and 56.5 from Newsgathering (again, how many left ?). They estimate there'll be another 170 jobs going in the following two years. Here's the list - BBC written evidence starts are page 88, and this can be found on page 94. (Hat-tip to former Bush staff)
Albanian 23
Caribbean 5
Macedonian 10
Portuguese for Africa 11
Serbian 21
Arabic 60
Azeri 8
Uzbek 8
Kyrgyz 0
Chinese 8
Hindi 30
Indonesian 12
Russian 45
Spanish 20
Ukrainian 17
Turkish 5
African (English) 5
Persian 22
Urdu 5
Vietnamese 5
other Asia-Pacific languages 3
BBC Audio & Music 12
BBC Newsgathering 56.5
World Service announcers 3
WS Finance & Business Affairs 9
Digital Technology, New Media 4
Distribution 6
Strategy & Business Development 13
Studio and TV Operations 54
Total: 479.5
It would be good to have similar detail on the cuts at BBC Monitoring.
ReplyDeleteThe Europe and Asia-Pacific monitoring and editorial teams are being axed. Middle East editing is to be offshored. Language monitoring in Arabic and Persian will remain. But the collective editorial expertise on Europe and Asia-Pacific is being broken up and lost forever.
As an ex-colleague put it, "the whole place feels like a big store starting a closing-down sale. They are painting themselves into an ever narrower geographic area and will wind up on the BBC's doorstep in a couple of years
with a non-global agenda at variance from the BBC's own. Ironically, they are also holing their ability to report on some of their own priority countries below the waterline... No-one in [so-called management team] BDCR grasps that if, for example, you want the full picture on Chinese diplomatic expansion, you need to keep tabs on the countries into which China is expanding - which are mostly "priority 3" [Caversham-speak for minimal importance] and so are being dumped."
And yet the Caversham website still gloats on about "a global media monitoring service".
When George Howard was Chairman of the BBC Governors many decades ago, he was given the Grand Tour of BBC Monitoring. Later he was walked around the splendid grounds. Spotting a BBC Land Rover with a sat dish on the roof, he turned to his hosts and beamed: "You chaps are doing a great job tracking down those TV Licence defaulters!"
WTF!!