with a funding gap of £500 million. the result has been a series of budget cuts, the latest of which hit the news division on wednesday. although more money is being put into digitaljournalism and some broadcast services are being expanded — the news at one doubling in length to an hour, for instance — elsewhere, savings are being made. newsnight is losing half its staff, shortening its duration, and instead of the current magazine format with filmed reports and investigations, will become an interview, debate and discussion show. gabriel gatehouse, a former correspondent on the programme, had this response. but viewer david wright pointed out. while terry pearson questioned the thinking behind this week's changes. well, we'll be discussing the logic behind wednesday's announcement in a moment. but first, if this is the end of newsnight as we know it, what exactly is being lost without any dedicated correspondents — and i should say, i was one of them in the 1990s — or a budget forfilming outside the studio? will we be seeing any more location reports like those we've watched over the programme's 15—year history? good evening, and welcome at last to newsnight. for all our hundreds of members of the media who swarm around the prime minister, follow her every move, and the idea from the conservatives point of view is to get the best possible exposure on the tv news that evening. we seem to have been the first i westerners here and felt the blast of much pent up bitterness. she said, "they killed my brother. my house is gone. it's everything. we don't want saddam doing everything". mr duncan smith, are you frightened of michael portillo? are you frightened of mr portillo? thank you. aren't you taking this quiet man business a bit far? gkids was officially earmarked for closure last summer. it will be replaced initially by two regional hubs. newsnight has now learned there are concerns over several people appointed to a key role in training the new cohort of staff who will work in the regional hubs. well, the ceo of bbc news, deborah turness, has written a blog post about changes proposed to newsnight and bbc news as a whole. you can find that online, but here's a taste of it. well, we'll be speaking about all of this next week with the deputy ceo of bbc news, jonathan monroe, but for now, with me here in the studio is michael crick, whom we saw there in his days as a reporter on newsnight, where he worked for almost 20 years. and joining us from cambridge is roger mosey, a former head of television news and editorial director here at the bbc. thank you both for coming on newswatch. rogerfirst, the broadcast industry has been talking for a while about whether newsnight might be seen as obsolete in the current media world and therefore a fair choice for the bbc�*s big budget cuts, do you agree? it's absolutely true that audiences are changing and behaviours are changing and programmes come and go. but i'm still very sad about this because newsnight, in its day, was a fantastic programme and still has many strengths. and i think what i regret particularly is the loss of some independent commissioning of a different editorial voice within the bbc news mix, and a fantastic team of reporters who do add to the overall lustre of bbc news but are not necessarily centrally controlled, which is what's going to happen in the future. michael, the audience figures are down to about 300,000, which is a long way off the million or so in the kind of glory days when you worked there. can you see the logic for dropping the axe where they have? i can see the logic for it, but i mean, if i was a dodgy politician or a crooked businessman or a lazy civil servant, i'd be resting a little bit easier in my bed at night knowing that newsnight's no longer there. i mean, newsnight's done some cracking investigative stuff over the years, and particularly, actually, in the last year or two with david grossman and sima kotecha and the films that they've been making. and i think that at the heart of this is the point that roger makes about centralisation. the bbc, because it accounts for about a third of broadcast output in this country. it depends how you measure it, really. but the bbc has to sort ofjustify that almost quasi—monopoly position and has done so over the years by internal competition and pluralism within the bbc. now, if you centralise all your investigative work, you lose a lot of the pluralism. and by that i mean that until now, if somebody's got a scandal they want the bbc to expose or look into, they might go to the today programme, they might go to newsnight. if one turns it down, which inevitably happens, they can try another one. under this new regime that's being proposed, it's more like, let's get a yes or no, and that's it. that's it in terms of getting that sort of thing exposed. so i think the pluralism of the bbc is something that needs to be maintained. roger, the bbc says it's not downgrading investigations, they're just being centralised. michael's implied that's pretty ominous. does it sound ominous to you? it does sound ominous because this country is now much more diverse and therefore needs, i think, a range of editorial voices and a range of powerful editors. and the way michael is right, is that when the today programme had its own team of reporters and newsnight and the world at one, it meant sometimes it was hard to justify in terms of efficiency, but it didn't make good programmes. and you had the today programme able to put resources into hunting down a story and sending a reporter, which they now can't do. they don't have any reporters. and newsnight was the last redoubt of a semi—independent organisation within the bbc able to do its own agenda. and that's now going in. i think roger's right there. i mean, if you get rid of these alternatives, it becomes much more monolithic in its output. and then people start saying, "well, hang on a moment. shouldn't you know the bbc's a monopoly? shouldn't we be worried about them in the same way that we've always been worried about the murdoch newspapers"? well, one of the other issues is, you know, the heated discussions and the interviews are what gets newsnight lots and lots of attention on social media. you know, the prince andrew interview, the victoria derbyshire grilling, those get praised so there's a logic to say the bbc is going to keep the stuff that makes newsnight really important and that's not going at all. that's just going to be the heart of the programme now. yeah, i mean, the problem that newsnight's had, though, over the years is that when you and i were there, you'd get cabinet ministers on virtually every night and they would come down to the green room afterwards and you'd learn a lot, you know, you get ken clarke there, douglas hurd, senior ministers, regularly. nowadays, it's very difficult for newsnight to get senior people like that. and they basically, i think they're saying to themselves, "look, we don't have to do newsnight. the audience isn't that big. "we've done a whole string of interviews throughout the day. by the time it gets to 1030pm, we're knackered, we're tired, we might make a mistake". and so the newsnight isn't getting the line ups in its discussions, i'm afraid, that it used to get. and, of course, other people are now basing themselves on studio discussion and talk tv and gb news. so there's a lot of competition for this, these studio discussions. roger, if not newsnight, where would you make the cuts then? well, i'd say it's an error at the moment to leave newsnight as, if you like, the ghost of christmas past. so it neither has its independent reporting nor actually enough time. i mean, 28 minutes to talk about the big issues of the day isn't quite long enough. but i think the key issue for me is not where you would cut elsewhere in news, but what you cut elsewhere in the bbc. and the bbc has recently, for instance, in its peak time entertainment schedule, brought back a hoary old format survivor, which is a global television format. it was run by itv and then ditched by itv in the uk. costs a lot of money. it's getting quite poor ratings and the bbc, i think, needs to look at where is the more important content it's producing. and i would say this as journalist, but it's news, not survivor. michael, what would you cut then? well, it's very difficult to know without having access to the figures, which i've never had. but i would agree with roger, really, that the preserving news and news related content is vital. i mean, we have a role really in a democracy, a liberal democracy, in holding people to account, no longer taboo, the menopause has finally become a hot topic, with what many women can go through hopefully becoming better understood. so i've had a bit of a rubbish day today with feeling quite anxious. i had quite a bad night's sleep last night. hey, so i'm just between cases today at work. - ijust had a quite - embarrassing hot flush. i'm struggling with the light. i'm struggling to see. so, it's 6am on sunday morning and i'm wide awake. i've been perimenopausal for the last... ..seven or so years. definitely one of the most challenging symptoms i've found over the last few years has been the brain fog. i'm trying not to be too, erm, too upset about it. maybe, though, the way that women's reproductive health plays out doesn't need to be inevitable. i've been to meet some scientists who are working on the idea of delaying menopause. at the buck institute for aging in california, neuroscientistjennifer garrison studies the connection between the brain and the ovaries. menopause is basically what happens when a woman's ovaries stop working. essentially, it leads to a whole host of really dramatic health consequences. so ovaries are producing notjust eggs for, for making babies, but also a whole host of really important hormones that are absolutely essential for overall health. when those beneficial hormones go away, what happens is a woman's risk of osteoporosis, heart disease, stroke, cognitive decline, all sorts of things — arthritis, depression — all of those risks go way up. if we don't address age at menopause or reproductive span in women, then, essentially, we're going to be making gender inequality worse and not better. and that's because female humans born today can expect to live on average about 100 years. and so what that means in practice is that, soon, women are going to be living more of their lives after menopause than before. well, i can see the problem, but can menopause be delayed? we hope so. there are very few animal species that actually go through menopause. so, what that means to me as a scientist is that it's probably not a biological imperative. there's no benefit to it that i can see. combine the latest scientific understanding of menopause and the often symptomatic years running up to it, the perimenopause, with big data and things get really interesting. at cambridge biomedical centre, genomicist stasa stankovic is trying to develop reliable menopause prediction tests. the access to these kind of data basically allow us to read the dna of over 200,000 women who are menopausal. we can basically analyse and understand what are

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