BBC news tonight

I take it bbc are doing TWO live bulletins tonight? one for Scotland at 9.40pm then another one for England and wales 10.15

George Alagiah just said and now one bbc one, Reporting Scotland...

It happened a few times before. Why the BBC can't try and arrange the schedule of Network so that only one bulletin needs to be done and save costs is beyond me.

It doesn't really cost anything to do them - unless there are satellite lives in both bulletins that the News Channel wouldn't have done otherwise.

It is tricky to totally align networks at New Year because BBC One Scotland really do go off and do their own thing. The same thing used to happen (and may still) on Saturdays when there are different sporting schedules on BBC One and BBC One Scotland.

Same situation with ITV News tonight - they did a special bulletin for STV

This has happened several times this year - though usually Scotland end up being the later bulletin as sport causes the need for the second bulletin. I often wonder why Scotland aren't able to just extend their Reporting Scotland bulletin and include the content from the UK wide bulletin. There have been occasions where the content was all packages rather than any lives. I guess this could set a precedent that the BBC would not wish for.

As has been said there is no real additional monetary cost of producing two bulletins - the same teams would work on both. The difference is the impact on the news channel. I would like to see a general commitment that weekend news is scheduled within the 1700 and 2200 hours on Saturday and 1700/1800 on Sunday with the BBC News Channel then opting to run the BBC World bulletin for the front half hour and a recorded programme for the second half. The same should happen at Breakfast; automation surely could allow the adverts to be replaced with BBC promotions?

I agree that, assuming there is no extra costs in opting to a World bulletin (as I'm not an expert I wouldn't know) it would be nice to see a World bulletin in these situations, but that all depends if there is a World bulletin at that time - BBC World News has a lot of pre-recorded programmes on of a weekend, even in the first half hour with just headlines at the TOTH and BOTH.



Also, this should really be in the National News thread.

Really? I thought there was an OFCOM requirement that all ITN bulletins on ITV had to be carried by all regions.

The requirement would be that ITN have to produce the bulletin should STV require a separate one.

Why not just have the Reporting Scotland team present both the national and regional news instead of impacting on the News channel schedule?

Good point - how difficult would it be to get all the content up to BBC Scotland I.e. - scripts, packages etc

Then you start up the argument about the Scottish Six / Scottish Ten...