BBC News: Presenters & Rotas

To be fair a lot of the NC and news presenters are usually present - Simon McCoy and Carrie Gracie, Jane Hill and Matthew Amroliwala, and Joanna Gosling are almost always present. As are George Alagiah, Fiona Bruce and Sophie Raworth in term time.

I personally like the variation at weekends - Maxine grates on me because she's unbelievably dull and characterless, and it's nice to see a variety of faces.

I seem to recall on News 24 about 10 years ago the regular presenters were in their own slots for most of the year. For instance, Ben Geoghegan (later Philip Hayton) and Joanna Gosling in the morning, Bill Turnbull/Chris Eakin and Valerie Sanderson, Matthew Amroliwala and Jane Hill in the afternoon and Gavin Esler and Carrie Gracie in the evening. Late night was always Peter Dobbie or Peter Coe and overnights a mixture of Clarence Mitchell, Rageh Omaar, Heather McCarthy and Susan Osman. As I recall, weekends used to be presented by Maxine Mawhinney, Philip Hayton, Peter Coe with Chris Lowe and Gwenan Edwards (later Anna Jones) in the evenings.

If and when these presenters presented they were usually in their own slots - it was highly unusual for a regular presenter to turn up at a different time of day like we have now. N24 had a fairly small pool of reliefs, which included Jon Nicholson, Brenda Paterson, Stefanie Callister, Liz Pike, Mike Embley and possibly a couple of others. Between the regulars and those few reliefs, most of the week could be covered. I also recall that most presenting couples did at least four weekdays and Matthew and Jane always did five. They never ever used business or sport presenters on the main news, either.

In 2011 it's almost impossible to predict who will be presenting when you tune in. Many presenters do far fewer than 4 or 5 days a week and they regularly appear out of slot. What's more, they're far too reliant upon a handful of presenters like Tim Willcox doing huge marathons and thus turning the channel into the Tim Willcox Show.

I know presenters have contracts which stipulate how many hours and days per year they work, but my point is that if they could organise the channel properly 10 years ago, why can't they do it now? My personal opinion is that they have far too many presenters nowadays. They could do with a cull - ITV News did it a couple of years ago and now their rotas are fairly stable and predictable.

Joanna Gosling rarely completes a whole week on the NC!

Shaun Ley on BBC World News now. I have to echo the sentiments of other forumers - these rotas are getting rather irregular. Couldn't Tim have just done this shift?! I don't really like this Shaun fellow. It shows that he works on radio as opposed to TV normally. Very fidgety and moving around a lot.

They reason why the rotas are so ballsed up is because of all the moves.

They are trying people out in different roles because they are either going to salford or staying in london.

For example Victoria Derbyshire on Breakfast news, because she like 5 live is going to Salford. Another example is the Newsround girl (sorry for got her name) maybe doesn't want to relocate to salford so the Beeb are trying to find her a role in London so they don't need to pay or make her redundent. Therefore why shes popping up on world.

Interesting to see Fergal Keane reporting live from inside the Dale Farm travellers site. He's been doing a few reports from there over the past few weeks too - it wouldn't surprise me if he's been dropping in for a while and building up contacts and relationships to make that happen. I know he used to be a Special Correspondent - is that still the case, and do the BBC have others?

Another day on for Adam Parsons, currently on The Hub, alongside Tim Willcox.

Where is Nik Gowing?

Edit: also, Philippa Thomas is in for ZB tonight.

Very much off-topic, but it might interest some nonetheless.

BBC World Service are having a week of different presenters on Newshour. Jeremy Paxman, Christine Ockrent (who?), Redi Tlhabi, Christiane Amanpour and Evan Davis.

http://www.newsonnews.net/radio/11713-amanpour-lined-up-for-bbc-world-service-guest-spot.html

It's interesting this week to see Sophie Long presenting live from the Liberal Democrat conference in Birmingham, and sitting at a desk there. The kind of thing I'd expect someone like Jon Sopel or Huw Edwards to be doing.

Huw Edwards was doing it yesterday for the nationals - and probably will be tonight too.

Ben Brown is back on the News Channel this afternoon too, after quite a while away. The last shift he did was a good few weeks back, and that was a one-off and it was a few weeks before then that he'd presented!

You have to remember that about 10 years ago News 24 didn't really send their regular presenters out on location as much as they do now - for example these days presenters such as Jon Sopel and Ben Brown are regularly sent out to report and broadcast live from where a story is happening e.g. recently Ben Brown in Libya and Jon Sopel from Ground Zero. I don't think it was until after 9/11 when N24 started to do this kind of thing often. Also, the regular faces 10 years ago, apart from maybe Matthew Amroliwala and Jane Hill, were only really confined to News 24. These days, all the regular presenters on the NC, apart from Chris Eakin and Carrie Gracie, two people who rarely have time off from the news channel, present other news programmes such as Breakfast and the nationals, then of course there's Jon Sopel on the Politics Show, Louise Minchin doing daytime programmes and Matthew Amroliwala on Crimewatch.

For the most part I agree with you Rob, sometimes it would be better if the News Channel could be more consistent with their rotas, but it is nice to see flexibility for when certain faces present.

Ben was back in Libya recently reporting on the going-ons there, so maybe he was having time off from that. I think he was also on the NC yesterday afternoon with Emily and then presented the Five from the studio!