Bleak week at Channel 4
Channel 4 said yesterday that it will cut 150 jobs, reducing its 1,000 or so staff by some 15 per cent. Understandably, things were said to be “very bleak” at C4 yesterday.
The reason C4 is cutting jobs and hoping to save £50m this year in other ways is because its revenues are being hit by the downturn in advertising. C4 itself reckons the value of TV advertising will fall by 5 per cent this year. As a result it will cut its programming budget by £25m this year. According to C4’s annual report, it spent £624m on programming in 2007. The channel hasn’t said where the cuts will come in programming terms.
The BBC is also cutting jobs because it didn’t get as much money in its latest licence fee settlement as it had hoped. So the pain is being shared around the broadcast sector.
It’s hard to feel compassion for organisations whose budgets run into millions in the first place. The BBC and C4 operate on a large scale - although C4 is naturally about a 20th of the size of the BBC - and when times get tough, as they patently are economically, they should be seen to be making efficiencies.
It’s hard for those individuals who may be faced with redundancy. But it can be done voluntarily, there should be a payoff and you haven’t lived in the modern world until you’ve been made redundant at least twice. I have and can thoroughly recommend spending a redundancy payment on a Belfast sink unit.
September 30th, 2008 at 10:51 am
[...] has apparently said it’s going to cut 1,000 jobs. It probably felt left out, what with the BBC and Channel 4 laying off staff left, right and [...]