It looks like the breakup of the old BBC Radio newsroom with the announcement that the corporation's TV, radio and online newsgathering operations are to be merged. Furthermore, 25 journalists are be moved out of the radio newsroom to Radio Five Live and will presumably depart London for Manchester in a couple of years, writes Tim Maby.
This is the final stage in a process that began with then director general John Birt trying to homogenise BBC News at the beginning of the 90s.
Veterans like me think that the decay in the quality of BBC radio journalism really set in when radio and TV news were brought together in the same building ten years ago in Television Centre in Shepherd's Bush, when radio had to leave Broadcasting House near Oxford Circus.
The bosses accused us of simply bewailing the loss of lunchtime retail therapy. But reporters found they were less able to put late interviews in decent quality on The World at One and PM. Presenters like Nick Clarke less frequently conducted their interviews face to face, which lost a certain frisson. Remember Neil Kinnock stomping out of the studio because he didn't like being accused of failing his party?
Joining the radio newsroom in the early 70s, the atmosphere was intimidating, similar to my temporary job in Whitehall. Editors stalked the room, almost like Oxbridge dons in flowing black gowns, hunting out split infinitives. For weeks as a sub-editor you were allowed to write little more than the weather and you were expected to sit at the far end of the desk waiting in silence.
There was one charming overnight editor, who would issue his stories to the team soon after midnight and then rewrite the whole of the morning news himself. One night we called his bluff. As we were a crew of amateur musicians, we all then went down to have a 2am jam session in the BBC concert hall. With whisky of course.
It was an age of literary style though. There would be one star writer, known for their precision as well as colour, just to write the top minute and a half introduction to the main story on the Radio 4 six o'clock news.
You would hear assistant editors, at three minutes to broadcast time, discussing with war correspondents whether they should move a clause to a different part of the sentence in their report.
There was also farce in this nit-picking sang-froid: I heard a foreign duty editor saying to a man on the Israeli front line: "We've had rather enough sounds of firing going away from you. Can you get some coming towards you as soon as possible."
Then came popular journalism, for Radio 1 and Radio 2. At first it was just a job for juniors and they would leave only two of us to write a two minute summary every half hour. The author of the film The Ploughman's Lunch came to watch us for a month, because a character was supposed to work there and he was pleasantly amazed at how people holding a handful of agency stories could dictate crisp summarisations of the breaking news straight to the copy-taker.
The team adapted quickly to more direct language and enjoyed it. "Clear and colloquial" became the aim. Then came different kinds of news programmes and the blokeish, tabloid styles of Newsbeat and Five Live. There were and are constant clashes between precisionist subeditors and producers with less training and strong opinions.
Once television got the whip hand, my old colleagues in radio news rather lost heart. Mistakes, either grammatical or factual, began to appear more often, as there was less supervision of scripts before broadcast.
Television producers had long had to live with this, since many of their late reports arrive in the building for broadcast either instantly or even live.
However, now BBC news executive Peter Horrocks seems to think that the people he can afford to axe are those very assistant editors whose job it was to provide quality control.
Tim Maby worked in BBC radio and TV news for 35 years as a reporter and producer. He is now editor of Guardian Unlimited's podcasts.
