How to fix Newsnight

A Newsnight review, of sorts.

To commemorate today’s Newsnight relaunch, this is an unlocked version of a post from earlier this year. To get more politics, policy, tech and media takes direct to your inbox. Subscribe now (for free!)

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I’ll always have a soft spot for Newsnight.

When I was first getting into politics as a teenager, it was tuning into BBC Two at 10:30pm every evening that really made me feel like I was becoming a sophisticated consumer of political information.

And much like Doctor Who fans have ‘their’ Doctor¹, ‘my’ Newsnight era was the brief post-9/11, George Entwhistle-edited era. This was when Jeremy Vine presented the programme – though Vine’s most memorable moment back then wasn’t actually on Newsnight, but on Children in Need².

Anyway, I mention this not just as an excuse to embed the above video, but because after you fast-forward through the Ian Katz era, you reach today, where Newsnight is sadly in a much more difficult place.

Over the last decade or so, the show has fallen from around a million viewers every night (1.1m watched Jeremy Paxman’s last show in 2014), to around 300,000 today³.

Then at the end of last year, the BBC leant into the death spiral, and took a knife to the programme, slashing its annual budget from £8m to £3m, and cutting the production team from 57 to 23 people.

As a result, the show is getting reformatted against its will, with its runtime falling to just 30 minutes. Worse still, investigative reporting has been abandoned, in favour of making it a pure interview and debate show. The first edition in this new format is reportedly due to launch in the not too distant future.

And in my view this is a pretty sad state of affairs. Not just because of the loss of arguably the most important element of the show, but also on a more sentimental level, because it would be shame to see Newsnight slide towards irrelevance.

However, instead of simply feeling miserable about it, I have come up with a plan for how the programme can make the best of a bad situation. So following in the footsteps of my pieces on how to fix the New Statesman, and how to fix local news – here’s how to fix Newsnight.

Making debate work

Let’s assume that we’re still living a world where budgets have been cut, so rebuilding the Newsnight that existed before is a non-starter. This gives us two options: Making the “interview and debate” format work – or doing something more radical.

Let’s think about the first option.

The main challenge for any discussion format is that there is already too much discussion.

When Newsnight first began in 1980, it was one of the few places to see political and media figures talking and arguing about the news in broadcast form – but 44 years on we live in a world of not just news channels, but debate channels, like TalkTV and LBC, which pump out talking head commentary pretty much 24/7⁴.

And of course, if you want something slightly higher brow, like we can imagine the new Newsnight might try to do, today there is a crowded marketplace of upscale podcasts where people talk about the news. If you pick any two men at random on the street, then it’s statistically probable that they have a podcast together. Hell, even I’ve got one.

My point then is that the world is already too noisy. So if the new Newsnight is just another time-slot when we can see Owen Jones and Andrew Pierce shouting at each other then it will add approximately zero value to the world.

So if a discussion-focused Newsnight wants to stand out, I think the BBC needs to do three crucial things.

1. Stop caring about viewing figures

Newsnight will never return to the level of viewership it used to have. That’s not a slam on the team who make the show – that’s just the reality of an attention economy where Kirsty Wark et al are competing for eyeballs with everyone from Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart, to Mr Beast, Netflix, Novara Media, Joe Rogan and James O’Malley.

The way the BBC should think about the programme then is as pure public service box-ticking – just like it does with Songs of Praise, boring but extremely worthy Storyville documentaries⁵ and whatever the employment support scheme is that keeps Paddy McGuinness in work.

And to be clear, narrowly focusing on public service is not a bad thing – in fact, it can be a very good thing. As once the purpose of Newsnight is clearly understood, it gives the editorial team a clear direction.

For example, freed of the need to worry about TV ratings, the metric of success for the programme can be defined as what I’ll call “added value” – is each edition of the show adding value to the news discourse?

In more practical terms, this “added value” metric demarcates that if the new Newsnight is just another place for two bloviating pundits to spend five minutes trading predictable attack lines, then it will be deemed a failure.

2. Embrace longform

Historically each edition of Newsnight has tended to cover a number of stories on the same night. Again, this might have made sense in the 1980s when it would have been the only news programme on TV that late in the evening⁶.

But viewers today don’t need a digest or a round-up. They can get that on their phones. The added value of, say. three ten minute segments on three stories of the day is going to be negligible.

So instead, I would focus each edition on just one story, and dedicate the full thirty minutes to it. The goal for the production team should be to curate an interview or a discussion that goes in-depth, and really digs and finds new angles on the story of the day – to move it on, or to enrich the discourse by slathering a weighty layer of expertise on top of it.

However, this is easier said than done. With a need to produce such a show everyday, the team would struggle to find a slam-dunk newsworthy guest every time. But here the producers can embrace a little variety.

Some nights, the presenter could of course interrogate a government minister on whatever the issue of the day is.

The BBC could use its reputation and connections to lean hard on the government and opposition, to create a sense of obligation that, say, on the day of the Budget, the Chancellor is subjected to a 30 minute sit-down – much like how they usually appear on the Today programme the morning after. And so on.

But what about on trickier news days where there isn’t a newsworthy figure to interrogate? Here, the show should find well-credentialed experts or even have an in-studio debate – but make it a longer one that can shy away from the rote talking points.

And I don’t think they should even be afraid to interview one of the BBC’s many expert in-house journalists at length too, even if there’s a risk it may appear a little incestuous.

For example, if something happens in Moscow, say, they should just get Steve Rosenberg on the line to talk to for 28 uninterrupted minutes⁷. Again, that would definitely add more value than a quick, 5-minute two-way followed by turning to hear what Quentin Letts and Ash Sarkar think about it.

3. Affirm editorial independence

The Newsnight headcount reduction is far from the first round of cuts experienced by BBC News in recent years, as budgets have tightened.

Just before the pandemic in 2020 there was another round of cuts – but perhaps more importantly, there was also a significant restructure made to BBC News operations, making the organisation more “story led”.

In effect, what this meant was that whereas previously programmes had their own editorial teams who pursued their own stories under their own direction, the new way of working is to organise teams who work on different stories, who then output their work across multiple different programmes.

There is a sound logic to this. Imagine there’s some important investigative journalism that uncovers a scandal (say, the lack of freely available UK address data).

Instead of coverage simply appearing on Newsnight, the thinking is that the BBC can instead make the most of the scoop by dropping it into coverage throughout the day. The story can be teed up on BBC Breakfast (my favourite show), the Today programme, and the BBC News website, and then dipping in again on the 1pm and 6pm TV news, as well as on Radio 4’s PM. Then later in the evening, perhaps there could be a Panorama special at 8pm, and then story coverage can be closed out with a discussion on Newsnight.

From a BBC management perspective, it is probably sensible. Why have one bite of the apple, when you can eat the whole thing?

However, I think if the BBC really wants to make the most of a discussion-focused Newsnight, it needs to maintain the show’s editorial independence. Part of this is as a hedge against BBC News – the most powerful news organisation in the country by some distance – developing a monoculture.

But it will also help with the driving ethos of this imagined new Newsnight – it’s more likely the show will add value if it approaches stories from a different perspective or with a different set of incentives to the rest of BBC News.

A couple of examples of this were made clear recently by Stephen Bush in the FT, who points out that Newsnight’s investigations into the Tavistock gender clinic and Kids’ Company were only possible because the editor fought “tooth and nail” to get the stories on the air, in the face of resistance from the wider BBC. Both stories unearthed extremely high profile scandals, and led to policy changes being made.

So if a new Newsnight really wants to add value to stories, it needs a strong editor with a mandate to think and act independently. As even if they’re not turning out investigative stories, the freedom to choose their own framing and agenda will add some much needed plurality – and will be more likely to turn out new information, than if the programme was following the same script as the rest of BBC News’s output.

A more radical Newsnight

Added together, I think these three elements would make the best of what is obviously a shitty situation. Newsnight would remain a shadow of its former self – but at least it would be meeting public service obligations, while optimising its output to actually add value to the world.

However, the truth is that even this reinvention of Newsnight does not really go far enough. I think if the BBC really wanted to make the most of the programme, they would do something much more radical.

When the changes to Newsnight were announced, BBC News CEO Deborah Turness said in a press release that “Audiences have told us how much they value Newsnight as an iconic BBC debate and discussion programme, and we’ve listened to what they’ve said – we’ve made the decision to keep the programme on air five days a week, despite the financial challenges we face.”

This is probably true. I’m sure the existing audience who still do regularly watch the programme value it – but in a happy coincidence for them, what BBC management has chosen to do is also taking the path of least resistance.

With a slashed budget, there’s essentially a binary choice: Cut the investigative, in-depth reporting, or cut the time spent crewing and producing a live, in-studio news programme at 10:30pm, five nights a week.

So it is easy to imagine why the option to keep the broadcast was taken.

If a deeply reported 15 minute package uncovering a scandal doesn’t make it to air, no one is going to miss it as by definition we don’t know the details of a scandal or how important it is until someone uncovers it.

And if there is no scoop, it can easily be replaced by 15 minutes of studio discussion where Miriam Cates and Richard Burgon slowly sap the viewer of the will to live.

By contrast however, if the studio time is cut, then there’s a blank screen on BBC Two and a hole that needs filling. So to avoid the highly visible institutional headache, it’s easier to lose the actual journalism.

But this isn’t good for the long term – for Newsnight, for the future of the BBC, and for really, meaningfully, adding value to the discourse.

So here’s what they should actually do instead.

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The Hbomberguyification of news

If you’re as hopelessly online as I am, you might have seen this video already. Don’t worry if you haven’t – you don’t need to watch it. Partially because it’s three hours and 47 minutes long.

Posted a month ago, it’s a pretty impressive work of journalism⁸ by YouTuber Harry Brewis, who is better known as “Hbomberguy”. And since it was posted it has had fifteen million views.

The story he is uncovering isn’t really important in the grand scheme of things. Basically the crux of it is that a bunch of popular YouTube ‘documentary’ channels have been plagiarising material from books and articles written elsewhere. And the main villain of the piece is a guy who makes videos about LGBT themes in Disney cartoons.

And even though I do not care about this story in its own terms, I still watched the entire damn thing – because it is told in a compelling way by a charismatic presenter, who was rigorous in his research and delivered the goods to make the long runtime worthwhile.

And as mad as it might sound, I think this should be the touchstone for a radically rebooted Newsnight.

Because if I were the BBC, I’d do the dramatic thing and dump the nightly BBC Two broadcast – crucially freeing up money and production time to instead work on the much more important investigative stuff.

I think this would be more in line with the BBC’s strengths. Because the national broadcaster’s competitive advantage isn’t distribution. It doesn’t matter in 2024 that it has TV channels it can broadcast on, or that it has TV studios it can broadcast from – you only have to look at some of the more professional YouTubers and Twitch streamers to see how trivial these capabilities actually are now.

Where the BBC does have competitive advantage, as I have written before, is that audiences trust it. The best thing the BBC can do is leverage this trust, by empowering its journalists to report stories that matter.

So what I’d do with Newsnight is take the team of reporters and producers who are left on the show, and say to them: Newsnight is now a social media channel. There is no studio. There is no regularly scheduled broadcast. Use the assets the BBC can provide – money, time, brand and connections – to go out and investigate stories that add value. And then tell those stories digitally, whenever the time is right to tell it, using whatever format works best.

I think this is where Newsnight can learn from Hbomberguy. He’s managed to make millions of people care about some obscure YouTuber beef. Now imagine if journalists used a format like this to tell important stories about something that actually matters.

Why not produce a 3 hour video on tax policy in a similar format? Or how about a deep dive into corruption in the Namibian election? It shouldn’t be impossible to tell us about ‘boring’ things in this more engaging, less staid, format – without the need for an expensive studio, live broadcast and other TV tropes from an earlier broadcasting era.

Simply put, spending these more limited resources on the impactful stuff – the investigative journalism – is simply a better way to add value given the BBC’s strategic position in the modern media eco-system.

And as for what goes on BBC Two at 10:30pm? Nobody cares – they could broadcast repeats of Dad’s Army for all that this question matters in 2024.

The real world

So now you know my pitch.

Take the talents of the Newsnight team and get ahead of the disruptive shift to digital formats, by putting them to work creating a digital-first product.

Make them tell stories that actually matter – but use the grammar of social media when making content. Post stories directly to social media, to build an audience and make an impact there.

And make the best of a bad situation and take the more radical path – because traditional TV audiences are not getting any younger⁹.

I make it all sound so simple.

However, in the real world, reshaping Newsnight into something for the 21st century is a much tougher challenge. If a brave executive tried to do it, there would be plenty of people threatening to overrule them¹⁰.

Getting away from caring about broadcast slots, and persuading the management hierarchy to move away from 50-minute programmes as the measure of a unit of content would be a profound cultural shift for the BBC.

Similarly, if the BBC did take the more radical option, it would obviously be framed as the show being dismantled, and invite negative headlines and protests from politicians and older viewers. Perhaps the Daily Mail would manage to coax 73 year old Jeremy Paxman into criticising the changes for being too woke?

And if they did go the more radical route, there would be constant fear that the team was under threat – just because closing one team producing sporadic videos will be easier than taking another politically tricky knife to the corporation’s linear programming, even if the former is better for the long term health of the BBC than the latter.

But on a more profound level, I don’t think the ‘radical’ approach is that, well, radical.

I’m just saying a true thing about how all news content will be consumed sooner or later. Institutions like the BBC that don’t reshape their output to match this reality will become irrelevant if they don’t change. News consumption in 2039 is going to look a hell of a lot more like Hbomberguy than what goes out on BBC Two at 10:30pm today.

So why not add value to the BBC, by not taking the path of least resistance, and using Newsnight to prepare for the future?

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1. Though I’m not sure Newsnight fans hate the show with quite the same passion that Whovians hate Doctor Who.

2. My headcanon is this incident explains why Peter Sissons, who was clearly reluctant to participate, took a turn and railed against ‘political correctness’ after he retired.

3. This is dredging up a memory from 20 years ago but if I recall it used to get around 2m viewers every night during the Entwhistle era – and presumably it got even more before the dawn of satellite and cable.

4. Even Channel 5 has spent the last few years quietly expanding out its daytime programming from Jeremy Vine’s programme, with each hour branded differently for different hosts – exactly like a talk radio station. And the reason they do it is for the same reason Newsnight is going in this direction: It’s cheap.

5. I know you like boring Storyville documentaries but let’s be real: If you’re the sort of weirdo who pays to read my extremely niche Substack posts about media inside-baseball, then you are not a typical TV viewer.

6. In fact, some nights the programme so closely resembled the 10pm news on BBC One that the phrase “Fat Ten” was used by the production team to describe the phenomenon.

7. Another thing traditional TV people will have to get over is that though a long interview may be visually ‘boring’, realistically most people watching will be second-screening while scrolling tweets or playing a game on their phone anyway. Hell, put out the show as a podcast too.

8. He does call himself a “communist” though, in the sort of eye-rolling way that a lot of young people do.

9. Hell, digital-native millennials like myself are now in our 30s and 40s and many (but not enough) of us have mortgages. We’re boring adults now – and we would be receptive to Newsnight-calibre content. But are we turning to linear TV at 10:30pm? Of course not – because my partner is too busy watching hour long videos of women sewing dresses on YouTube while I sit on the sofa with my iPad, arguing about politics on the internet.

10. See what I did there?