In July last year, Lord Chris Patten, Chairman of the BBC Trust said that high senior management pay was "one of the most toxic reasons for the public's lack of sympathy for the BBC".

Today it's clear that his concerns have been taken head on, as The Guardian reports that the BBC actually exceeded its 2009 target to cut its top management bill by 25% and its number of managers by 20%.

The BBC has slashed the amount it pays for senior managers by 27%, and the actual number of those managers by 24%.

The deadline for the savings was originally set for 2013, but it was later brought forward to the end of 2011.

The cuts bring the number of senior managers down to 484 as of December 31 2011, compared to 640 in 2009, reports Digital Spy.

According to the BBC's website, it anticipates making savings beyond its original objectives in other areas as well. The broadcaster writes that of a planned £2bn of savings between 2007 and 2012/13, "we have already delivered £1bn of savings in the first three years and are on course to exceed our targets."

The holiday's over. After being available for free for the past 3 months thanks to a sponsorship deal from Channel 4, The Guardian is set to start charging for its iPad app.

Starting this Friday, current users will be asked to pay £9.99 a month for the app. Not everyone will have to pay right away: new users will be given a seven day trial period before they face any fees, and print subscribers will get the app at no extra cost. But even with these offers, the charge is The Guardian's highest fee for any digital product. The paper's mobile app, by comparison, costs £2.99 for six months, £4.99 for a year and is free in the US.

In an article for Paid Content, Robert Andrews speculates that The Guardian could generate significant revenue if it manages to convert the same proportion of free users into paying subscribers on the iPad and it has done on the iPhone. Andrews writes that The Guardian may be able to convert 47,600 of its current 280,000 active monthly users into paying customers, which would produce £475,000 per month, before Apple takes its 30% cut.

Dan Walters, the star political columnist at The Sacramento Bee, is not only the celebrated dean of the statehouse press corps in California, he also has been a loyal shareholder for 22 years of the company that owns his paper. But his faith in his employer, McClatchy, has not been rewarded.

After buying his first stock when McClatchy went public at $18.98 a share in 1989, Walters kept accumulating shares as they soared past $74 in 2005 and watched in horror four years later when they plummeted to less than 50 cents apiece.

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A year ago, co-authoring the "State of the News Media" chapter on newspapers, I thought 2010 would be a year of rebound -- and a test of whether newspapers would reinvest in "developing new lines of business and rebuilding skimpy news reports."

Little of that happened. Advertising revenues declined for the year, 6.4 percent by my estimate. Profits on net earnings hovered around 5 percent. Newsroom cuts continued, though not so severe as those of 2008 and 2009.

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