Newsnight to become 30-minute programme as part of BBC cost cuts

Newsnight is to become a 30-minute “interview, debate and discussion show” as part of the BBC’s wider plans to make £500m of savings, the corporation has said.

Deborah Turness, the BBC’s chief executive of news and current affairs, confirmed a shake-up of the organisation on Wednesday.

An extended hour-long edition of BBC News at One will be relocated to Salford, making it the only daily BBC national news bulletin to be broadcast outside London. BBC Breakfast, also broadcast from Salford, will be extended by 15 minutes, she said.

The corporation expects the changes to save £7.5m as part of its plan to cut spending by £500m.

More than half of Newsnight’s 60 jobs will be lost. The corporation said the programme would become a 30-minute discussion programme showcasing “the best of the BBC’s talent and news-making interviews to make sense of the day’s news”.

As part of the BBC’s plan to cut 1,000 hours of content, the Our World documentary strand on the News channel – which bills itself as “BBC journalism at its best, with programmes that expose and evaluate global topics” – will be axed, and BBC Two will make nine fewer hours of single documentaries each year.

Panorama will continue as the flagship current affairs brand on BBC One, with no change in the number of hours, while a new BBC News Investigations unit will be created and BBC Verify will get a boost.

Turness said: “Like many businesses, we are in a tough financial climate and as our audiences shift rapidly from TV to online news consumption, we need to make choices about where we allocate our resources. While TV and radio remain crucial to BBC News, we must invest in our digital platforms to ensure they are also the home of our very best journalism, and today’s package of measures will accelerate this transformation.”

In a blogpost, Turness addressed the decision to cut Newsnight to 30 minutes, praising its impact since its debut on 30 January 1980. “We’ll all have our own memories of Newsnight – from Jeremy Paxman famously repeating the same question to Michael Howard to the Prince Andrew interview,” she wrote.

But she added that the BBC had streamlined editorial teams to avoid duplication. “It simply no longer makes sense to keep a bespoke reporting team dedicated to a single news programme with a small and declining audience, however good that programme is,” she wrote.

“There will be people – both inside and outside the BBC – who’ll worry this change means less investigative journalism across BBC News. That Newsnight’s particular type of gritty, independent, dogged reporting will disappear, leaving the BBC poorer for it.” But she said that would not be the case, pointing to investigations including the exposure of workers’ claims of a toxic culture at McDonald’s and the undercover filming exposing abuse at a mental health hospital as “proof we have the skills, talent and commitment across the organisation and we are delivering”.

The BBC said it would restructure the BBC News story teams in the UK and reduce the amount of TV packaging in an effort to become “digital first and to “focus on digital storytelling and live coverage”.

Roles in the news department would be lost but there would be new specialist roles for journalists, with open-source intelligence and policy analysis expertise within an expanded BBC Verify.

Other new roles include a UK editor based in Salford, a royal editor, and roles covering artificial intelligence, financial and political investigations, employment and housing – which the BBC said “have been designed to focus on areas which are of particular interest to today’s audiences”.