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BBC Thunderbolts - Are they Red, White or Blue... or yellow? (September 2015)

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DE
DE88
Brekkie posted:
Doesn't give you much faith in MeteoGroups' forecasts when they think Spring is in September.


sjhoward posted this on 19 June:

sjhoward posted:
Chatting to a Met Office colleague today, I understand that the Met Office / BBC contract has been extended until the autumn.

One point of interest is that after the changeover the BBC will still be broadcasting branded Met Office weather warnings - with a requirement to be clear that the Met Office is not responsible for the remainder of the forecast.

Interesting to consider how that might be handled in practice, especially for the longer range 5-day warnings where the different providers' meteorological models might not match.


I wonder if the new corporate font has something to do with this?
MD
mdtauk
DE88 posted:
I wonder if the new corporate font has something to do with this?


I think its more likely to be staffing, budget, and technological issues, and yes, I expect it to use the new corporate font. It probably coincides with updates to the BBC Weather website and apps.
JA
JAS84
DE88 posted:
Brekkie posted:
Doesn't give you much faith in MeteoGroups' forecasts when they think Spring is in September.


sjhoward posted this on 19 June:

sjhoward posted:
Chatting to a Met Office colleague today, I understand that the Met Office / BBC contract has been extended until the autumn.

One point of interest is that after the changeover the BBC will still be broadcasting branded Met Office weather warnings - with a requirement to be clear that the Met Office is not responsible for the remainder of the forecast.

Interesting to consider how that might be handled in practice, especially for the longer range 5-day warnings where the different providers' meteorological models might not match.


I wonder if the new corporate font has something to do with this?
That would be a minor alteration, they could've designed the graphics with Helvetica or Gill Sans, and changing them to Reith would be easy. ITV did this once. They were using Helvetica too, but when ITV changed their logo in 2006 and brought in a corporate font, the weather graphics were updated to use it.

*
*
LX
lxflyer
Alina Jenkins presenting the weather on BBC News Channel this afternoon.
LL
London Lite Founding member
lxflyer posted:
Alina Jenkins presenting the weather on BBC News Channel this afternoon.


She was also on yesterday as well.
RD
RDJ
She's just done the national forecast on BBC One.
MI
m_in_m
RDJ posted:
She's just done the national forecast on BBC One.

Alina's Twitter profile is now "presenter and producer for BBC Weather"

Looks like we have one new presenter now. I wonder what training new presenters will receive. Haven't they historically been trained Meteorologists or I undergone specific training with the Met Office?
NE
neonemesis
Historically many of them were employed by the Met Office directly and contracted to the BBC. I think that model has been binned in this restructure.

Presumably however, to be a competent weather presenter some level of meteorological training will be required. No reason why MeteoGroup couldn't provide it.
BA
bilky asko
noggin posted:
Spencer For Hire posted:
thegeek posted:


From the blog:

Still the new system is in the hands of Creative Director, Yael Levey; she's created "6 personas" so that the design development serves a range of different needs. The personas are Jenny, Jade, Tim, Tony, Helen and Imran.

Could someone who speaks fluent bull***t translate this for me please?


It's called knowing your audience and designing for them. It's a perfectly normal and valid technique. It's used in TV production and all sorts of other areas of content creation (advertising in particular)

Each 'persona' has different requirements, and the personas are there to ensure that the team designing and changing things consider the impact on a range of users. It's there to avoid people designing a look, or a system, or UX or a programme, that meets their own personal needs very well, and those of others less so.


Wasn't the most recent well known example from a Phones4U PowerPoint? I seem to recall the personas were a bit unusual...
NG
noggin Founding member
m_in_m posted:
RDJ posted:
She's just done the national forecast on BBC One.

Alina's Twitter profile is now "presenter and producer for BBC Weather"

Looks like we have one new presenter now. I wonder what training new presenters will receive. Haven't they historically been trained Meteorologists or I undergone specific training with the Met Office?


Until the mid-90s all on-screen BBC Weather people were full Met Office meteorologists (*) and would often be forecasting in an off-screen capacity. The Met Office forecasters also prepared the 'symbol' graphics with the cloud, sun, rain icons on them (these were not created automatically)

In the mid-to-lates 90s, co-inciding roughly with the BBC News 24 launch, the staffing levels of the weather centre increased, and some new forecasters were recruited, alongside a number of weather 'presenters' who didn't have meteorology degrees or similar forecast training, but were properly trained by the Met Office to a decent standard in understanding weather well enough that they could present the weather credibly, un-scripted. Both groups of people were, I believe, Met Office employees - with one of the forecasters also effectively managing the weather centre at the BBC.

(*) Francis Wilson and the Breakfast Time weather was a separate contract and not part of the BBC/Met Office deal - which was always a bit of an oddity.
:-(
A former member
So how did it work for his holls? Ian McKenna did do a few breakfast times.
NE
neonemesis
That's an oddly specific question!

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