Have 24 hour rolling news channels had their day?

Written by the former BBC News Director Richard Sambrook.

any follow ups?

article here ……..

MEDIA on THEGUARDIAN.COM
04-Feb-2014 @ 12:49

How about the Twitter newschannel?

The 'traditional' news channel format doesn't have a particularly useful future in all likelihood. Certainly, you only have to watch Ben Brown's thrilling coverage of helicopter pictures of an entire boat's slow journey down a flooded country street to know technology has outstripped need - or rather the technological possibilities have been developed before a day-to-day need for them has. I can't imagine a future news service not featuring live and packaged video and audio, as I think consumers respond better to live people than they do text-based services. The question is whether such a service is required 24/7, regardless of running order/newsworthiness.

Love or hate the partisan, often i'll-informed discussions Fox News and MSNBC have come to be dominated by, both have managed to create a nice service viewers actually value. More than that, they've found a way to make their channels 'appointment-to-view' programming in a way that standard bulletins on Sky News or the BBC have never acheived. Programming/content diversification is the only way, MSNBC seemed to find, to make a news channel profitable. But I doubt a UK-based news channel - particularly one still wanting to focus on straight, unbiased reporting - will ever have the budgets or resources to replicate the US successes.


Tangential thought: could BBC News (Channel) and BBC Four be merged? Considering viewing figures, tightening budgets and the acknowledged wide availability of alternative news services, could you merge NC's daytime operation with BBC Four's factual primetime programming? Effectively something closer to BBC Radio Four/Five Live's format, while maintaining the ability to pull away for breaking news without inconveniencing the Eastenders-sized audiences? Not only would there only be the costs of producing and transmitting a single channel, rather than the two at present, but there would be a far greater and more natural way of 'filling' time with news bulletins and BBC four programming - particularly at the weekend - potentially reducing each service's budget needs?

(Not advocating, just questioning)

Has anyone else notice that BBC news is filled with fillers at 30mins past each hour on many jct during the weekends?

This is a concept certainly applied already in Europe - for example, in Germany, N24 have a mixture of rolling news and documentary programming. It would be interesting to see how it would go down in the UK. Personally I believe there is still enough demand for the back-to-back news bulletins to justify it, but increasingly less so. If technology would allow for a decent digital service on all television platforms the concept could be rendered pretty much obselete. Imagine if you could watch an entire news bulletin from the beginning regardless of when you tune in...

Agree with most of that article - I don't use them anywhere near as much as I did, and usually if a story is of such importance it's worth watching rolling coverage it'll crop up on BBC1/2 anyway.

The UK news market does kind of miss the original ITN concept of airing bulletins every 15/30 minutes rather than just sticking with one story for hours on end. Actually it's probably for that reason I do find BBC News more watchable at the weekend.

Certainly has opened a can of worms. Adam Boulton throwing his toys out of the pram on Twitter, Krishnan Guru-Murthy joining in too.

Really ? I was in a bar on Sunday night, the screens had BBC News (24) on. Every time I looked at a screen they
were banging on about that 46 year old actor (who I'd never heard of, and nor had my companions) who had OD'd himself (it would appear). Self serving, self obsessed, media village luvvie stuff were the comments bouncing around.

Banks seem to like the news channels. My local Barclays has the NC on the monitor while waiting in the queue. I've also seen the NC in HSBC in Westfield Stratford City.

When SSN was on Freeview, I've seen in it numerous South London barber shops.

It's a funny one - Al Jazeera English couldn't fit into the cookie cutter of 24-hour-news described in this article. I suspect the problem isn't news channels but their model. No one likes watching people rail off coverage of nothing from a scene like Sky and the BBC insist on doing, for example. AJE doesn't do endless live satellite catch-ups, and shows documentaries and other news output for much of its broadcast day. As a poster pointed out above, Fox, MSNBC and to a degree CNN have abandoned what Sky and BBC spend so much time and resource on, and certainly the former two have been pretty successful in building an audience.

To be fair BBC also does this to a very small degree, especial at the weekend, Look up the iplayer and you will see the list.

Click, Newsbit, book review etc. BBC got its foot in the door it just needs to expand.

And something else we discussed here a few weeks ago was how stagnant Sky and the BBC are compared to a few years ago - after years of constantly evolving they've both been pretty much in the same place for the last 5-6 years or so.