[ViridianFan]

I will admit that I’m only occasionally putting the channel on anymore whereas I’d have it playing all day before, but the pace is just awful. As others said outside source and 100days worked because they were different to the rest of the schedule. 

I used to really enjoy outside source when Ros was on the balcony because even though you’d spend longer on one story the whole show felt it had a good pace because each way the story was looked at it as short and snappy plus Ros’ own presenting style helped. 100 days worked because of the relationship between Katy and Christian.  I know an budgets wouldn’t allow it now, but it showed the difference double heading can make. 

I will hold my hands up and admit I can be one of those who doesn’t get the need for whoever is presenting the news to be live from the location. Clive in Kyiv was very different as he was “living” the experience but a lot of the time the presenter being there doesn’t add anything as it’s the reporter leading the story who ends up stood next to them where it could all be done down the line and allow the report to almost take on the presenter role at that point (in my head that made sense but I don’t think I’ve worded it in the best way!)

The reporting from the newsroom just annoys me. It’s not as if they’re presenting from their desk they’re walking to a presentation area, just walk into the studio. If you want to make it look more like they’ve just stopped to tell us this get them to walk through the door at the side of the studio to give the impression this is all actively happening. 

Having never watched world pre-merger I can’t comment on the balance of stories, but looking at it through my “BBC News channel (old) and BBC world are no more, it’s BBC News channel (v2)” glasses it feels from the times I’m dropping in very much to be swings and roundabouts. I put it one day and it did feel very much of UK focus that day, but then a few days later in inadvertently put the context on and it was so overly USA focused that I did wonder if it had been similar stories based in the UK that there would have been people on here commenting about the amount of time a run of UK focus story got. 

It’s a difficult balancing act because they’ve got to keep world viewers happy to keep that revenue stream going but they’ve equally got to keep the UK Government and UK license fee payers happy because without them the whole corporation gets carved up and sold to the highest bidder and then we slip into the world of keeping shareholders happy and cutting costs to keep profits up to payout to share holders. 

As DTV and many others have said before, the format of the hour needs looking at. I definitely think at the top of the hour it should be 10/15mins covering all too stories with a briefer 5 mins on the half hour to give viewers an overview of what’s happening that day. We discussed before the radio news do a good job at this. There could even be then the possibility that the person who is there to do the UK opt out could do an opt out there with more UK focuses stories before returning to the combined studio for the remaining half hour

(Sorry it’s a long one but not been on and catching up on the conversation my mind  started bubbling away)