[DTV]

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.

There is certainly a bit of inconsistency in editorial balance and I'm not sure how much is down to differing people in the editor's chair or whether there are just no rules for anybody to follow. But taking everything together, I think it's hard to come to any conclusion other than things happened too soon. Pretty much every fault in the merged channel - whether it's the lack of clear rules on editorial balance, questions of format, the recruitment process being incomplete, staggered and half-arsed graphics changes - would all have been avoidable with a longer period of preparation and/or phasing in. Now, obviously there were financial considerations in play, but it's clear a lot of crucial decisions were either rushed or just not really taken.