News Network Benching Veteran Anchors Amid Big Overhaul

There are some big changes coming to the BBC this week, including the departure of some long-time news anchors and presenters. According to a report by Deadline, BBC News planned a cascade of “sweeping changes” starting on Monday, April 3, and continuing throughout the spring. The most concrete change will be the lineup of anchors, with five journalists taking new roles as “Chief Presenters.”

The BBC will now focus on its “Chief Presenters” Matthew Amroliwala, Yalda Hakim, Christian Fraser, Lucy Hockings and Maryam Moshiri. All five got the job in an audition process that left ten other applicants behind, including Ben Brown, Martine Croxall, Geeta Guru-Murthy, Shaun Ley and Annita McVeigh. Sources told Deadline that those ten were dropped off the “hosting rota,” but they may not necessarily be done for good. At the very least, they will not have any shifts in the month of April.

These changes are reportedly meant to counteract any negative impact of the BBC’s merger with its U.K. and World News stations. Executives fear that the merger will reduce the domestic output of news overall, diluting their audience and lowering ratings figures. The hope is to hold viewers’ attention with a “big bang” of new features.

“Somebody somewhere has realized that this isn’t going to work and a lot more separate U.K. output is going to be required,” one insider reportedly said. Another added: “If they do really lower the bar, you could end up effectively with two channels all over again.”

A third person complained that staffers are not being kept up to date on these changes or why they are being made, leading to fears in the newsroom. They said: “Presenters are being offloaded, they’re not going to have enough people to do the job. There’s a lot of unhappiness in the newsroom about how they have been treated.”

Regulators are concerned as well. The director of Ofcom, a British media regulator, wrote an open letter to the BBC last week saying: “The absence of important information has resulted in a lot of uncertainty for audiences who are not clear about what the changes will mean in practice for the services they use.”

The British TV industry operates much differently from that of the U.S., as it is technically a government-funded public utility. There’s no telling what changes will come out next. In the U.S., users can watch some BBC programs via BBC America.