[Stooky Bill]

The ability of opt for big stories has to include the resources to cover them properly. It's been said that such stories will be covered in the regional programmes, but I have to wonder how that will work in practice?

Picture the scene. It's Saturday morning, your station is taking a breakfast show from the station to the south of you and mid morning from the station to the north. There's one newsreader on shift tasked with putting out hourly bulletins comprising of GNS content and a few pre-prepared clips about local diary stories. The local football team are playing away so the sports team aren't in the building other than a BA who will drive the desk for the OB.

Some incident occurs. It's important but wouldn't be of interest beyond the local area. Local radio would cover it but regional TV wouldn't be interested.

How do you cover it?

Thing is that at the moment unless the incident has happened to the presenter or producer directly it doesn't really make much of difference if they're in the studio in the same county or the one at the other side of the region. They're still just in a studio relying on eyewitnesses phoning in and the usual social media and news wires etc for information. The only real difference is the presenter is less likely to have local knowledge of the area, but it's not guaranteed that a local presenter would either. 

On Saturday morning there's probably only 3 people in the building now - there's no one to send to it unless they call someone in. If they did that they'd just work into the regional show

It doesn't matter that it's not of interest to other people in the region, if that were the case there'd be no point in regional TV or radio. Everyone's used to hearing news about other parts of the country on both local and nafional radio. Plus if it was a major incident it would be still of interest to a lot of those in neighbouring counties.... we don't all stay within county borders 

Not that I'm trying to defend the changes, but it's perfectly possible to do