London Live to slash staff

London Live, the UK local digital-terrestrial TV station owned by Evgeny Lebedev, the Russian-born proprietor of the Evening Standard and Independent newspapers, is reportedly to cut 20 of its 60 staff. 

London Live chief operating officer has said that the channel was restructuring its news and current affairs team, and would re-allocate the funds saved through job cuts into new commissions and higher quality acquisitions, according to press reports.

London Live has been criticised for showing too large a number of repeats and has struggled to find a large audience. The channel nevertheless claimed an audience of over 2.3 million for December, double the number that viewed the channel in June last year.

In October last year, regulator Ofcom approved some cuts to the channel’s local programming commitments under the terms of its licence, having initially rejected the channel’s move to cut its total number of local programming hours from 18 to eight a day. Ofcom said that the channel could cut the number of local programming repeats from 10 hours a day to six for its first year, and from nine to five hours in the second year.