Wish 1

In the seasonal absence of tittle-tattle, like many journalistic enterprises, I shall fill my festive black holes with a list. 12 wishes for the New Year.

First, someone to bring rigour to the current frontier days of BBC recruitment. The Mail and BBC organ Ariel finally picked up on the ad for a new Chief Finance Officer to report to Anne Bulford - 10 days after my little piece. And I'm not saying this blog is the source, but I did get Zarin Patel's final BBC salary wrong, like them. In her final year, she opted not to follow the rest of the Executive Board with a month salary sacrifice, so took home £352k, not £337k.

In News, James Harding has appointed a new business editor, Kamal Ahmed, after a competitive board. But, whilst we can but admire the elevation of vastly-experienced and qualified Carrie Gracie to the new post of China Editor, there's no evidence that this was advertised. There are a number of current BBC employees, and more now outside, who might have thought about an application.  Meanwhile, an advert for a PA to James has appeared - after stories that he'd brought his assistant from The Times with him, at a salary that raised eyebrows. Also in News, there's a new post of CFO coming - when most people thought that was fully covered by existing jobs in domestic and global finance.

At Newsnight, Ian Katz seems to have just lighted upon Laura Kuenssberg as presenter/chief correspondent; Chris Cook appeared as policy editor, and David Grossman was shuffled to technology editor, where there was none before. At least there's an ad for the latest new job, investigations editor.

The first principle of the BBC's recruitment policy? "Vacancies should be filled via a competitive selection process, using fair and robust job-related criteria".