The best examples I can think of came at the last General Election. There is always a little competition between broadcasters about being first with news. The BBC officially claims it is more focussed on being authoritative, but at the coalface all that matters is speed.

One example is that they contracted stringers to be present at every count in the country to phone in the result as soon as it was announced. However, at the last minute someone panicked that the stringer might be unable to contact Television Centre without a mobile phone. Now, please stop for a minute and meditate upon the possibility that a British journalist exists who doesn't already carry at least two mobile phones. If you have never had any direct contact with these narcissistic self-important specimens of debased humanity, I can assure you that the one thing of which they live in terror is missing a story through being out of contact of their editor.

So there wasn't a chance they didn't have a phone, but an editor wanted to make sure, so bought a brand new mobile phone to be sent to each constituency count, ready and waiting for the journo. He got a deal from the shop (after all, you get a tasty discount when you buy 650-odd mobiles at once), so that in itself wasn't expensive. However, as he did it two days before the election, he had to contract couriers to deliver them; at a cost widely rumoured to be between £50,000 & £100,000.

Another example is that Newsnight hired a helicopter for the entire month of the election period to cart them around the country. Of course it didn't, they just used it occasionally in a few shots to give them a look of being at the heart of the action. But it was always available to look good on camera.

Yet another was the fitting out of an entire "election" studio with atemporary IT infrastructure so that, on the day of transmission, an entire body of political journalists, who had their own fully equipped desks lesss than 100 feet away, could become a backdrop for a load of talking heads. Of course, it's a tradition at the BBC to do this for elections, but with each election the necessary infrastructure to keep the journos productive becomes more complex and much, much more expensive.

Equally, the amount of repetition of work by different departments within News is legendary. Martin Bell is right when he complains they send rival correspondents to the same event, what he neglects to mention is how many rival programmes there are. Each requiring travel expenses, technical support, cameras etc. Any mundane story may have multiple teams covering it. The US government even officially complained about the number of journalists ringing them up at all hours of day or night (editors never remember that Washington is asleep for UK morning shows), all requesting separate interviews from the same spokeman for different programmes. Now there is a team at the Washington bureau who filter all the calls. Such efficiency is not replicated at Westminster.

Now News may be an event-driven department, at any time of the day you have to drop what you're doing to cover a breaking story. But News is also Planning-phobic. There are events we know will happen at specific times on specific days, yet somehow planning for these events isn't exciting enough. The trouble is that the less time you give technical staff to prepare, the more expensive the "fix" will be; frequently by factors of ten. It's also worth noting that, invariably, regular high profile events are often very big and require a lot of work, so a factor of ten increase in the solution cost can become a big figure. Yet year after year, these events are thrown together, despite the best urgings of those involved, at the eleventh hour because somebody simply can't be bothered to approve a budget.

And this goes on, year after year and nobody ever learns. Every month seemed to bring a new story of heart-stopping waste, of hours of overtime burnt because somebody couldn't be bothered to plan or tell somebody else what was going on until nearly too late.
I know I have mentioned very few examples, and have neglected the inter-departmental rivalries such as News teams covering major sports events (usually requiring the biggest fees), which most people think is the Sports department's job.

But Martin Bell is correct that the BBC could save huge, colossal sums of money if News planned a lot more and reined in their various editor's sense of self-importance. If they pooled their reporting a lot more it would help. But the BBC is set up in fiefdoms that are impervious to change and so journalists will be got rid of unnecessarily. I say unecessarily even tho' the BBC is stuffed to the gills with journos most of whom barely contribute to presentation or on-air broadcast. Output will suffer, not because there won't be enough people left to do the job, but because they simply don't know how to work any differently than with profligate staffing levels.