Vaunted British broadcaster BBC will cut 450 newsroom jobs and cover fewer stories as part of an effort to save £80 million ($1.4 million), the head of news, Fran Unsworth, announced Wednesday.
The journalists will be pooled in centralized teams, The Guardian reported, rather than work for specific programs, with an increased emphasis on digital content over television and radio.
“The BBC has to face up to the changing way audiences are using us,” said Unsworth in a BBC statement. “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.”
Currently BBC News employs about 6,000 people, the network said, 1,700 of them outside the U.K. In 2016 the corporation said it had to save £800 million and that £80 million of it would have to come from its news division. BBC News had managed to reach half that, the network said.
Included in the move are some cuts that have already been announced, such as the cancellation of “Victoria Derbyshire,” a weekday current-affairs show that specializes in award-winning original stories and exclusive interviews. That cut came to light last Wednesday.
Other cuts include a dozen jobs slashed at BBC’s “Newsnight,” which will also halve the number of in-depth films it makes and cut spending on investigative journalism, The Guardian reported.
The National Union of Journalists told The Guardian another dozen jobs will go at “5Live,” and a dozen more positions made redundant by the sharing of radio bulletins across the BBC.