[interestednovice]

Unusually for this time of night, they've gone back to London for further coverage. Doesn't seem that we'll be seeing Singapore tonight.

We didn’t!

Sumi continued for just over an extra hour from Washington, until shortly after midnight BST, then we got an hour with Rajini from London (a good presenter for this given her previous experience working in the Washington bureau for several years) which presumably gave everyone in Washington a short break. After that, we returned to Washington an hour earlier than usual (1am BST) to Carl Nasman, who I am guessing started a shift which would have been 2-5am an hour early.

So the BBC did quite well in managing to stretch resources out of the presenters they already had, given that they couldn’t have known in advance when the verdict was going to appear. All three worked one extra hour each to cover for Singapore’s missing three hours.

Presumably the decision to axe Newsday was made quite early on, as they must have asked Rajini to stay after The Context.

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My only issue with it is the fact that only 11 years ago £1bn was spent on NBH to bring all bbc news together under one roof. The huge price tag was justified by the bbc that bring all of the different parts of bbc news together would save money, there would be more collaboration. Whilst never announced publicly, it’s safe to assume studio B wasn’t cheap. But that’s only being used for 2’hours a day. What can be achieved in Salford that couldn’t in London?

This is my biggest issue with recent moves at BBC News (and not just Salford, either).

It’s especially galling at a time of cuts now that money is, however you look at it, being wasted because of the fact that the BBC keeps changing its priorities. That makes no sense, and although it can and does happen in all organisations it seems to be almost constant at the BBC.

NBH cost an absolute fortune and was completed very late, yet almost as soon as it opened we saw decisions being made which watered down the justification of “invest now in a high quality building to bring all of BBC News together, and have greater efficiency and collaboration”. The first example was Breakfast, which could easily have come from Studio B in a setup not dissimilar to Victoria Derbyshire, Newsnight or Impact. Yet a last minute decision was made that they would share a studio with North West Tonight.

Now we see a huge upgrade for Studio B (which had been, for a time, mothballed - when the BBC still had two separate news channels; so the idea that Studio B was not strictly required to keep BBC output on air was established). Shortly after, one of the daily programmes that uses the studio is off to Salford. So did we really need a new Studio just for the Six, Ten & LK on Sunday?

Breakfast finally gets a proper studio, over a decade after sharing a regional-standard set, and it looks good - but do we really need a top-notch Salford studio and Studio B in London? A lot of this spreading things around the country creates duplication of resources.

I’m not convinced the cost can be justified.