[Omnipresent]

This week's Sunday Times has a feature on BBC News and the merger of the two news channels.  The article also says that one idea is a BBC News livestream on iPlayer.  The BBC denies the merger may be delayed.

www.thetimes.co.uk 

On the screen tests:

“It was clearly devised by people who know nothing about presenting,” a journalist said. “One of the scenarios was that you immediately start rolling on a news story with a single source, which never happens. You had to operate your own autocue standing up and you didn’t have support from a producer in the gallery. So it was basically a memory test, seeing how much you could recall from past iterations of a similar story.”

The mood at the channel is mutinous. “This was never a merger — it’s a de facto closure of the news channel,” one journalist said.

They added: “We know you can’t serve two divergent audiences properly on one channel. The world audience isn’t interested in strikes by ambulance drivers. When anyone asks, ‘How are the new channel or the UK breakout stream going to work?’ the bosses don’t have any answers.”

There are rumours that the launch will be delayed, denied by the BBC. Another source says instead that the channel will have “the softest launch, so as to be indiscernible — all it will look like is joint output”.