[interestednovice]

That’s the thing - many of us had seen and really liked both the old channels, so all they had to do really was pick a style and run with it; they would have ended up with a decent channel. It’s such a shame they decided to throw the baby out with the bath water and go for what we’ve actually got, a total reinvention of the wheel that’s not as good as either predecessor service.

[Rolling News]

I too am in full agreement with LDN’s post.

Totally agree with the points made around branding. I honestly think this is the worst I’ve known it. There’s just no identity whatsoever to BBC News anymore, across bulletins, the channel, and the nations & regions. Everything is just a mish mash of nearly 16 year old titles which have been botched and modified half a dozen times to fit the BBC branding guidelines (with of course the current ones looking the worst) and whatever it is they’re now trying to achieve with red circles.

When I look at other broadcasters (ITV, Sky, Channel 4 and even GB News) I instantly see a strong uniformed consistent branding product, even if I’m not a fan of some of them. When I look at BBC News I just see a bunch of too many ‘chiefs’ who can’t decide between them what it should do and what it should look like (even down sometimes to which studio should be used).

I know times are tough. I can honestly say I wouldn’t want to work at BBC News at the minute. But what a mess.

[chris]

What’s odd is that the pulsating rings on a globe look of 2008 still looks pretty fresh and recognisable as BBC News.

As someone who’s messed around on After Effects, it’s not too difficult to make a semi-decent remake of that style.

I can only guess that this designer has been given very little time and/or a poor brief.

[Mike]

As someone who’s messed around on After Effects, it’s not too difficult to make a semi-decent remake of that style.

I can only guess that this designer has been given very little time and/or a poor brief.

One wonders if that brief was 'do anything BUT use bands mapped to a sphere'. I also wonder if they wanted something they could easily mess with as/when required.

It's no secret, since 2008 the regional news titles have been an After Effects template/workflow solution, maybe they wanted that for everything.

Would I be wrong in assuming the new regional studios - with their backdrops - would be a basis for a new title sequence? Red transparent/overlay pillars between generic static shots/drone shots of the region in question resting on the programme name?

[Spencer]

What’s odd is that the pulsating rings on a globe look of 2008 still looks pretty fresh and recognisable as BBC News.

As someone who’s messed around on After Effects, it’s not too difficult to make a semi-decent remake of that style.

I can only guess that this designer has been given very little time and/or a poor brief.

Or the designer isn’t up to the job?

[DTV]

That’s the thing - many of us had seen and really liked both the old channels, so all they had to do really was pick a style and run with it; they would have ended up with a decent channel. It’s such a shame they decided to throw the baby out with the bath water and go for what we’ve actually got, a total reinvention of the wheel that’s not as good as either predecessor service.

Even more broadly than presentationally, in hindsight, I think they should have just gone with a full schedule of pre-merger 10:00 joint BBC News hours. It might not be the ideal, but it's about the UK-World balance they ended up with, while having been a more dynamic format and more fitting of the supposed 'back to basics' intent of the new channel. Once they got that right, then they could have started experimenting with newer formats, new presentation, etc.

As I've said for a while now, the real problem with the new channel is just a complete failure to really answer (or maybe even ask) what the purpose of it should be and what it should be doing. This is why you have just a weird and deeply flawed mixture of new things nobody asked for (e.g., the pointless branded programmes, magaziney Across the UK features), legacy fixtures that are hanging around for no real reason (the timing of business and sport updates) and well intended but misguided expansions of things that worked well as time-specific features (attempt to emulate OS and Context across the day).

[interestednovice]

I couldn’t agree more.

And actually, although I was initially posting regarding branding, I have the same sentiment towards the channel as a whole as well.

It was always going to be difficult to satisfy everyone with a merger, as we’ve all said here before. But they had experimented with it during Covid as an emergency measure and settled on OK mapping of a typical hour with a good range of stories for the 10am slot. In fact, it wasn’t too different from 9am for UK viewers and would have been most noticeably different for World News viewers - but, even then, global coverage wasn’t too bad. It also retained more of the relaxed timings and flow of a typical NC hour instead of WN rigid timings which can lead to awkwardness.

So, yes, they should basically have gone for that across the day and, as in 2008, simply branded every hour as BBC News initially - possibly with the exception of existing shows such as The Context, Newsday, World News America and Outside Source which they could have carried over into the new service. Further experimentation and new brands could easily have come later.

It’s become clear to us that, basically, the new channel concept wasn’t ready at launch but (for budgetary reasons) it had to  be launched when it was. However, they have tried to do too much new too quickly and everything has fallen apart in terms of quality suffering - and frankly bizarre moments such as Carl Nasman welcoming us to BBC News from Washington and then immediately starting to talk about Gary Lineker to a worldwide audience. I am not sure he was convinced that the running order he was reading made sense, and I certainly wasn’t. Not to mention the fact that, at 2am, the UK audience is tiny so it would be justifiable to skew more towards WN at that time of day.

If they needed to “play for time” to figure everything out, they really ought to have stuck to a format like the “interim service” that existed for a month. OK, we were still critical at the time, but it overall mostly got the balance right. They then could have introduced the capability for UK opts, allowing the interim service to “skew more World” for the global feed. Then they could have started thinking about editorial priority more generally. Then, new presentation like the new countdowns. Only finally new shows.

[DTV]

Only finally new shows.

To be honest, you don't need new shows at all. Stranded programmes worked in their early days when they supplemented a schedule that was primarily filled with half-hour no frills news bulletins - there was a room and a purpose for a more in-depth, regionally focussed programme every few hours that also included interviews and (in the early days) stories that wouldn't otherwise be featured. 

But once they all started becoming blocks that clogged up pretty much the whole schedule (around 2015), they became increasingly redundant. A combination of budget cuts and partially taking on the function of ordinary bulletins meant that they became less distinct and no longer added anything to the channel's output as they were the main chunk of the channel's output - at one point weekdays were going 17 hours without a standard bulletin. In that situation, as now, you only really need one brand for your programming - stick to BBC News and emphasise that you're doing the same simple news reporting all day, every day. That's a better basis for a channel than several meaningless branded programmes that differ merely in being overly interview heavy or near-exclusively interview-based.

(Worth noting, though, things on World never got as bad as the NC's utterly pointless attempts at branded news programming, which had even worse titles than the current ones).

[interestednovice]

I agree, to a point.

But marketable “shows” are important for advertising to be sold in targeted slots; for sale as a standalone “product” to other broadcasters (such as PBS) and to indicate a specific regional focus - such as Focus on Africa & World News America. They can also be a way of trying out a different approach to news “storytelling”, without impacting what the audience expects in a standard hour - Outside Source, as an example.

So they are not useless, but they are certainly not a requirement of a successful news channel.

That’s why I said I regard them as lowest priority to sort out. That said, the current weak branding is having an arguably negative impact on the overall audience perception of the “quality” of BBC News, so trying to do “shows” badly can work against you.

[harshy]

20 years ago it was pretty much BBC World News with branded programmes on the half hour like Asia Today, World Sport, the only difference the presentation standards were extremely high back then and make good use of effectively a studio whacked in the heart of a newsroom. Now they have wonderful proper studio set but looks pointless as the presenter is left controlling their own autocue and therefore glued to their seat, it is a bit too basic and the branded shows no idea why they even bothered other then to create slots they could market abroad.