Off

It seems the BBC's News Content department, aka Newsgathering, has failed to persuade one of its most reliable and dogged correspondents to stay with the organisation. 

Nick Bryant, 52 (Wellsway Comprehensive, Bristol; Bristol Easton Salvation Army Band; BA History, Churchill, Cambridge; PhD American Politics, Balliol Oxford, including a year at MIT) is the BBC's New York Correspondent, and has announced he's leaving the post later this year, for Australia, his wife's home, with his young family. 

He became a BBC News trainee in 1994; a placement with the infant 5Live followed, and my mate Phil Longman and his Drivetime team soon deployed Nick as a fully-fledged reporter. 

He was a correspondent in Washington within five years of joining the BBC - quite a feat. Normally, Newsgathering has a matrix of development for its senior correspondents, as they juggle family life with foreign deployments.  Australia is preferred to whatever the Newsgathering plan offered Nick.