[interestednovice]

The ship has long, long sailed on that one - I hear the mood there is miserable, many of those who haven’t already got out want to and the fact Sally feels emboldened enough to (justifiably) publicly slag off the handling of this latest announcement tells you everything you need to know.

Oh I know the ship has sailed now, but why didn’t the BBC realise at the start that the way they were conducting this process was completely unacceptable? The story Joanna Gosling wrote in the paper about going into work on the train, seeing a headline which named her as an “at risk” presenter and then, on the same journey, getting a casual text from her boss asking her to “drop by” their office when she got in to work comes to mind. I mean, come on - this is no way for any employer, especially one as large as the BBC, to behave.

At this point there really isn’t any work in the channel for the remaining displaced presenters as even assuming that both Ben and Geeta are being used to cover days off it only leaves 13 slots per week for what may well be 6-8 reporter presenters (I would suspect that Ben Thompson, Sarah Campbell and Lucy Grey at the very least on top of those whose names have been leaked).
People like Frankie McCamley and Luxmy Gopal who are clearly ambitious in their careers are also likely to be more important to the BBC in the longer term than the off air presenters so the BBC need to be careful not to restrict the younger presenters opportunities to an extent that sees them looking for work elsewhere.
The remaining displaced presenters would be better served with being offered redundancy or being reallocated to other vacant roles within BBC News (for example to replace Alex Lovell in Bristol or to finally give some consistency to South tonight or to boost the BBC One team in order to remove the need for Maryam, Katya and Tina to be covering semi-regularly).

My assumption is more that presenter-reporters will be, primarily, reporters and only presenters probably occasionally on weekends (also possibly the “secondary presenter” on location sometimes).

What you seem to be advocating, deliberately prioritising the hiring of younger presenters and firing older presenters to “make room”, would be a shockingly ageist policy and, in this context, arguably illegal.

I also think that the idea that we’d suddenly see Martine presenting Points West, for example, is a pretty remote prospect.

why does it look totally different to every other BBC News set? I mean, they might be using the new logo, but that’s as on-brand as it gets.

I think it’s because Clickspring Design did the set and modelled it more on other American networks and a modular approach, rather than anything from NBH. I imagine they were deliberately given an open brief rather than instructions around a specific brand, it’s supposed to look different so it doesn’t have to be refreshed at the same time as London in the future.