Emily Maitlis presents Newsnight Photo: BBC
They kept the nameplate, but understand: in the past, Night Night died. The BBC's announcement that the program will suffer a steep budget cut of £7.5 million and an equally painful cut of 15 minutes in running time marks the end of an era. Once upon a time — not too many years ago — Newsnight was the place where the BBC's journalistic reputation was built and polished. From now on it will be just another talk show, its glory days are long gone, and the survivors will forever remain in the shadow of past triumphs.
This brutal operation was inevitable because it made sense. The program has made headlines in recent years for all the wrong reasons. The Emily Maitlis episode had lasting and damaging consequences when, in 2020, she jettisoned the boring old dogma of BBC impartiality and decided to give the nation her unvarnished view of the dishonesty of Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson's government. At the time, Maitlis' left-wing speech enraged many conservatives and she was reprimanded, but she then quickly reappeared on the show (though she was fired last year and left to host her podcast at Global, The News Agents).
< p>The point about Newsnight — in the wider context of the BBC — is that it was becoming bad for business. From the outset it has always felt to critics like Guardian TV (a view strongly reinforced by the experiences of some senior staff; Ian Katz, editor of Newsnight from 2013-2017, was in fact deputy editor of the Guardian). In all his years of existence, he has never been a friend of the political right; he always dressed to the left and was proud of it. And there was a certain arrogant swagger in his politics; he seemed to shrug off conservative critics, smugly confident in his luxury beliefs, which were, after all, shared by his audience and the media elite of which he was a part.
But times are changing. Newsnight became not just an irritant, but also a headache for BBC management. Those who work closely with CEO Tim Davie tell me that he is completely sincere in his desire to restore the corporation's reputation for impartiality; Newsnight's many misdeeds in this regard did not sit well with him. Thus, budget cuts and shorter time slots will seem to many to be a deserved punishment. Newsnight has received its comeuppance and few tears will be shed among the Conservatives.
But Newsnight politics aside, there is another good reason why this was low-hanging fruit ripe for the pruning. Newsnight's total budget was around £13 million. When rumors of cuts first surfaced a month ago, cuts were said to be £5m; the fact that the actual cut is 50 percent higher suggests a certain ruthlessness among BBC management. The £7.5 million lost represents about 58 per cent of Newsnight's money, which I calculate is roughly in line with the decline in the program's audience over the last 10 years. In its splendor it sometimes attracted spectators of 800,000; these days you're lucky to get 300,000. For a media accountant, or any rational manager, Newsnight's rapidly disappearing audience was perhaps the best argument for budget cuts.
The BBC has announced a decision to cut 34 #Newsnight staff, cut them by 10 minutes, cut original reporting and reduce its number. investigations, & change its format to “studio debate”; format
Reminder of @maitlis monologue about Cummings & Barnard Castle👇pic.twitter.com/R4CAYp2O0D https://t.co/0UBpkHxU3b
— Stefan Simanowitz (@StefSimanowitz) November 30, 2023
Deborah Turness, head of news and current affairs at the BBC, put it bluntly. «It just doesn't make sense anymore,» she said, «to have a dedicated team of reporters devoted to one news program with a small and dwindling audience, no matter how good that program is.»
So what remains after the operation? The program's staff will be reduced from 57 to 23 people, and instead of investigative journalism there will be debates, discussions and interviews. This means Newsnight will enter an already crowded field. As viewers, we're hardly short of this kind of fare: Sky, Channel 4, GB News and Murdoch's Talk TV all make similar programs, so the question is what will differentiate Newsnight in the future, what will be its USP?
The future success of Newsnight will largely depend on who hosts the new show, and change is in the air again. Newsnight's current queen bee is Kirsty Wark, but she will retire next year. Next up are Victoria Derbyshire and Faisal Islam, but I'm not clear that either of them has enough star power to turn a new talk show into must-see television; like the new Paxman. Part of this, of course, is that “must-see TV” itself is becoming a rarity, especially in news and current affairs. The BBC's statement announcing the changes to Newsnight placed great emphasis on the need to adapt to changing audience preferences. And “linear television” is in decline in the long term, quite rapidly now.
In his pomp: Jeremy Paxman presents Newsnight Photo: Geoff Overs/BBC
This term refers to television on the TV listings page. The kind of thing where you turn on the TV and sit down to watch whatever the channel schedule shows. Fewer and fewer of us do this. Most people are now media savvy enough to get whatever they want online, at a time that suits them. That interesting discussion you missed last night? Watch this on YouTube in the morning: simple and convenient. The remaining linear TV audiences tend to be older and more established. Very few people under 35 now sit down and obediently do what their schedule dictates. I predict that Newsnight Mark Two will have a hard time retaining even the audience it currently enjoys.
Today's announcement of spending cuts predictably drew poor reactions from all the usual suspects. Channel 4 news presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy called it a «sad day», former BBC reporter John Sweeney said Newsnight was the «rebellious conscience of the BBC», the National Union of Journalists deplored the BBC's abandonment of investigative journalism. The BBC itself disputes the latter claim. It says the money will now be invested in a new investigative unit, but it will become a shared resource for all BBC programmes.
This marks a significant change, as BBC News and Current Once have traditionally been divided into separate (and often competing) fiefdoms. Important programs such as Today and Newsnight had their own teams of reporters, and this gave their editors real freedom to set their own agendas. Newsnight was one of the last bastions of the old system (Today's reporting team was cut years ago), but now that too has fallen.
Does it matter? We will always need good investigative journalism, and no journalist should ever celebrate when ambitions fall and jobs are lost. But I can't help but feel that Newsnight was waiting for this. Too self-confident, too condescending, too tied to the out-of-touch liberal elite, he ended up appealing only to people like himself. The rationale for the cuts just announced is compelling, but in the new format it will be a ghost of its former self and unlikely to satisfy anyone. Of course, the BBC should have gone ahead and closed the program altogether
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