[interestednovice]

I agree that the original concept of Outside Source, ironically, was far more innovative. It also fit the name far better.

On the point about context to news for World viewers: good point, however to an extent the reverse it also true - British viewers will be irritated by constant explanations of where Warwickshire is and how the “UK Finance Minister” is called the Chancellor, so will quickly switch away if things get too international. This is party what I meant before when I was saying that it’s impossible to satisfy both audiences. Financially, the WN audience is by far the most important but the BBC must also be seen to do enough for British viewers by Ofcom and the press, so it has no choice really but the unsatisfying fudge we are now seeing.

There is nothing wrong with “proper” WN if that’s what the audience is expecting, though. But it wouldn’t allow the BBC to claim that it’s “not closing the NC”!

That's my point. 

On one story, UK viewers were treated to a detailed explanation as to where Birmingham and Oxford were in England, the counties they're in and where they are relation to London, complete with a highly detailed map and a guest being credited as being in 'Oxford, UK', yet the next story which was captioned and scripted as 'UK snowfall' mentioned three places, one in England and two others in Wales and had no geographical context attached as to which country they were in. Then the reporter pops ups in Cumbria which is described as 'the North of England' and talks about several other places, one of which was in Scotland. If anything the UK snowfall piece needed more detailed context than where the HS2 line is going to run.

As a UK viewer I found the whole 20 minutes very odd indeed. As a World viewer, I'd just be confused and how the presenter felt, goodness knows.

A lot of the issues can be resolved with some consistency in whoever is writing the presenter scripts. If they're going to recycle a script from the BBC News at One it either needs to be better tweaked for international viewers or every presenter lead-in piece to a package or report that is UK focussed has to go into microscopic detail. You can't really do both as the way it is at the moment is very jarring, sounds very bizarre and just becomes awkward after a while.

I think perhaps the relevance of where HS2 might go, to international viewers, was a bit higher - as they might actually travel on it when visiting the UK, if it ever gets built!

The snow, on the other hand, was a story almost entirely of relevance to U.K. viewers and was, at best, a mild curiosity to viewers on BBC WN. Therefore, because they didn’t need to know and probably weren’t interested, the BBC opted not to bother with long explainers? Perhaps that was the logic - it was just “pitched at the UK audience” and they aimed to get it over quickly before WN viewers switched away, so they could move on to something else! Again, they had to cover it because British people would have expected them to, but it would have been inappropriate last week for WN.

Even for British viewers though, the “editorial whiplash” is a problem, and risks being very confusing to WN viewers as you say.

I’m not convinced there is a way around it. Long explainers, as you say, would work - but at the expense of the pacing of the channel; we are constantly hearing how everyone has a short attention span these days so that would surely be detrimental to viewership as people would get bored and switch off!