International News Presentation: Past and Present

They all look modern and fresh.
I particularly like Morganmagazin (moma). Minimalism is good. It would look good for Good Morning Britain.

5:30am? That's 4:30am GMT! Their morning shows basically begin when for us it's the middle of the night! How come?

05:30 is only half an hour before the main UK breakfast shows start or end overnight “wheel of news” programming.

Are you sure? I thought that BBC Breakfast and GMB start at 6:00am our time, which due to time zone difference it is 7:00am in Germany

You're gonna be shocked to find out about what time breakfast programmes start in Japan.

Breakfast shows around the world have this rather odd convention of being scheduled based on their local time rather than UK time.

I want to know, please tell me!

Well, if you really want to know, NHK's morning programme starts at 19:30 (although most viewers in Japan would argue that it starts at 4:30).

Do you mean it starts in the evening and last all night?

To put it clearly: it starts at 4:30 am, Tokyo time.

People in Japan live in a different time zone as people in the UK. When the night starts in the UK, Japan reaches the very last hours of the night.

This is due to the Earth's endless rotation on itself: when some parts of the Earth's surface are exposed to the sun (and are therefore in day light), some other parts are in the night; and because our planet rotates on itself, at some point, parts which were in the night become lit by the sun, and parts which were under the day light start entering into night. And the cycle repeats endlessly.

They have special guests on Japanese morning programmes too, this particular episode featured an earthquake as special guest right at the top of the hour one morning, making it as punctual as the trains in Japan:


(Japan sits on an earthquake belt and has many earthquakes every year, and so this earthquake warning stuff is actually quite common on NHK, as they're the public broadcaster over there and are required to basically "get the word out" as it were when an earthquake strikes, and all the "chattering" at the end of the video is the wake-up call for Japanese TVs to power up and tune to NHK at full volume.

Its sort of a slight oxymoron that the warning tone for an earthquake/tsunami in Japan sounds like a mobile phone going off followed by the information, and yet in America where you have the Emergency Broadcast System (and the later Emergency Alert System) which generates the most irritating tone going and I believe is also used on the occasions where they test it)

Many US stations start local news at 4am local time - I think some have even started at 3am on occasion?