05-11-2023, 10:05 AM
(05-11-2023, 01:25 AM)Stockland Hillman Wrote: You can see that £8-13m on Newsnight for 300k viewers does raise questions.At £8m, that is around 15-16p per viewer hour, which is higher than BBC Two as a whole at 9p and more than twice as high as the BBC News channel at 7p, so it is, of course, arguably underperforming cost wise. But I think that's still within a justifiable level owing to both its unique nature and PSB value - it is the BBC's only 'broadsheet'-level news and current affairs TV programme left, as well as being the only BBC TV programme that really deals in things like policy analysis. There are still, of course, a few programmes of this ilk on Radio, but I'd argue it's important to have at least one outlet of that type on both mediums.
I don't think it necessarily has to stay wholly as it is - maybe move it to half-an-hour earlier in the evening, with a focus solely on UK news (perhaps giving the BBC's long-form world affairs reporting, i.e., Our World, a network outing to compensate) - but I think that the unique things it does are important to keep somewhere and more important than keeping something newsy in the timeslot - which is why I'd rather they axed it outright and reformatted the Ten than turned Newsnight into another talking shop.