British Broadcasting Cuts
The new director of the BBC decided to treat the broadcaster like a business, so the first thing he did was to cuts jobs. Australian Broadcasting reports that : BBC staff strike over job cuts.
There’s a report on the BBC site, but given that instead of listening to the news on the BBC World Service, I’m currently hearing “world music” being played by an unfamiliar female voice who needs a bit more time in the minors before making to the World Service, I wouldn’t bet that the website will be stable today.
Apparently there will a series of 24-hour strikes in the near future, by the employees of the BBC protesting the cut of approximately 3,700 jobs.
The “plan” would appear to be replacing people with “new technology” to make the service “more efficient and competitive”. There’s no clear statement as to who exactly is competing with the BBC, as the other media outlets in the UK are commercial and dependent on advertising revenue.
It’s not clear exactly what changes in technology are going to be purchased with the savings, or how they are going to get the information to put on this new technology.
To the best of my knowledge HDTV is the only major recent change in broadcast technology and that’s been in hand for some time. The whole thing sounds like a rote repetition from some business school class project. An almost 15% cut in staff upon taking over a new job is not a reasonable thing to do. You really should spend some time investigating an organization before you start stressing it like this.
