Business as usual – ministers in their departments doing their day jobs will soon bring us back to the last throes of charter renewal – and that vexed question of whether the BBC can be independent, editorially independent, with so many government appointees on its top board. To which one answer, at least, will be who’s left down below in the corporation’s executive board, getting things done.
And we know what’s cooking there. Anne Bulford, the finance director Tony Hall brought with him from the Royal Opera House, has just been installed as deputy director general while (in the name of efficiency and cutting management salaries) five sitting execs have lost their seats in the sun. But every reshuffle tells its story. What’s gone here is any majority of programme-makers on the executive. The managers are masters now, especially because Bulford sits in pole position for selection as Hall’s successor.
More significantly – in a supposed era of devolution and many blossoms blooming – the executive cuts are mostly achieved by wrapping four members (Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and Salford) into one, yet un-named, director of nations and regions.
So much for national and regional powerhouses. So much for letting creativity bloom. The world still revolves around W1. Which must mean a few constipated discussions on the new supreme board as HMG’s own selected directors for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland shower problems on the man or woman with no name.
Now you see it, now … welcome to pop-up papers
Here today (that’s the New European newspaper, on sale this weekend in London, Liverpool and Manchester at £2 a throw). And gone tomorrow? Quite possibly, says Matt Kelly, launch editor at Archant, the group with the fast idea, conceived only 13 days ago and executed 11 days later. “We have no intention of publishing it for more than a month. We’re calling this ‘pop-up publishing’ – an instant response to a market opportunity that will come and go just as the zeitgeist comes and goes.”
It’s a new mindset for newspapers, he claims. “You don’t have to burden yourself with a 40-year projection of success. If you launch with the right mentality and cost base, pop-up publishing is a real viable model for print. I think this is new, and obviously a contrast to other more traditionally constructed newspaper launches of recent times where people have had their fingers burned badly.”
So much for the New Dawn school of instant sunsets? Give Kelly credit for trying something fresh and maybe one day inspirational. And don’t forget to put your copies of the New Boris in the bin as you leave. Here comes the New Theresa (or possibly the New Andrea).
In the steps of Anthony Howard
Doom and gloom in a dying profession? Ask Patrick Maguire, a 20-year-old graduate from University College, London, who’s just won the £25,000 Anthony Howard award to help make young journalists find their way. He is the fourth winner: the first three all have jobs now (on the Times and the Indy). All praise to his winning draft feature on what happens to constituencies whose MPs are shunned by their parties. All praise to Michael Heseltine’s Haymarket group, which funds the prize. And warm thoughts remembered for Tony Howard: deputy editor at the Observer, editor of the New Statesman and obituaries editor of the Times. Tony loved change and opportunity. He’d have made Patrick a worthy winner.