The BBC has axed investigative journalism show HARDtalk after nearly 30 years as part of a 130-person layoff program in its news division.
The news has emerged as part of the wider 500-person-layoff program that was announced earlier this year by Director General Tim Davie, as the corporation grapples with a deficit of £500M ($654M) amid tricky economic headwinds. Davie delivered a speech yesterday in which he urged more government funding for global news, as he warned that Russia and China are filling gaps vacated by the World Service with “unchallenged propaganda.”
The closure of HARDtalk, which will happen in five months, is part of the latest round of cuts to the hard-hit BBC News teams, which news boss Deborah Turness said today will “help meet the BBC’s savings and reinvestment challenge” in an internal email sent out in the past hour. An all-staff meeting led by Turness is currently taking place.
HARDtalk launched in 1997 and is hosted by Stephen Sackur, who tweeted today that the move is “depressing news for the BBC” for a show that stresses the “importance of independent, rigorous deeply-researched journalism.” He pointed to interviews with the likes of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Hugo Chavez and Emmanuel Macron from down the years.
A BBC spokeswoman said: “HARDtalk has done great work across the last 25 years, but we’ve had to make some tough decisions given the level of savings required and changing audience habits. People are coming to our news channel for live and breaking news, while across the whole of BBC News, we have hard-hitting long-form interviews and discussion on more platforms than ever, for instance via our global on-air editors, and our debate and discussion programmes.” She cited recent interviews with the deputy leader of Hamas and former UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron as evidence.
Along with HARDtalk, the BBC is closing the bespoke Asian Network News service, with the station instead taking Newsbeat bulletins and commissioning a new locally-made current affairs show. Domestic radio will start taking World Service summaries overnight rather than running its own news services and the production of Radio 5 Live and Radio 2 news bulletins will be synchronized.
In all, there will be 185 role closures and 55 new ones created. The news team is delivering a saving of £24M – around 4% of its budget. Turness said more than 40% of these savings will come from non-staff measures including reductions to spend on contracts, suppliers, distribution and physical buildings.
“But with staff costs accounting for 75% of our overall budget, I’m sorry to say that post closures are unavoidable,” her email added, before calling on anyone interested in voluntary redundancy to come forward.
“I know change is not easy,” she added. “We are doing all we can to support those directly impacted, and I encourage you to talk to your manager, editor or HR representative should you need further information.”
“Tougher on deciding what we do not cover”
Turness stressed Davie’s ‘fewer, bigger, better’ strategy and said that, going forwards, the news team will “be tougher on deciding what we do not cover and saying no to lower impact content.”
“The commissioning team will empower editors to make earlier decisions so we waste less resource,” she added. “We will also continue with existing initiatives to find new ways to tell stories and rely less on resource intensive TV packages.”
Part of the move will see the BBC extend what it terms its “follow the sun” strategy, which means increasing the number of digital roles outside the UK in placecs like Sydney while closing some roles at London HQ.
National Union of Journalists General Secretary Michelle Stanistreet called the cuts a “damaging assault on journalism and news at a time when the UK needs greater plurality and diversity of news, and trust in journalism is under attack at home and abroad.”
“Some of these decisions represent comparatively modest savings yet will disproportionately undermine the breadth and range of news content the BBC currently provides,” she added. Her broadcasting organizer Laura Davison said the union will “unpack the detail of the proposals” and “bring together NUJ reps to consider next steps alongside the scale and impact of these damaging plans.”