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.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Odds and Ends of History to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.