Newsnight: Some have questioned the future of the BBC's current affairs flagship – but don’t write it off yet

The Media Column: Since Jeremy Paxman quit the show has taken a pummelling of the sort it was famed for when he was inquisitor-in-chief

‘Newsnight’ presenter Evan Davis: the successor to Jeremy Paxman took a while to settle in (Rex)

I wish a happy New Year to the BBC’s Newsnight. Some predict it will be the show’s last. In the past 18 months, since Jeremy Paxman quit as lead presenter, Newsnight has taken a pummelling of the sort it was famed for when Paxo was its inquisitor-in-chief.

When he left, the new Newsnight editor, Ian Katz, declared that the combative political interview was over and that the show’s new host, Evan Davis, would adopt a more discursive approach. At that time, Katz spoke of concerns that the loss of Newsnight’s figurehead could have precipitated a “great ‘Whither Newsnight?’ storm.” This month the New Statesman television critic, Rachel Cooke, began a piece with that very question, “Whither Newsnight?”, ahead of a damning assessment of the show’s future. It’s not an isolated view, and the reasons for this pessimistic outlook are many.

Paxman’s wasn’t the only departure. Laura Kuenssberg, who Katz lured back from ITV to become a Newsnight presenter and chief correspondent, has (in vindication of his judgment) been appointed BBC political editor. Newsnight’s own political editor, Allegra Stratton, has joined ITV News as national editor. Robert Peston was offered some Newsnight presenting duties in a bid to prevent him defecting to ITV. He went anyway. And Duncan Weldon, Katz’s imaginative appointment as economics editor, has quickly decided against a career in broadcasting and left to work at a large financial services company.

The show’s attempts to freshen its offering post-Paxman – from asking presenter Emily Maitlis to interview the crude comedian “Dapper Laughs”, to cooking squirrel roadkill live on air – have led to it being dubbed “infantile”. Others say it tries too hard to be trendy. Newzoids, ITV’s satirical puppet show, depicts Newsnight’s host wearing a pair of Dr Dre headphones and introducing the programme with the words: “Booyakasha! I’m Evan Davis and my favourite band is a band you’ve never even heard of, that’s how shitting cool I am…”

The show’s apparent vulnerability is being exploited by politicians. The business minister, Nick Boles, dismissed an excellent recent investigation of Tory party bullying as the final broadside of a “sinking ship trying desperately to reassert its political relevance”.

Critical to Newsnight’s future is next month’s extension of the BBC1 News At Ten bulletin to 10.45pm, overlapping the first 15 minutes of the BBC2 show. Some 40 per cent of Newsnight’s audience also watches the “Ten”. The fear is that fewer will bother to switch over from the extended bulletin (a trial of the format earlier this year saw a 10 per cent fall in Newsnight’s ratings). This change might mean Newsnight having to vacate its imposing, state-of-the-art Studio B home at New Broadcasting House. Discussions are ongoing. There are even members of the show’s 50-strong staff who fear its time is running out.

Newsnight has been on air since 1980. It feels like a pillar of modern British democracy. But it’s not infallible. Its predecessor, Tonight, is little remembered.

There is no question that the BBC2 flagship current affairs programme has been caught in the crossfire of the long-running engagement between the BBC and ITV late-night bulletins. That rivalry has recently been exacerbated by ITV’s relaunch of its bulletin and the public spat between its presenter Tom Bradby and the BBC’s Huw Edwards. The BBC is keen to show who is top dog. “We are definitely collateral damage,” said a Newsnight insider.

But the changes also bring opportunities. If Newsnight vacates the bombastic environs of Studio B it will get to design its own smaller set, something better suited to its new mission of intimate late-night analysis and discussion. Every night on BBC News At Ten at 10.31 and 30 seconds, Newsnight’s presenter will pop up on BBC1 to trail the show and hopefully entice a greater chunk of the bulletin’s four million audience to switch channels.

For Evan Davis, in particular, that trailer will be a shop window. After a brilliant career across the BBC and a smooth landing as a presenter on the Today programme, he struggled to please a Newsnight audience that grew up with Paxman and sometimes felt cheated by the new man’s less abrasive approach. He was criticised for an early interview in which he held hands with Russell Brand. But Davis – who also had to cope with the BBC courting Peston with a slice of the job that he’d just taken on – has latterly become settled in his role.

Maitlis has justified Katz’s faith in her presenting talents, and her “Bill Somebody” skewering of Ed Balls, when he forgot the name of a key Labour supporter, was one of Newsnight’s high points of 2015.

It was possibly unfortunate that the programme’s most prominent scalp was the BBC’s own creative director, Alan Yentob, largely brought down by the reporting of Newsnight’s Chris Cook (in a joint investigation with BuzzFeed News). But that story, along with James Clayton and Esther Oxford’s work on Tory bullying, shows that Newsnight’s team of 11 reporters can produce agenda-setting journalism.

The show has also performed well on foreign stories, notably a remarkable 25-minute reconstruction of the horror inside the Bataclan music hall during the November Paris terror attacks and Gabriel Gatehouse’s fine reporting of the refugee crisis.

Despite the complaints of some old buffers about the programme’s craving for street credibility, Newsnight realises that younger viewers are largely found on other platforms and is putting more content on social media.

That John Sweeney’s “Finding Azam” film, which followed the trail of a lost young Syrian refugee, was documented on Snapchat is a perfect example of that.

For all the upheaval, and despite some reports to the contrary, Newsnight’s audience has not evaporated. The programme’s share of viewing is a stable 4 per cent, and its average audience, at 579,000, is down only 2 per cent year-on-year, despite the five-month trial of the extended News At Ten. While it’s true that the show was watched by 867,000 in 2008, the rate of decline has slowed considerably.

After the debilitating impact of its buried Savile investigation in 2011 and its bungled report smearing Lord McAlpine in 2012, Newsnight was always going to face a long road to recovery.

I hope it prospers. Our serious news programmes must be protected, especially in tumultuous times such as these. Crucially, the BBC’s director-general Lord Hall – a former Newsnight output editor – and James Harding, BBC head of news and current affairs, have championed Katz’s vision and have a stake in its success. The fact that Peston was offered a presenting Newsnight job and that a bespoke studio is under discussion are not signs of the show’s imminent demise. Provided its efforts at original journalism don’t lead it back on to the rocks, I don’t expect the BBC2 news flagship to strike its colours any time soon.

The app that means BBC Sport still counts

It’s been a tough end to a hard year for BBC Sport, as the loss of rights to cover Formula 1 have followed in the slipstream of the furore over boxer Tyson Fury’s nomination in the prestigious Sports Personality of the Year (SPOTY) contest.

The BBC has revealed that more sports rights would be lost as the organisation implements another £35m of cuts. The BDO World Championships in darts, which has been shown on the BBC since 1978, could be next to go when the broadcaster’s contract expires next year.

Snooker, which owes the BBC an eternal debt of gratitude for decades of support, will worry that the broadcaster may walk away from coverage of the World and UK Championships after 2017.

But at least there’s still the BBC Sport app, which has been downloaded 7 million times. Of the top 10 biggest stories on the app, only one (Transfer Deadline Day) concerned football, on which broadcasters lavish insane amounts of cash. Five of the top 10 were big moments in England’s Ashes triumph and three concerned the progress of Andy Murray at Wimbledon, which helps explain why he was winner of this year’s SPOTY.

Wrong way round the new right way round

Among his New Year’s resolutions, Mark Thompson, the CEO of The New York Times, will be seeking an answer to the question: “How do we get a person who has read one news story in the New York Times to read a second?”

Thompson, former Director-General of the BBC, has set out this fundamental challenge facing all news organisations. These days, the overwhelming majority of articles are read via social media rather than from a paper’s homepage.

The trend for 2016 is likely to be news providers going in search of eyeballs wherever they can reach them. Rather than simply posting links, they will increasingly post content directly to social media, using initiatives such as Facebook Instant Articles. Expect more 360-degree video, live streaming and branded “quote cards”, featuring bons mots from star writers.

Snapchat – where news providers from Vice to the Daily Mail have dedicated teams on the Snapchat Discover feature – will grow as a news platform. And vertical (portrait mode) video – once derided by smartphone users as shot the “wrong way round” – looks set to replace horizontal mode because it’s more suited to the way we view mobiles.

Twitter: @iburrell