[Critique]

I’d agree with others that it’s by no means awful, but there is certainly room for improvement.

I’m not a fan of the ‘Around the UK’ segments and would much rather it was just a quick read-through of a few UK stories. If the UK opt presenter is going to be on hand all day anyway, then they may as well go back to what they did twenty years ago and do the handover from the ‘World’ presenter to the UK presenter for a moment or two. The quarter past/quarter to breaks are only 1 minute long at the moment though so would probably need extending to two minutes to make it worthwhile - otherwise you’ve only really got time to summarise a few stories.

There have been more UK opts than I expected and they seem decently resourced (apart from the studio/set leaving something to be desired), but I don’t think they quite work at the moment. I know they’ve spoken about wanting to do single story streams for iPlayer and that the UK opts are one and the same, but when the UK opts out now it means that a story will get blanket coverage until the end of the opt. This often comes across as overkill, especially when things are delayed and they run out of things to talk about! Restructuring those opts so that, if needs be, they can take a breather for a round-up of other UK news, the odd weather forecast etc, would be a big improvement.

Above all though, the thing that I have been the most disappointed about is the decline in the technical quality of the output. There are a lot of sloppy opt in/out points, even when they’re regular, such as the 10 into Newsnight into Newsday, along with the constant pregnant pauses whenever World is opting to/from a break or pre-recorded programme. These pauses did not exist in the same way two decades back!

Likewise, the erratic behaviour of the ticker is baffling - turn it on or turn it off! I don’t think the single line story straps look good either, and they make the channel much less useful if you’re watching it somewhere without sound (such as an office, lobby etc). For breaking news I’ve also noticed that as they’re now restricted to a single line of text, they often just put whatever would have been in the second line of the strap as the ‘headline’, which means you end up with some very strange breaking news ‘headlines’ that don’t make sense without the context of the story (again, a problem for if you haven’t got the sound on or aren’t paying attention).

Finally, beyond the pre-set camera moves I’ve found that the output is much more ‘static’ than it has been traditionally. The catwalk gets only an occasional outing, the screens either side of the desk seem to be mostly unused and for the most part each hour (outside of interviews and VTs) is just a tight headshot of the presenter.