Cultural shift

The teams that produce Newsnight on BBC2 and Today on Radio 4 have historically circled each other warily, each confident in the belief that their own journalism, contacts, scoops and big interviews are better than the other's.

Ian Katz at Newsnight is in that period of the BBC financial year just before the bean counters get anxious, so this week jetted out Paxo to the Middle East, to present and report. Jamie Angus, fresh from minding Newsnight in the post-Savile interregnum, is now at the helm of Today, and this week spent on sending James Naughtie to offer some apercus from Washington. (Is this perhaps a last jolly before Jim has to turn up for shifts at Good Morning Scotland ?)

The BBC is notoriously quiet about Newsnight's viewing figures. At the RTS Cambridge conference, Richard Desmond, owner of Channel 5, who ought to have reasonable access to data, said the average audience stands at 613,000. Katz is under more pressure than Angus when it comes to cost per listener/viewer....