Gatherers

New Director James Harding seems to have a reasonable field to choose from (if lacking on the distaff side) to replace Fran Unsworth, now his No 2, as Head of Newsgathering at the BBC.

Candidates are said to include No 2 at ITV News, Jonathan Munro, recently passed over at Gray's Inn Road for the top job; Adrian Wells, with Newsgathering up to 2002, when he moved to Sky and helped launch Sky News Arabia; current BBC Home News boss Gary Smith; and Jon Zilkha, minder of the talents of Peston, Pym, Heslehurst and chums in the BBC Finance and Business Unit.

It could have been otherwise: among papers on Harding's desk on his arrival at the BBC was a proposal from Peter Horrocks, boss of Global News, for a radical redistribution of the Newsgathering management superstructure (once nicknamed "The Gondoliers" for their regular visits to the old Venice restaurant in Great Titchfield Street). The redistribution would have been largely in Horrocks' direction.

Interview questions are likely to focus, once again, on doing more with less - which may favour Munro. Newsgathering's budget for the year has been drained by several major, fruitless, large-scale deployments to South Africa, through twitchiness over Nelson Mandela's health. "I am not ill, I am just old" is the latest message from Madiba.