International News Presentation: Past and Present

And here is the promo for that Local TV trial:

Oh yeah that channel replaced three others when they were closed by the Ukranian government

Strewth! That's a dreadful voiceover and an awful promo. File it under "what were they smoking?".

In France, many cities and some départements get short localized news inserts / opt-outs during regional news blocks on France 3. Unlike the pan-regional news, which is anchored live from a studio, the local news is typically pre-taped, about six or seven minutes long, and presented from the streets or, as in this case from Lyon, without an anchor at all:

And some areas get inserts in minority languages, as in this Breton-language example:

In this case I wonder when this one is going to be closed then

Glad to see that the Breton language still exists, I thought it was near extinct!

A news bulletin on Canal+ from 1993

Unrelated, but I've always been a fan of Étienne Robial's branding work for Canal+

It's a cool design, but I don't know if I have already said this before but.....the Canal+ backdrop used back then reminds me a little bit of BBC News' studio between 1988 and 1993. Does anybody else see the resemblance?

I apologize in advance for getting slightly off-topic here:



Many regional languages and dialects in "metropolitan" France were affected by policies of "centralization" in the 20th century, which included imposing the Standard French into schools and forbidding the regional dialects and languages there. Some languages survived, such as Breton, Alsacien, Occitan, or Basque (though weaker than on the Spanish side of the border), and several of these are also shown on bilingual road signs for example; but many dialects are now only speaken by a few old people (such as the one in my region, Saintongeais).

It seems to me that because of that, regional languages in France are not as strong, present, and alive, than in Germany and Spain for instance (there are even regional television channels entirely in Basque, Galician, Catalan there, although it may also have to do with looser restrictions on free-to-air television there).



Ah, Étienne Robial… ♥ Not only did he create the whole branding for Canal+ in 1984 and then again in 1995, he also worked for M6, La Sept (ARTE's French ancestor), i>Télé… He has a sort of a "cult status" among French television design!

In a conference held last year, he told that the first elements of Canal+'s first visual identity were made by night, in London, using equipments belonging to Channel + and the BBC.

"L'habillage est fait à Londres en 1984, la nuit, sur les palettes Quantel de Channel 4 et de la BBC."

"Les alphabets sont fait à la main, à partir de lettres peintes, en jouant avec les tailles, l'œil étant le seul critère de positionnement" #EtienneRobial #MotionPlusDesign pic.twitter.com/SGBAeJm3BN

— lenodal (@lenodal) September 19, 2020

It's a shame what happened to TV Breizh for example in France, which is now nothing more than a paywall channel showing US cop shows and TF1's French crime back catalogue.

The UK for example has PSB regional channels for Scots Gaelic and the Welsh language in Wales, yet France seems to be largely standard French. My mother speaks standard French as her family on her mothers side are from the Île-de-France, but struggles with regional variations of French dialect (although she's better with Normandy French these days) and that's before you start with the regional languages!