Enterprising young BBC journo Stuart Pinfold has produced a nice map showing how impressively broad is the BBC’s network of international coverage. Correspondents, reporters and stringers show up on the map as little dots and triangles.

So what does it feel like to be a dot on the map:

Funny that my name is on the list of stringers. But I haven’t been a BBC stringer for nearly a year. The BBC does not have a stringer in Angola now. The country is ‘covered’ (up) by one of the bigger bureaux – just like a whole lot of other countries which don’t really matter unless another war breaks out or a drought leading to famine occurs or some other reportable disaster easily-enough digestible for the minds of BBC ‘news managers’.

I would like to see, not a map of bureaux, correspondents & stringers, but a corresponding map of how the BBC values those people. You see, one of the things the BBC does supremely well is boasting to the world about how many reporters and journalists it has across the planet, all scurrying away like ants, digging for information to bring you – dear valued public – news from across the globe.

What the BBC does even better is paying people very little who live and work in some of the most testing and dangerous places in the world, forgetting about them when they get into trouble with the local dictator, and firing them when the government says it isn’t interested in having some trouble-making reporter in a country of interest to British businessmen.

And you don’t even really need to fire stringers because their contracts, as my legal minded brother once pointed out, aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.

Yes. I’d like to see a map of which BBC journalists are valued so much that they are given a nice car, a nice house, a nice pension, health insurance and paid holidays; and which BBC stringers are valued so little, they are bought a return-ticket if they’re lucky, a BBC laptop if they’re even luckier, and a coffin when they die from malaria – or the like.

I’d also like to see the nationality of those people. I’d like to see how many ‘local’ stringers – as they are known so patronisingly – are in the latter group, and how many self-important British ‘correspondents’ are in the former group. That would really tell you, the audience, where the BBC’s real shared values are; and just how much the BBC values the values it promotes on its programmes (about democracy and Bob’s love for Africa and transparency and equality); and exactly what it is that the BBC directors mean when they tell their staff ‘We’re One BBC’.