Karen said the joint venture would have to offer a better price than BT Openreach to ensure it attracted enough customers. “BT Openreach will become a competitor in a short timeframe,” she said. “It’s difficult to see how the financials stack up.”

Karen said Cevian could call for Vodafone to sell down its stake in the phone masts business Vantage Towers.

Egan also speculated that Cevian could seek improvements in the German cable business. “They massively overpaid for it and there’s a question mark over whether they should replace it with fibre — that will be very expensive."

Niamh said “In a lot of cases we don’t really know what kind of content is actually harmful, how harmful it is, or how widespread it is."

Trying to legislate before we understand this is likely a fruitless task. Part of the problem is the labyrinthine workings of tech giants like Meta or Twitter to be able to “fight” against its safety issues.

Alice said “It’s positive when traditional media companies are willing to experiment. The brands that experiment are often the ones that find new ways to engage with their audience.”

Claire said “This will result in savings on series but not on the essential missions of the BBC."

This is a surprising result in view of the existential crisis of the BBC and which should give hope to other public services. 

The stakes were indeed high. “But in her public release, Nadine Dorries short-circuited a whole process with the Ministry of Culture and an approval by Parliament."

Gill said "How do you suddenly stop someone watching BBC One when it’s free to air on Freeview? You can’t do it until the whole world is online."

Claire Enders points out that despite public debate being dominated by the tastes of younger viewers, audience fragmentation and online subscription services, there are 8 million adults in the UK who lack the means, or do not wish, to pay for any TV service beyond the licence fee.

Douglas said “I think the days of just building scale and generating advertising revenue in order to fund an entire newsroom are probably over,” he says. “I think people have more sophisticated views of what it is they are building now. The kind of themes that we are seeing is those businesses that focus down on utility or one very specific aspect of the market – one or two beats, one or two specific areas of journalism – are the businesses that seem to be doing better."

He added “I’m thinking about the Athletic, I’m thinking about Politico, I’m thinking about Tortoise to some degree. Loyal, dedicated user bases, membership models – certainly at the very least registered users – are just so much more valuable than just relying on traffic, just relying on an advertising model.”