[interestednovice]

I couldn’t agree more.

And actually, although I was initially posting regarding branding, I have the same sentiment towards the channel as a whole as well.

It was always going to be difficult to satisfy everyone with a merger, as we’ve all said here before. But they had experimented with it during Covid as an emergency measure and settled on OK mapping of a typical hour with a good range of stories for the 10am slot. In fact, it wasn’t too different from 9am for UK viewers and would have been most noticeably different for World News viewers - but, even then, global coverage wasn’t too bad. It also retained more of the relaxed timings and flow of a typical NC hour instead of WN rigid timings which can lead to awkwardness.

So, yes, they should basically have gone for that across the day and, as in 2008, simply branded every hour as BBC News initially - possibly with the exception of existing shows such as The Context, Newsday, World News America and Outside Source which they could have carried over into the new service. Further experimentation and new brands could easily have come later.

It’s become clear to us that, basically, the new channel concept wasn’t ready at launch but (for budgetary reasons) it had to  be launched when it was. However, they have tried to do too much new too quickly and everything has fallen apart in terms of quality suffering - and frankly bizarre moments such as Carl Nasman welcoming us to BBC News from Washington and then immediately starting to talk about Gary Lineker to a worldwide audience. I am not sure he was convinced that the running order he was reading made sense, and I certainly wasn’t. Not to mention the fact that, at 2am, the UK audience is tiny so it would be justifiable to skew more towards WN at that time of day.

If they needed to “play for time” to figure everything out, they really ought to have stuck to a format like the “interim service” that existed for a month. OK, we were still critical at the time, but it overall mostly got the balance right. They then could have introduced the capability for UK opts, allowing the interim service to “skew more World” for the global feed. Then they could have started thinking about editorial priority more generally. Then, new presentation like the new countdowns. Only finally new shows.