[Stockland Hillman]

Good to have a more up-to-date figure - a 50% real budget cut in 15 years is certainly something of an achievement for a similar level of functionality, even if certain production costs have fallen.

In terms of News struggling with inflation, I'm just going on the fact that both BBC News channels spent the last decade repeatedly attempting to cut costs - including significant staffing cuts, programming reductions, etc. - and ended up with little real savings (indeed, the BBC News channel's 2022/23 budget was higher in real terms than a decade earlier). Going by few publicly available figures (which are likely less reliable), Sky News also seem to have found it difficult to substantively reduce costs. Though, given the different cost structures involved in news channels, perhaps that's just particular to them - they are notoriously financial black holes, while bulletin news is much easier to do cheaply. It's just very hard to find comparable data for other BBC News programming as they rework the way data is published every few years.

My understanding is the STV data is for PSB news,  so excludes Scotland Tonight and online.  The analysts are usually very accurate and trusted, but you understand I can't share specifics.

Public data has the entirety of ITV Network and regional news and current affairs (exc Scotland) as costing £120m in 2019

You can see that £8-13m on Newsnight for 300k viewers does raise questions.

Should point out that there is some debate about the ITV spend, as other analysts have suggested its included platform and tech costs that would exist anyway for ITVs regional ad sales