BBC News, the broadcast news arm of publicly funded UK broadcaster BBC, announced yesterday that it will close 450 jobs as part of a massive savings drive that expects the department to save £80 million (US$104 million) by this year. The cuts, which will target mainly the broadcast radio and television services, are meant to be in line with BBC’s move away from traditional broadcasting and towards digital, according to BBC News Director Fran Unsworth.

“The BBC has to face up to the changing way audiences are using us,” Unsworth said during the Wednesday announcement. “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.”

With a staff of 6,000, including 1,700 outside the UK, BBC News is the world’s largest broadcast news organization and will most likely remain so even after the cuts. It has been able to maintain its size and the range of its programmes primarily because it is simultaneously taxpayer-funded and a Royal Charter organization, meaning that it is operationally independent of the government. However, political pressures in recent years have affected the licence fee that makes up the largest part of BBC revenue, forcing the organization to take a £800 million (US$1.04 billion) cut across all its departments.

Journalists’ unions in the UK have taken issue with not only the job cuts but the entire reduction of the BBC’s budget, calling the move both damaging and risky. Michelle Stanistreet, the general secretary of the National Union of Journalists, said the cuts were “part of an existential threat to the BBC”, and Bectu, the media and entertainment union, blamed the cuts on government policy rather than poor management.

Image credit- BBC