BBC News and BBC World to merge

[DTV]

I know it seems like a hopeless cause right now, but a less BBC antagonistic Tory government, may make the merge moot, if a better funding arrangement is sought - and a compelling enough argument is made for keeping the two separate entities, with more sharing of content and resources.

Without getting too deep into the politics, the main direction of the Conservative leadership contest seems to be public sector cuts and culture wars - I doubt the landscape is going to get more favourable to the BBC over the coming weeks.

You have to wonder too how much running the actual channel itself costs compared to the cost of the news gathering, especially as the studios and galleries are in place and to the best of our knowledge we know at least one more will be upgraded in NBH and there will be no cut to transmission costs.

The problem with trying to work out the BBC News budget is the BBC doesn't list accounts by department, just by channel. The BBC News channel has a budget of roughly £60m, but I think that network programming, regional news, etc. comes from the BBC One/Two budget. Sky News' total budget is roughly £90m - that will include newsgathering, but obviously the BBC has a far larger newsgathering organisation. So I suspect that the News channel's budget includes some newsgathering, but not all. The actual operational costs of putting the channel on air (i.e. gallery teams, studio costs, presenters, transmission costs) is probably fairly small, a few million.

BBC World is funded partly by carriage fees in certain countries, but mainly by grants from the government.

I'm not aware that the latter is reducing, so the current debate is about spreading a lower relative level of licence fee (fixed in absolute amount as costs rise). The trade off isn't between BBC World and BBC News in the UK, but how to spend less from the licence fee in the UK in total. One way is to reduce the spend on the BBC News channel by using what is already produced for the overseas audience. Another is to maintain the spend on that channel, but reduce spend elsewhere in the UK.

BBC World News is not funded by government grants, that is the BBC World Service. BBC World News is a commercial enterprise, largely funded through advertising (which is dependent on viewership). I'm not entirely sure about your wider point about trade-offs - the trade-off fundamentally is between BBC World News and the BBC News channel because the two are being merged.