The new manager Carlo Fuortes wants to completely rebuild the public television company RAI. The range of information is to be bundled in a single editorial office.
The RAI boss Carlo Fuortes wants to increase the quality with a reorganization and at the same time enable savings.
Has a «shock» Carlo Fuortes promised his journalists in the usual managerial speech. The new boss of the Italian Broadcasting station RAI has been in office for six months and wants to completely rebuild public television. With a matrix organization, he wants to increase quality and enable savings at the same time. The three main channels and various secondary channels should no longer produce their content independently, but ten specialized divisional production units should be responsible for it.
There is talk of an “earthquake” that shakes the transmitter. But the RAI supervisory board approved the new strategy, “unanimously,” as Fuortes emphasizes. It corresponds to what is going on in other countries too, you don’t have to reinvent everything. The new structure should be in place by summer, 60 percent of the staff will be affected by the renovation.
Cut the goals at midnight
RAI is through fees and advertising financed. The fees bring 1.7 of the 2.3 billion euros in total revenue per year. According to Fuortes, the public broadcasters in Germany receive three times more fees. As elsewhere, advertising revenue has been falling for a long time. Last year RAI had 700 million euros less money at its disposal than in 2008, and the deal was slightly negative with a loss of 15 million euros. Cuts are imperative if you do not want to increase the fees, and that is not up for discussion.
The first specific shortening of the offer now concerns a late-evening sports program, which primarily offers a look back at daily football events. According to information from RAI, it had an average audience rate of 0.5 percent at the time it was broadcast. In the opinion of management, the effort is not worth it for such a small audience. Fuortes has also stopped the planned launch of the English-language channel RAI internazionale.
Unit news because of unit editing?
The focus of the dispute is the future of the information division. The previously decentralized news programs with several independent editorial teams are to be bundled in a single, large “newsroom”, which will contain all the news programs and, above all, the online platform rainews.it supplies; this should be strengthened. There are currently almost 1,800 journalists working on eight RAI stations, 250 of them in managerial positions. At the niche channel RAI Parlamento, there is one boss for every three journalists. The annual expense for the news broadcasts (excluding sports) is according to the portal Firstonline at 320 million euros, per capita personnel costs at 143,000 euros.
The not unfounded suspicion is that the political orientation of RAI should also be “bundled” with the news offer. Profiled and stubborn broadcast vessels like “Report” It is feared that RAI 3 is threatened with taming. The government and parliament will have to deal in detail with the matter in the near future, especially since the renewal of the service mandate to the public broadcaster is imminent.
Not only will the political parties assert their interests, but also the Mediaset group of the entrepreneur and former head of government Silvio Berlusconi. The state RAI broadcasters are currently just ahead of the private Mediaset broadcasters in terms of audience ratings.