Naming of parts

I've been writing about BBC News cuts (publicly) since 2010. None of them have been billed as cuts. All have been billed as strategic moves into a brave new future. Newsgathering, a BBC-construct, was born out of one such strategy, driven by John Birt in the 1990s. Previously we had, sensibly, reporters, correspondents, planning and intake desks. Newsgathering sounded daft to me, but, hey, look where that got me.

Renaming jobs allows you to make whole swathes of staff apply for jobs that look pretty much like the ones they had, but, with the appropriate endorsement of HR, are clearly very different. So in 1992/3, News Reporters were made to apply to be News Correspondents, and lo, a dozen weren't good enough to keep the job they were already doing. That doesn't include others who saw the writing on the wall and volunteered for redundancy.

BBC Newsgathering, like the cow that wants to be eaten in The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, has faced savage cuts year after year, but incredibly seems to have rump still to be sliced after all these years. (One might note that Newsgathering displayed a renewed interest in the World Service, once the Foreign Office committed to an annual grant of £85m in 2015). They've got to make the 2020 cuts look difficult, and so there are to be more pilots of The Dartboard of Death.

The truth is they need 300 posts to close in this exercise. Newsgathering have never liked 'programmes' having their own reporting and planning efforts, so they'll come for them first. The war cries of 'duplication' will echo around the open plan, missing the point entirely. Another feature of Newsgathering is that they never really watch or listen to much outside Today, The Six and The Ten; they just presume programme reporters must be covering the same things. So their belief is that Central Catering will create steaming trays of ready-made items for distribution around the programmes they don't care about - the equivalent of free-school dinner eaters. Gawd help a programme caught chopping its own salad. 

Whatever. In the end, to get to a total of 300, there'll be some sham renaming of jobs in Newsgathering. In the most recent staff survey 78% of Jonathan Munro's staff thought jobs were decided in advance of interviews. Re-assuring, huh ?