BBC News 24

Was that on Tuesday night / Wednesday morning by any chance? If it is then I taped the programme before it and have got the crossover and to be honest I didn't hear it.

Aside:

I've just seen BBC Weather on both BBC1 and BBC2 (News24). But with different presenters. Helen Willetts on 1 and Dan Corbett on 2.

Just a pointless comment there for you friendly lot to ponder over

Out of interest, why is it that Simon McCoy is still in London?

When he went to N24, they touted him as 'their key on-location anchor for live breaking stories' and in part I imagine that was one of the reasons he was tempted there in the first place.

However, I've never actually seen him presenting outside the studio; it's always Jon Sopel or Chris Eakin.

Is poor McCoy feeling a bit glum at these broken promises, I wonder?

Im guessing that it may be simply he is not known by BBC World viewers yet. Perhaps they have some strategic plan to make him more well known first. If it was just News 24 that was coming from the Vatican then he probably would have gone. May be im just talking rubbish.

I can't vouch for the absolute veracity of this, but I was told that after a couple of live breaking news situations where he was on scene (including, I believe, the building collapse in Scotland last year?), McCoy decided that he preferred studio presenting, which is why we never see him sent out and about. It looked like everyone but McCoy was being sent out to Rome this weekend - with Brian Hanrahan, some bird, Huw Edwards and even Dermot Murnaghan being flown out on our bucks.

I still don't understand this need to send out a familiar face to a big story. Why can't the BBC use the human resources in place more effectively, and let their correspondents that are already there take the weight of the responsibility for breaking the stories? Fair enough, if the correspondent in place is crap, then send some back-up. But I think it's pretty unfair when a decent correspondent gets cast aside just because the big cheeses decide that BBC ONE viewers will be confused if they don't see someone they can instantly name.

And don't get me started on London's use of correspondents in the Regions and Nations.

Maybe all that will change when the cutbacks announced by Mark Thompson come into play?

That is an interesting point, yes.

For instance, the BBC's David Willey has been their Rome correspondent for years... he was actually their correspondent there when John Paul II was installed as Pope in the 70s, and he's still there when the guy dies!

However - and maybe I wasn't watching hard enough - I only heard him on Radio 4 and Radio 5 once each, and he had some fascinating insights, but I didn't see him on TV at all. Seems utterly incomprehensible to do that.

I think Sky really set a precedent for it with the tsunami, and the Beeb felt a bit stood up by it. It does make Sky's coverage look exceptionally slick when they go from a presenter in Krakow to one in St Peter's Sq. to one overlooking the Vatican skyline to one in London, and back again. It's also obviously a hell of a lot easier to do now and significantly cheaper than it used to be.

There's certainly an argument for sending out people who viewers know and trust, but it does worry me to see correspondents who really know what they're talking about passed over in favour of someone who just looks the part.

A flight booked through the BBC is not that expensive, getting presenters down there, and putting them up in a hotel for a night or two is cheap when compared to the cost of running a news operation, I dont like this 'our money' argument all the time, doesnt mean the money shouldnt be spent wisely! Anyway, I think it would be very odd not to have a familar face announce the news of the death or be there for the main network bulletins. The local corresponedents should do the reporting and presenters presenting, its obvious at times like these more people are needed there, did you think the day-to-day correspodents could cope with the ammount of work to cover all the BBC output 24 hrs a day?

Your argument is specious at best. Last minute flights and accommodation tend to be quite expensive to arrange. And of course, one flight and one hotel room for one night are a pittance compared to the £2.6bn (or thereabouts) of licence fee revenue. However, in a time of extreme cost cutting, surely you can understand that lots of these flights and hotel rooms add up to a significant amount of a single department's budget over time. When each department has to cut 15% from its annual expenditure, I'm afraid I simply can't see the justification for sending out a familiar face for the sake of it.

There's no reason that a familiar face can't announce and anchor from London, if it really matters that much to have someone that everyone knows instantly. However, I take issue with being frequently informed of the BBC's vast global resources, correspondents dotted all over the globe etc, and then watching as those same correspondents are relegated to the status of merely "covering" until the 'professionals' arrive, at which point they are shunted out of the way.

You don't need to be needlessly patronising by making out that I'm naive enough to suggest that a single correspondent should be forced to cover all of the output required for all of the news services on radio and television, 24 hours a day for the full duration of the event. That's not what I suggested, and only an idiot, or someone deliberately trying to undermine a valid point, would infer that from what I said.

It's quite obvious that more than one person will be needed to offer continuing coverage of a story for long periods. My point was, and is, that that person does not need to be flown in from London, often at the expense of the designated regional correspondent.

And it's a broader point, not specifically and uniquely targeted to the reporting of the Pope's death. I don't understand why, for example, Simon McCoy had to be flown up to Glasgow (I think it was) following a factory building collapse last year. The BBC has extensive resources in Scotland, teams from BBC Reporting Scotland would have also been on site gathering information for their programme. I don't quite grasp, therefore, why Simon McCoy is deemed more suitable to report on the incident than the people from the region who would have been there much sooner, and who could have taken care of all the reporting live to London. Instead of letting a Reporting Scotland correspondent report direct to News 24, they flew someone up, who would then have had to be briefed on everything that happened, and who would have less first hand knowledge of the story as it broke. Considering McCoy didn't even appear on camera for News 24 until about 3 hours after the news first broke, you can't even use the argument that Reporting Scotland's team would be less accustomed to breaking rolling news. By the time McCoy got there, there was little left to announce that couldn't have been adequately covered by the local team.

The BBC has a lot of extremely competent and experienced correspondents across the country, around the world. A well-known face flown in from London who has less immediate experience of the "feel", the "mood", of what is happening where the news has broken, doesn't improve the quality of the reporting. The face may be familiar; but the fact that it's someone who's arrived late at the party. and most likely doesn't have the depth of awareness that other lesser-known faces may have of the situation, can ultimately only result in poorer quality reporting than those who have witnessed the situation first hand.

A big name can fulfil the same purpose from London that they do on location in such situations, without getting in the way of those people who have been closer to the action.

Jon Sopel is relatively known to World viewers, whereas McCoy isn't. However, Jon is not all that well known. We at World would have expected Nisha Pillai or Nik Gowing in Rome. However, I guess that economics make this impractical.

Nisha and Nik did however pop up in the studio. Hope we see Alistair Yates soon - he is perfect for this type of gravity.

James

He certainly has been A Rome Correspondent until now, mostly on radio but also some out-of-vision two-ways and reports on News 24.

Tamsin Smith has also been reporting from Rome for a while.

David Willey also presented a special programme at 5pm on Radio 4 yesterday:
www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/religion/rams/OBITUARY_Pope.ram

Sorry, went to edit my post, but deleted it! Yes, I meant he is no longer the TV Rome Correspondent. Hence, why cat heard him only on radio. The TV correspondent was seen an awful lot.