BBC World News from New Broadcasting House

The BBC has some quite detailed procedures in place for the obituary coverage of a number of senior world figures and members of the British Royal Family. These include joining networks together (i.e. agreeing an opt-in point for BBC One and potentially other BBC Networks) for a formal announcement, running pre-made obituary packages etc. There are also some protocols on how you cover a breaking news story that develops into a major obituary.

All of these are rehearsed so that staff are experienced, and over time changes can be made to procedures based on changes to technology, studio design, location of obituary packages (at one point they were on tape in a locked cupboard, but as servers have taken over this will surely have changed?) and changes to what the BBC deems is the correct way of handling a major story of this type.

Extra care is taken these days with the rehearsal studio to ensure that it cannot be mistaken for real coverage (both the sound and vision from the studio is flagged constantly as a rehearsal)

indeed - I once saw a rehearsal where they had a live insert from a reporter at "Balmoral" (actually the Glasgow newsroom camera), and they did their piece while holding a piece of paper with "rehearsal" written on it.

Generally the output of the studio is disconnected, so it's hard for anyone to see it by mistake.
The precautions are quite a lot to do with the accidental announcement of the Queen Mum's death when someone saw the rehearsal without realising it was one, and passed it on to Australian media, who broadcast it as true.

ISTR that for some rehearsals that involved Pres, you had to have the studio output left up. So a permanent graphic was keyed saying "Rehearsal" and a constant loop of Philip Hayton saying "This is a rehearsal" was added to the sound mix. Which wasn't in any way annoying.

With this talking of obituaries I was wondering what would happen in the event of Nelson Mandela and The Duke of Edinburgh dying on the same day, one has more relevance to a British Audience and one more of a World Relevance. In that case would WN and UK split or would they broadcast the same bulletin split in half.

I think the closest/more probable is, the birth of William & Kates baby and Mandela dying is more likely.
But lets not speculate.

BBCWN is presented by Dani Sinha, but what caught my attention was the lack of mention of Andy Murray's win... opt to do more serious stories, unlike CNNI. haha.

BBC World News always used to have problems with rights when dealing with Wimbledon, either reporting results with photos and results graphics or not at all. However in around 2003 they did reach a sponsorship deal with Rolex (surprise surprise) to show the wide shot from the Centre and No.1 courts for something like 3 x 1'00 segments a day.. however this was in a separately scheduled item rather than within the news programmes. Can't remember what it was called ... Wimbledon Report?

Yeah they did this again this year as well, noticed theres a new BBC World News on 0.8w using HD parameters, but unfortunately still in SD

1630 GMT Friday. Two major breaking stories - fire on an airline at LHR, closing the runway; and a train crash in Paris. Efficiently and quickly covered by Sky. And BBC World News? They are late with LHR pics and have no pics of Paris (unlike Sky). Then they cut to Weekend World, leaving the field clear for Sky.

Not really a World story though I woud imagine, more of a Domestic story...

I've never really understood this school of thought. Is the UK not in the world and as such should be covered by BBC World? If there was an incident at an American airport you can bet your life it would be covered, however trivial. Heathrow is one of - if not the - biggest airport in the world and has many millions of international passengers travelling through it, so I would have thought it would be of interest to most people.

I was also surprised (or not really) to see them carry on with normal schedule when CNNI was all over both of these stories. If the London story wasn't that important then the train accident surely did since it had actual casualties.

They could have simulcasted NC. I do wish they would be more flexible when it comes to simulcasting domestic on big UK stories, the same way CNNI does with CNN US.