NBC News to Shut Down Paris Bureau

NBC News plans to close its Paris bureau and open one in Budapest as part of what the network describes as “a long-planned restructuring of NBC resources” in the United States and abroad.

NBC’s Paris bureau--whose chief, Ted Ebert, will take over a revamped Moscow bureau--will be shut at the end of the year and about 10 French nationals employed there will be let go, according to a network source. Two Americans, correspondent Jim Bitterman and producer Pat Thompson, will remain with NBC News.

The closing of the Paris bureau is part of a trend by the cost-conscious networks to try to cut expenses and increase what management calls “efficiencies” in the face of declining audiences and declining revenues caused by increased competition from cable television, independent stations and VCRs.

CBS also plans to close its Paris bureau, and ABC downgraded its bureau there this year by moving chief European correspondent Pierre Salinger to London.

Although the latest network adieu to the City of Light is likely to raise eyebrows in some journalistic circles, NBC News President Michael Gartner, in a statement, downplayed the importance of Paris in coverage of European news in the era of satellite transmission.

“The Paris bureau has primarily been used as a launch pad to cover stories elsewhere in Europe and Africa,” he said, “but we also have that ability in our bureaus in London, Frankfurt and Rome.”

Meanwhile, NBC said it will open a bureau in Budapest for news coverage of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania, and will “begin to establish a presence in Barcelona in preparation” for the Summer Olympics there in 1992. NBC will televise those Games, having bought broadcast rights for them last December for a record $401 million.

Gartner said that NBC’s Budapest bureau “reflects the increasing developments in Eastern Europe, developments that often are finding their way onto our news shows.”

The chief of the new Budapest bureau is David Page, formerly a producer in NBC’s Frankfurt bureau and most recently a producer on the news division’s “Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow.”

Gartner said that the “Barcelona move is to begin preparing for the Olympics as well as to cover better a part of Europe where we historically have been underrepresented.” NBC’s office there will be run by Victor Solis, now a producer at the network’s Tel Aviv bureau.

The network’s Moscow operation is being turned into what NBC described as a “combined Moscow bureau” with the BBC and a British-owned TV news agency, Visnews, in which NBC bought a 37.75% interest last November. Visnews’ other owners are the BBC and the London-based Reuters news agency.

NBC gave no details of how its troika version of its revamped Moscow bureau will operate, or when the change will take place.

Closer to home, NBC, which last year closed its Southwest bureau in Houston and shifted bureau chief Ray Cullin and correspondent Dan Molina to Burbank, said it will “soon” reopen its Southwest bureau. This time, it said, the bureau will be based in Dallas, at NBC affiliate KXAS-TV, manned by bureau chief-correspondent Jim Cummins and producer Larry Weidman.

There also will be what NBC described as a “satellite” office in Houston at affiliate KPRC-TV, it said.