Veteran journalist Reno Bugeja will continue to head the State broadcaster’s newsroom for at least another two years, since the PBS board of directors decided to extend the contract beyond his retirement age.
A spokesman for the Justice Ministry, responsible for the public broadcaster, confirmed that although Mr Bugeja reached his retirement age last month, “the board agreed to keep using the experience of Mr Bugeja to head the PBS’s newsroom for the next two years”.
Mr Bugeja has worked at the PBS newsroom since the 1980s and was appointed head of news in 2013.
The ministry spokesman said Mr Bugeja’s contract would remain the same as the one he had had since 2013. According to information given in Parliament, Mr Bugeja has a financial package of over €50,000 a year. Additionally, he receives an extra €400 a week for his popular TV current affairs programme Dissett.
They decided to lower the payments made for programmes
The spokesman said Mr Bugeja would continue to receive the additional remuneration for his programme, adding that “this is much less than what is being paid for other programmes of the same genre, including payment made to Times Talk”.
Times Talk, produced and presented by Times of Malta journalists, used to be aired on PBS but it was axed from the TVM schedule last year. It is now streamed on timesofmalta.com. Meanwhile, a number of production houses supplying programmes to PBS have complained that the national broadcaster decided to cut rates by about 20 per cent.
They said PBS recently informed them they would be paid less for the same programmes in a bid to cut costs.
“They decided to lower the payments made for programmes. The reason seems to be that they wanted to have extra funds to be able to produce more programmes,” a senior private TV producer said. “Although this might not be a bad idea, it will lead to more mediocre programmes,” he added.
Other TV producers complained they had not been paid their dues for months.
“A number of producers have yet to be paid for programmes aired last year. The situation is quite worrying, although we were always paid at the end of the day,” one producer said.
According to the latest set of published accounts, PBS ended the year with a loss of about €1.2 million despite receiving more than €4 million in government grants.
The accounts show that the wage bill ballooned to €3.2 million by September 2016 from €2 million in September 2012.
ivan.camilleri@timesofmalta.com