[Stockland Hillman]

This taps into exactly what I've genuinely been wondering regarding the occasional ad-hoc UK opt-outs.

There clearly won't be a team (however small) sitting about for whole shifts just on the off-chance that UK breaking news happens, of course. So...

I wonder exactly what people and resources will be pulled into action for UK opt-outs, with no detriment to whatever they'd otherwise be doing, and how quickly they can be mobilised when the need arises.

But that’s no different to how anything happens. The very nature of news is that it is largely unexpected. What do you think happens if a bomb goes off somewhere? They put the resource where it needs to be. There won’t be a bomb team waiting around to be deployed, they’ll be journalists working on things already that they’ll have to leave. 

Journalism is a multi-skilled profession more so than ever these days. Everyone increasingly needs to know how to do anything. We’ll no doubt end up with a team of reporters who can go live on air as and when required, but their core role won’t be presenter.

What you see on screen is a fraction of the staff needed to operate a live insert

We're talking about a major story that's important for UK audiences but deemed irrelevant for world. Let's look at what's required:

- A director/multi skilled technical operator who can run a live breaking news gallery  (the events themselves would require more skill than a canned the night before  Breakfast opt)

- Multi skill operators to do edits, graphics etc to the sourced pictures, audio etc to provide the "wallpaper"breaking news requires in the early stages; extra resources for ingest and traffic.

- A live  producer who can pull all the elements together for the live broadcast, including making sensitive decisions on pictures used (think Grenfell,  think twin towers) compliance , taste and decency  questions arise all the time.

- Multiple production journalists to compile and verify the news events, get approval for social media pics,  find contributors,  archive pics, develop a narrative for the story.

- Journalists to do actual reports on the news events, on the scene and on the topic 

- an output editor to decide treatment and make complex editorial decisions

- experienced presenter who can deal with complex breaking news logistics and verbalise the events context and information in a journalistic way.

All these are dedicated to the live event, so have to stop what they are doing if moved internally (but the World feed continues,  as does Network bulletin production)

If its a event big enough to justify a UK opt, then its way, way past the point that a reporter "hanging around" can grab a tech spare tech op and head to a clip studio can manage

This ability is whats being lost so the BBC can spend an extra £150m plus on Podcasts that have few listeners and online stories that could be written  now by Chat GPT

So no, no journalist has the multiskills required