With the BBC celebrating its centenary this year, the world’s oldest and most respected public service broadcaster should be in a celebratory mood, but it doesn’t feel like it, especially to its staff. A matter of months after Nadine Dorries, the Culture Secretary, announced that the cost of the licence fee was to be frozen for the next two years, before rising with inflation, Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general, has announced another round of cuts, on top of an existing £1 billion of savings. While previous cuts have focused on everything but programming, this time the resultant changes to the BBC’s output are stark. BBC News and BBC World News are to merge their output. BBC Four, CBBC and Radio 4 Extra are to move online to BBC iPlayer in a few years’ time. One thousand more jobs are to be cut, after years of existing rounds of redundancy. Even BBC Radio 4 Long Wave is to be phased out, raising questions about the future of the much-loved Shipping Forecast.
Origen: CBBC shutdown: a «digital-first» BBC should worry us all – New Statesman