[interestednovice]

I take your point Brekkie, but equally when the story is unfolding live (new developments, more information constantly coming in, live pictures available) it’s the right choice to stick with it as people just finding out about it will be turning on the channel and wanting to see the latest developments.

I was just thinking the other day, while watching another poorly-paced hour on the channel, that people like Mike Embley, David Eades, Karin Giannone, Joanna Gosling, Annita McVeigh, Ben Brown & Reeta Chakrabarti were just so good in years gone by. They brought the right mix of warmth and empathy along with great journalistic instincts and incisive questioning. Breaking News was always expertly covered. It’s clearly not all the fault of the individual presenters that this is now no longer quite the case, as resources behind th scenes have become stretched much more thinly and also the “operate your own autocue”, etc, takes up more of the time of the presenters. Casting your mind even further back, even after routine dual-presentation ended, it was almost always used in serious breaking news scenarios as whoever was on shift on WN would join NC and both present together. This would allow one presenter to be reading breaking news lines coming in, and the other to be presenting at any one time. This prevented “filler” making in on air. It also gave behind the scenes staff a boost as they could combine resources. None of that is possible now.