BBC News at Ten competes with ITV News. The BBC has more resources, more reporters and more clout. So now it has given itself more time – 10 more minutes of national and local stories ending at 10.45pm. Good news for viewers? Absolutely, so long as the extra yarns aren’t flaccid vox pops and all the regional teams - attention East Midlands! - are pushed to try harder. But the main casualty of this expansion may not be Tom Bradby and Co. Watch the overlap with Newsnight and wonder whether, at root, BBC1 isn’t competing with BBC2 (the corporation’s only nightly programme of news analysis is under renewed threat a little down the line because of shrinking audiences). Is this public service provision with due drum rolls, or blinkered manoeuvring?
A bold BBC seeking really to put news first might do something different: move Newsnight to BBC1 so that it runs on for 45 minutes once the national and regional bulletins are over - a full hour-and-a-half of reporting and discussion stiched seamlessly together, a total package to match some more intensive European offerings, but such boldness is not an instinctive friend here in the vast wide-screen newsroom of limited ambition.
