Interim BBC DG Rhodri Talfan Davies tells us there'll be no salami slicing in achieving the next £500m of savings - but that's already what's happening. Cf Football Focus, Radio Scotland's presenter line-up (with yet another voice imported from Forth 1, Victoria Easton Riley's old patch), changing Strictly It Takes Two into a 'vodcast', linear BBC3 in the shedding ring (Have you seen the current schedules ?), it goes on...
Matt Brittin needs to overlay his own strategy and direction of travel asap. The remainder of Deborah Turness' management team at News are scaring the staff with the scale of cuts to come, without solutions. Their instinct remains to bolster 'newsgathering' at the expense of output teams. It needs a new Director of News to review the scale of the investment in Verify and the USA, and fast.
The re-merger of "Product" and "Technology" into Mediatech will produce savings. Ernst & Young's review of current BBC spending noted that, at 12% of revenue, the BBC spends more in these areas than Spotify or Netflix. But there remains a piecemeal approach to content for other platforms; each departmental hippo has a flock of oxpeckers tied to terminals making 45" clips of linear output for re-use on TikTok, Facebook Reels, Instagram and YouTube Shorts. Online has a small factory making weekend clips of The One Show for the front page of News Online. Radio 2 has just advertised for yet another "Social Media Exec, Radio 2 Publishing". Entertainingly, the tools they use are largely 'off the shelf', like Emplify, Adobe Creative and Social Flow. Put all the people engaged in this stuff together, and it's one hell of a cottage industry. Is is marketing ? Is it content ? Is it of value ?
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