Very poor tonight,, well below usual Sky News standards, I'm no fan of The Pledge however but at the end of the day it's a News Channel that used to have an excellent reputation for Breaking News and tonight it forgot the basics of that.
I'm not sold on the whole Appointment to View stuff anyway, the fact was Sky News tried that in the past and it failed miserably.
Bangkok is pretty well located and presumably office space a bit cheaper than Singapore.. plus excellent air links. ITV seemed to have made the same choice.
Great news about Istanbul. When a lot of organisations have been closing offices it's great to see Sky going the other direction.
They just need to get something set up in South America now. Pretty shockingly under reported on Sky at present.
Yes, Singapore isn't a great place for a news bureau, it's a smart modern city/country and has got good air links to other places, but not a lot happens there.
Bangkok is a bit more rough and ready but also a couple of hours further north so more central in South East Asia.
Kuala Lumpur is a favourite location for news bureaus too, seems a bit of a compromise between the two
The BBC has long had a presence in Singapore (and of course has Britain itself!) which might be a factor, the World Service's SW transmitters are/were there. It's available there on FM.
Of course the same could be said of Hong Kong, I don't know when they started presenting from Singapore but if it was in the run up to the Hong Kong handover, Singapore was a better bet
Last edited by Inspector Sands on 26 April 2017 9:52am - 2 times in total
I lived in Bangkok for two years, and can back up some of the points being made in previous posts:
- Bangkok is well connected to the rest of the region, although Singapore's Changi airport has the best regional and international connections of any airport in South East Asia
- Bangkok is substantially cheaper than Singapore
- Bangkok has historically had a decent sized foreign correspondents community, particularly since it was neutral in the Second World War (until it developed an "alliance" with Japan, which was essentially invasion-lite) and it was a staging ground for access to Vietnam and Laos during the Vietnam War, and to Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge era. By comparison, Singapore only became a nation state in the mid-60s, and was a province of Malaysia until then
- Bangkok has good but not great infrastructure, whereas Singapore has great infrastructure
- Thailand offers better protection of rights and journalistic freedoms than Singapore, except in the context of the Royal Family
- The Foreign Correspondent's Club of Thailand is over 50 years old, and is in the same building as the BBC and Al Jazeera
- I can't find the article but I specifically remember reading that the Government of Singapore encouraged the BBC to maintain and grow their presence in Singapore before the 1997 Hong Kong handover with the promise that Singapore was opening up in terms of access and freedoms. That never happened, but the economic growth continued well once it recovered from the Asian financial crisis, and so although there is little in the way of Singapore news, there is a very strong business and financial presence in the country, hence Karishma Vaswani is now based there as Asia Business Correspondent
- It has been a shame to see CNN Hong Kong shrink so much in recent years. Programmes like the Asia edition of This Morning, BizAsia, Asia Tonight, and Asia Business Morning are long gone, let alone more recent programmes such as Newsroom and and World Business Today. All that remains is News Stream. I think the BBC now has more live output from Asia than CNN by a long stretch.
