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The red button is given a reprieve, but significant cuts are still incoming at BBC News

By | Published on Thursday 30 January 2020

BBC

The BBC has backtracked on plans to close down its text based red button services, for now at least. It’s a very last minute decision, given the broadcaster was set to start winding down those services this week.

When it announced last year that it would stop providing news, sport and travel updates via the red button, the BBC explained that usage of those services had slumped in recent years as more and more people accessed such content via their smartphones or tablets, rather than through their telly. The BBC, of course, offers various apps for those devices.

However, on Monday the National Federation Of The Blind delivered a petition to 10 Downing Street calling on the BBC to reverse its decision regarding the red button. It argued that the old fashion teletext-style updates were still “vital for visually impaired, deaf, disabled and older people, as well as many other people who want to find out information independently in an easy, convenient and accessible format, who are not online”.

BBC boss Tony Hall yesterday confirmed that protests from NFBUK and others had persuaded him that there should be another review before making a final decision on the red button.

In a letter to MP Damian Collins – the former Chair of Parliament’s culture select committee – Hall wrote: “People have expressed their concern that the closure of red button text services could negatively affect elderly people and people with disabilities. These are issues which I feel deserve to be explored in more depth … so we have decided to suspend its closure pending further work in that area”.

NFBUK said Hall’s decision was “fantastic news” and that it looked forward to working with him, Collins and the British Deaf Association “for a better resolution”.

The BBC has been under pressure to cut costs for some time, of course, and that pressure is only going to increase as the role and funding of the Corporation is hotly debated in political circles in the years ahead. The challenge for BBC bosses is that, while most people agree savings should be found, whenever they propose cutting any one specific service, there is outrage from one group or another who insists that the service set for the chop is exactly the kind of thing a licence fee funded public service broadcaster should be providing.

Elsewhere at BBC HQ yesterday, bosses also announced a radical overhaul of its entire news operation. Said bosses hope that that overhaul will help them meet an £80 million savings target without having to actually axe too many channels or programmes.

The main plan is to try to reorganise BBC News so that it is structured more around news stories than programmes and platforms, the aim being to reduce duplication, where multiple BBC journalists cover the same story, eg one for the ‘One O’Clock’, one for the News Channel, one for online and one for a local news programme. The Beeb’s digital outlets will also be given more prominence under the grand money-saving plan.

BBC news chief Fran Unsworth said: “The BBC has to face up to the changing way audiences are using us. We have to adapt and ensure we continue to be the world’s most trusted news organisation, but crucially, one which is also relevant for the people we are not currently reaching. We need to reshape BBC News for the next decade in a way which saves substantial amounts of money. We are spending too much of our resources on traditional linear broadcasting and not enough on digital”.

“Our duty as a publicly funded broadcaster is to inform, educate, and entertain every citizen”, she went on. “But there are many people in this country that we are not serving well enough. I believe that we have a vital role to play locally, nationally and internationally. In fact, we are fundamental to contributing to a healthy democracy in the UK and around the world. If we adapt we can continue to be the most important news organisation in the world”.

Many of the cost savings will come from redundancies. The big revamp will likely lead to about 450 job losses across the BBC’s news division.



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