[Worzel]

But that sort of thing is not unique to now.

Take when the News channel moved to N6 and shared with the national news from 2008. You'd end up with the 'BBC Ten O'clock News Hour' being half presented by the network presenter on BBC One and then the other half by the evening News channel presenter with the rather awkward half past pause, and... 'now with the rest of the Ten O'clock news hour here's Chris Eakin etc'. Why the network presenter couldn't stay on to finish the back half hour never made sense.

Then (up until recently) you'd have the silliness of a weekend network bulletin going out at 17:20, with a separate presenter coming in to read almost the same set of stories that the news channel presenter had just read out for all of 10 minutes. When the network bulletin started at 17:05 you were often treated to the same headline sequence done twice within 5 minutes, read by 2 different presenters! There was always opportunities to make cutbacks if needed right there, but it was never done.

The BBC do it with the One now where the network presenter stays on but why not for the Six and Ten? There's no real reason why the BBC One presenter can't stay on to finish off the back half hours at those times? You'd then end up squeezing out 3 full hours on UK-focussed news at relatively peak times.

The BBC never really learnt anything from how the ITV News Channel did things where the ITV network presenter would often stay on to back-fill the channel saying something like 'join me/us over the ITV News channel in a few minutes when we'll be talking about X, Y, and Z'.

I suspect it's all down to internal politics!

These are seriously valid points and I really expected the BBC to look more closely than they appeared to before going for the “nuclear option” of what is effectively a NC closure in favour of WN. There were, and continue to be, seemingly easy ways of producing additional output for little additional cost.

It must have also cut costs to have used the same presenter for the 6 and 10 bulletins, as they did for the pandemic, and it makes sense given that the two are largely similar broadcasts these days. Again, the 1 being a NC production clearly opens up opportunity for an extended coverage of some sort to be done on the cheap. Why not? The BBC just don’t appear to have addressed these ideas at all. At the very least, the Six and Ten presenter should stay on for the rest of the hour (as you rightly say). The One presenter already does this, so why not the 6 and 10? At least we would be spared the “guide dogs time” of 22:40 every night! It’s like the new CBeebies Bedtime hour, but for adults!

Also, I think other than Sir Trev, all of the main ITV News presenters appeared on the ITV News channel covering shifts, or back filling hours. 

Now, other than Huw Edwards presenting the 5, name which other 'network' faces would appear regularly on the News channel? Huw would present the 5 when he was rota'd to do the 10 - but yet when George, Sophie, Mishal and Fiona Bruce were down to do the 10, they never did the 5. Nothing against them, but it never seemed right and no explanation was ever given.

We hear the BBC need to make cutbacks and Tim Davie says about people getting 'value for money', there were really obvious areas of News channel/network (presenter) duplication which could've been addressed - especially when the output was coming from the same studio - long ago but weren't and now we're in an even worse situation.