From Press Gazette:

The £550,000 question – do you need to rebrand your customer-facing side when you reorganise your back office?Peter Horrocks’ first major move, since his elevation to BBC newsroom supremo, has been to hand over half a million quid in consulting cash to Martin Lambie-Nairn.

But without getting dizzy from poring over spreadsheets or watching idents, you can see why he might think that in the long run this will save the Beeb some money.

Graphics have long been a bête noir in TV news. They’re expensive, slow and resource intensive. They’re a bottleneck that clogs up newsroom workflows. When stories change suddenly they have to be junked.

Here’s the advantage of a look that enables cheaper, simpler graphics to be knocked up during an edit, or prepped by a producer.

Welcome to PowerPoint. Roll that out across all the Beeb’s audio-visual news content and you can see how you might start saving money.

But setting aside the potentially cost-saving aesthetics, what else is this rebrand for? It isn’t about the general public. When it comes to branding, ITV News is still labelled ITN. I worked for Channel 5, five, Five, and everything bar Chanel No.5 without the public giving much of a damn about the “brand”.

So who else then? The renaming is also a powerful defensive play against the only constituencies the BBC has to take really seriously: Government and regulators.

Branding something as news is the nearest you can get to stamping “public service” on it, and if there is an untouchable core to the BBC then uniting news under one name is at least a form of protection – especially for marginal parts of the empire. The more costs are shared and budget boundaries blurred the harder it is to cut services without affecting everyone.

Still, Horrocks is being asked to make five per cent cuts year on year. And the Lambie-Nairn branding won’t cut much ice in radio…