Among the pages of debate about the BBC, "industry sources" were credited with the view that the BBC had "failed to move with the times and hire fresh talent to tackle the news differently" (Delivering Cuts First: lost funding blamed for Newsnight debacle, 13 November). The comment may sound innocuous and plausible, but to anyone with long experience of working behind the camera it has a deeply ominous ring.
Let me offer a translation: "move with the times" means "outsource to the lowest bidder"; "hire fresh talent" means replace experienced professionals with people just out of film school, so glad to have a job they will accept any conditions, and "tackle the news differently" means focus on celebrity gossip, take the heat off the politicians and business leaders, and – just to ensure no one has the time and energy to turn up the heat on them – never send more than one person to act as researcher, interviewer, director, camera person, lighting person, sound recordist, production assistant and driver. (The BBC does already often send one person to multitask when a job is simple, but may send two or three, exceptionally five or six on more complex jobs.)
The remark is particularly bitter when the recent mess shows only too clearly that the problem is that the BBC has "moved with the times" to the extent that, like the private companies that pick up outsourced work, it puts too many resources into too many layers of management and not enough into the training and support of programme makers.
Margaret Dickinson
London
• I think there are two important matters for the BBC to address: its attitude to staff contracts and its internal view of age. When I started work as a journalist at the BBC in the late 1970s I had a staff job. In the television newsroom in Leeds where I began my career, there were other staff members, some in their 50s. They were the "grey hairs" who young journalists like me and former deputy director general Mark Byford turned to for their wisdom and who safely steered us through the coverage of the Yorkshire Ripper and the miners' strike.
I was made redundant in my late 40s and was told by personnel that only 2% of the BBC workforce were still in employment in their 50s. I wonder if the BBC has now begun to suffer the effects of being happy to lose its older staff members and the experience they can bring to a team.
Much of the media industry is now freelance on short-term contracts, which creates an atmosphere of insecurity and risk-taking. As a public service broadcaster the BBC should be encouraged to build a more stable workforce that can nurture new talent, and provide the maturity needed to protect the BBC's reputation. I now train freelancers in how to survive on a short-term contract, as well as being an independent producer providing programmes for Radio 4, where, unfortunately for George Entwistle, maturity and journalism still thrive. 
Janet Graves
Mellor, Cheshire
• The opening paragraph of the BBC's editorial guidelines (2005) states that "no set of rules or guidelines can ever replace the need for producers, editors and managers to use the wisdom that comes from experience, common sense and a clear set of editorial and ethical values when confronted with difficult editorial challenges". How were such values applied when it came to substantiating the truth of Steve Meesham's allegations about those who abused him? The BBC's editorial failures have seriously undermined the efforts of many decent, honest producers who work extremely hard to win and maintain the trust of contributors whose stories they tell. Trust is built on careful research and meticulous fact-checking, but it also relies on a commitment to treat contributors as they would wish themselves to be treated.
If that treatment includes making as big a splash in the media as they possibly can, there are plenty of media outlets to satisfy their craving for attention. They don't need the BBC – and the BBC doesn't need them.
Jeremy Cross
(TV producer), Chart Sutton, Kent
• So, Helen Boaden and Steve Mitchell are to join Peter Rippon in stepping aside from their jobs (Executives could face action over Newsnight, 12 November), as opposed to stepping up, out, round, forward, into, back or, as in the case of George Entwistle, down (a term which at least is now readily understood). Just because this is the BBC's opaque euphemism of choice for what could be transfer to other possibly "lighter" duties or suspension in some form, is it really beyond the capacity of the rest of the media to find out exactly what it means?
Kate Francis
Bristol
• George Entwistle may have "the leadership qualities of of Winnie the Pooh" (BBC in crisis, 12 November) but he appears to have walked off with a honey pot. After 54 days in the job a £450,000 payoff is a reward for incompetence that beggars belief. Or is it a reward for being a "nice" man? We can all be nice for that price.
Phil Whiteley
Blackpool
• Crisis? What crisis? Every radio and television programme went ahead yesterday as scheduled, and no doubt the same will happen today. True, Newsnight made a couple of bad calls, pulling a good programme and showing a bad one, but this hardly amounts to a crisis.
Andrew Belsey
Whitstable, Kent
• Before, during and after the US elections, I counted 25 BBC reporter/presenters stationed across the US. The BBC had a studio built, it seemed, on the White House lawn. Could sending all its newsgathering resources to a non-event that occurred while most of us were asleep anyway be the reason for the shoddy journalism that ensued back home?
Peter William Avery
London
• How can the standards of the BBC be maintained when we see Tim Davie, the man brought in to "get a grip", open necked and without a tie.
John Geekie
Beverley