BBC News Mandela Coverage

Cando, the domestic News Channel is closed overnight. There isn't anyone available to run live domestic rolling coverage between 1am and 6am. If the news is of significant importance, like the Helicopter crash last weekend, then BBC World News will run with it but if there is a significant World event like the death of a major World icon then that must take precedence, BBC World News doesn't have the same charter of public inormation as BBC News UK.
BBC World News is not directly funded by the licence fee, it's a commercial operation so you get as much say in it's output as you do with CNN or Al Jazeera who would be BBC World News's chief rivals across the world.
Speaking of rivals, I've yet to see anyone say that Sky News were up and down the East Coast all night.

Mandela's death is a huge news story. The BBC rightly chose to run with it ahead of all others, including the storm. It's about news judgement - and I'm sure the right decision was made. And, as has already been said, there wouldn't be the staff to run a domestic night shift anyway.

I think the worst tidal surges in 50 years are of significant importance to UK viewers, doesn't matter if its a simulcast of BBC World it was being broadcast on BBC1 and BBC1 has a public information charter so imo they should've broken away from the Mandela coverage for a while and reported on what the viewers wanted. The hashtag #UKStorm last night was mostly just tweets of people complaining about the lack of updates from both the BBC and Sky. That says something.

Except last week, the NC and World did remain separate after 1am.

In that case, maybe we should take the blame away from Broadcasting House and ask ourselves why the affected regions didn't cutaway and run the coverage themselves?

Not exactly, the TOTH was similcast, but as per BBC World's normal weekend schedule, they broke away after 10 minutes for usual pre recorded magazine programs while the live News team (still run by World News) produced the rest of the bulletin exclusively for the News Channel.

Do the regions have the permission to do that? And would the regions have staff available to that hour? Surely it's down to BBC News not the regions to update the country on severe weather.

Well Broadcasting House certainly didn't have the staff available, so why not use local resources, Perhaps even a webcam into a local radio station. As for permission, if it's that important to inform, why wouldn't they have permission.

I expect BH would have more staff available than a smaller region which wouldn't be going on air until 6.20am during breakfast, what about the staff available to provide BBC news channel updates during world adverts? would they not be available.

Also handled by BBC World News overnight normally. There isn't a separate UK team.

BBC World News isn't funded by the licence fee - but the overnight service that goes out both domestically and internationally is.

None on BBC TV, maybe but there's more to the BBC than that. Local radio is a much better medium for such information, I'm sure they were across it.

They were, BBC local radio across the East Coast opted out of networked programming to provide the latest news, along with Heart Radio in East Anglia.