Matt Brittin’s message was pretty clear on his first day as director general of the BBC. It was echoed in a schedule that included an introductory LinkedIn video as well as meetings with the newsroom, podcast, radio, current affairs and research and development teams. It was there in his first all-staff email, which used the word “velocity” twice and invoked the second world war to call for a “sense of urgency”.

Alongside Brittin’s affection for the BBC and public service broadcasting, his message can best be summed up as “move fast but break nothing”.

As the former head of Google in Europe, Brittin is likely to have heard the phrase used by Silicon Valley companies keen to distance themselves from the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s original business mantra – “move fast and break things” – once it was pointed out that the stuff getting broken included democracy and society. The BBC, its journalism and its universality, has been hit by a world of on-demand entertainment, fake news and internet slop.

The big question is this: how does Brittin plan to turn round the 103-year-old BBC supertanker quickly enough without hitting all the icebergs in his way? Huge hazards include a charter up for renewal in 2027, a demoralised, diminished workforce and a rival British media quick to throw the odd grenade in the culture war.

No wonder the former Olympic rower seemed in a hurry on his first day, peppering BBC staff members with questions. Several said he had done his homework and was ready to push back on answers. One said: “There’s no unseemly haste or panic on show, just a pretty steely focus.”

This focus is likely to be on cutting costs. Brittin said “tough choices” would be made because of the need for savings. In April, the BBC announced a £600m cost-cutting plan with as many as 2,000 job cuts – or one in 10 of the current workforce. On Monday, Brittin had to walk past journalists striking over previous cuts to the World Service and radio news.

Cuts to the BBC licence fee by governments since 2010, combined with increasing levels of non-payment, have slashed up to 30% in its real-terms income, according to BBC and parliamentary research.

Brittin outlined three priorities, including making the strongest argument for the BBC’s survival with the government and speeding up decision-making to “simplify” it. The word is that the BBC’s broadcast channels could be cut as it does deals with platforms such as YouTube and TikTok.

The hardest cuts are expected to fall on news, which would be a huge mistake. It would also make Brittin’s third priority, “editorial excellence” – the kind of hard-hitting, public service journalism and storytelling the BBC built its reputation on – more difficult to pull off.

Mark Urban, a BBC veteran of 34 years who left the corporation in 2024, has written that constant cuts had changed the culture of a beleaguered newsroom, leaving staff more risk-averse, as those who “play it safe tend to survive”. Programmes such as Newsnight, on which he used to work, have been hit hard and have far fewer journalists available to report on the most difficult stories, leading to an over-reliance on external talking heads and a constant flow of stories from Westminster and the White House.

Many of the controversies that have bedevilled the BBC in recent years – Huw Edwards, Bob Vylan at Glastonbury and the edit of Donald Trump’s speech at the Capitol in January 2021, for instance – involve editorial or cultural mistakes. One of the biggest doubts about Brittin is his lack of editorial experience, something he has said he will start addressing “immediately”, with the appointment of a deputy. Yet he is ultimately editor-in-chief, and the buck stops with him. It’s unclear how this will work in practice, yet Richard Sambrook, a former director of BBC News as well as the World Service, said Brittin’s lack of editorial experience should not matter so long as the lines of responsibility are clear. “Editors should be responsible, then the head of news. The DG should be above the fray and holding his team to account.”

Given his career at Google, there has been less doubt about Brittin’s interest in new technological developments, and his visit to the BBC’s Blue Room, a hub for the R&D team’s work on emerging technologies, helped confirm this. Alongside working on improvements to the iPlayer, the group also looks at issues such as trust and trickery in the AI age and how its verification services can serve the public good. Bill Thompson, the BBC’s principal R&D engineer, described the BBC as a sort of mechanism through which technologies would be used “to improve people’s lives”.

Brittin, who is spending this first week being followed around by a videographer, knows that his messaging must reach not just licence-fee payers but a cash-strapped and distracted government.

Making the strongest possible argument for its future will have to involve editorial that upholds truth in a world drowning in internet slop. One of the questions Brittin is demanding his team answer is what they would do if they were inventing the BBC today. Would it even be possible? The BBC’s reinvention will be hard, but its survival depends on it.

• Jane Martinson is an academic and Guardian columnist. She is a board member of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian Media Group, and writes in a personal capacity