The Toronto Star's Mitch Potter looks at the BBC, one of the world's great broadcasters and news organizations, albiet one that's had some missteps and is struggling with a painful restructuring.
The mighty Beeb is about to shrink. Over the next six years, savings of more than $4 billion must be found in a process that will involve at least 1,500 bodies going overboard and a 10 per cent reduction in overall programming.
The cuts were triggered by an unexpectedly low financial settlement with the government, which is forcing the Beeb – which runs without commercials and thus has no advertising revenue – to make due with below-inflation funding even as it scrambles to meet a government-mandated transfer of some major production hubs to locations outside London and pay for a raft of other one-off expenses.
But the real story is about much more than the numbers, however daunting.
Insiders say that – after a 75-year journey to build a legacy as the world's most trusted voice for independent, authoritative journalism – the Beeb's very soul is at stake as it struggles to reinvent itself for the digital age.
A glimmer of the internal debate spilled messily into the public realm when three of the Beeb's most seasoned voices railed against management strategy to continue to fund a broad array of light entertainment content when it became clear the news and current affairs limbs are designated for some of the sternest lashings. ...
The complaints add up to grating music for the ears of Richard Sambrook, director of the BBC's Global News division, who told the Star that in his 27 years at the Beeb, he "cannot remember a single moment when someone inside wasn't describing morale at an all-time low."
Sambrook isn't sugar-coating the fact that the BBC is about to get smaller – or that the process is likely to cost hundreds of news jobs.
But, he says: "The real story here is not so much about job cuts as it is about adaptation to the digital age. Like every other major news organization, we are grappling with the reality that tomorrow's technology requires an adapt-or-die approach.
"You either prepare yourself and your content to become available on demand, when and where the consumer wants it, or the consumer leaves you behind and goes elsewhere.
"The way to reconcile the costs of achieving this is job cuts and reorganization to make us fit for the digital age. And the message we're trying to get across is, yes, it will be a smaller BBC, but one more focused on quality. We're going to cut back on some of our marginal factual production, but we're not going to stop doing the landmark work we're known for around the world.
"Fewer, bigger, better, if you like." ...
The Beeb's increasingly aggressive commercial arm, together with the ratings-craving offerings of channels like BBC3, blur the lines between public and private and lead many to wonder whether the time has come to rethink the wisdom of allowing the BBC to collect an annual fee from every British television-watching household.
Skeptical outsiders, meanwhile, voice doubts the BBC is capable of adapting easily to the ambiguities of the digital media future, the reality of which won't be clear until consumers themselves decide how they want to consume information. The BBC may be many things – at times, it has wanted to be everything – but nimble is a word never before associated with the broadcaster.