Members of the National Union of Journalists have reacted angrily to the proposed cuts to the BBC World Service and the corporation’s online operation.
This afternoon’s meeting of the London BBC branch of the NUJ unanimously passed a motion condemning the scale of the cuts.
The motion said:
“This meeting deplores the BBC’s job and programme cuts in Online and the World Service.
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“Not only do they threaten many staff with redundancy they will do immense damage to parts of the BBC’s output.
“We urge the NUJ to campaign vigorously against the BBC’s plans and to uphold the union’s long standing opposition to compulsory redundancies, up to and including industrial action”.
The BBC plans to cut over a quarter of the BBC World Service staff in order to save £46m a year. BBC Global News Director Peter Horracks said yesterday that the cuts were likely to result in the loss of 30m from the World Service audience.
The annoucement about cuts to the World Service came just days after the BBC confirmed that 360 staff jobs would go as part of cuts to its annual online budget of around £34m.
The 25 per cent cut to the annual online budget of £137m will see the number of websites the BBC provides fall from around 400 to around 200.
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