rogerfirst, the broadcast industry has been talking for a while about whether newsnight might be seenin 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

rogerfirst, the broadcast industry has been talking for a while about whether newsnight might be seen 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 pluralis