Long division

Myself and a number of like-minded dullards are now hyper-excited about restructuring the BBC.

If you believe management salaries should follow headcount rather than budget, yesterday's move of Peter Salmon to run 2,000 'creatives' (Salmon-speak for staff) in BBC Studios leaves Danny Cohen rather well-paid to run the rump of around 400 commissioning and scheduling operatives in television.

Helen Boaden boosts her longevity by picking up responsibility for 3,200 employees in BBC England, to add around 1,200 in network radio.

The big output wagons of news, tv and radio right around the UK harbour techies in all sorts of shapes and sizes, with different ways of doing the same job, and we know Ralph Rivera from Digital, Matthew Postgate, from Engineering nee Technology, and David Gibbons, a new big brain CIO at Worldwide, have been told to crash them together.  

In support, Anne Bulford, in Finance and Operations, is doing an insource-outsource fandango, with HR building a new shared in-house team in the Mailbox, partly as a way of pacifying the MPs and newspapers of the Second City. James Purnell is downsizing re-focussing marketing and the UK online offering.

Maybe not even James Harding is safe in this job-straddling exercise. Depending on who you believe he has between 6,500 and 7,500 staff. But remember, Lord Hall is Editor-in-Chief, and an old news hand. He already does one morning meeting...