It is pretty obvious now in hindsight that News24 were first breaking the news, however this has nothing to do with their journalistic scope, it is purely down to the fact that they had a BBC exec on the train.
Sky showed what they do well; they get the information and pictures first and certainatly do that.
Both channels had lots of 'waffle' tonight as there was lots of time to fill with not much information emerging.
Would be interesting to see how overseas broadcasters are reporting this... I've not seen Fox News reporting on it (apart from during the breaks when the news headlines are provided by Sky), CNN have been reporting on it though with correspondents from ITV - and I noted one caption spelling the Cumbrian town as "Kendall".
News.com.au are reporting it as "One Killed in London Train Crash" (!)
I wouldn't expect the incident to get much coverage by overseas news, to be honest - looking on other websites like CNN.com, it's not even amongst the top stories - any more than I would expect a similar train crash in Germany to get a huge amount of coverage here. While not wishing to demean the casualties incurred yesterday evening, the derailment is not on the scale of, for example, the Paddington or Southall train crashes.
As for coverage here, I agree with what BBC LDN has said in the RTS thread. Sometimes you can practically hear the salivating desperation of presenters and reporters to find out how many dead bodies or severed limbs there are lying about the scene of an accident and then the palpable sense of disappointment when in actual fact, things aren't all that bad as far as 'major incidents' go.
Looks like the BBC were calling the shots when the Accident investigator was speaking to the press, they asked the questions and told him when to start.
Sky still have the breaking news strap up even though it was 15 hours ago.
It is events of this nature which IMO show rolling news coverage at it's worst!
In the first few hours there is little more than speculation and certainly not enough to fill continuous coverage of events for hours on end.
Yes, the story should be covered regularly as it develops but not continuously unless the story is actually unfolding. In this case the event had happened and it was just a case of information being drip-fed to the newsroom as a basis of their coverage.
And the suggestion that news channels were asking viewers to send in pics of the crash is absolutely disgusting!
I think actually last night the traditional news bulletin probably showed the news channels how it should be done - ITV News, without the demands of providing rolling coverage, gave a detailed report of the event focusing on the facts - and not at the expense of other news too.
I always feel with events of this nature is there is something of a sub-concious desire in the newsrooms of 24-hr stations for the story to be worse than it actually is.
Yes, it was tragic for those involved and yes, the story is completly worthy of being the stations main headline. However, the mindless speculation taking over the schedules does no one any favours at all - and there is absolutely no consideration shown for the friends and family of the people who could be involved.
And the suggestion that news channels were asking viewers to send in pics of the crash is absolutely disgusting!
I totally disagree with you there, it's good to see news channels embrasing technology and using it to get pics from the time it happened that they wouldn't be able to. I think Sky did a better job of it too, as from what I saw, News 24 only had a website address, which can't be easily used on mobile, where as Sky had an email address and text number, which pictures can very easily be sent to on mobile.
Last night, I think both channels suffered from the problem of little information, with a lack of light on live pictures. Also, I don't think we can judge channels on who was the first to find out about the crash, as the BBC had a member of staff on that train who would have immedately phoned them. From what I saw this morning, Sky News seemed to have the better coverage, but I could have just missed something.
BBC Tim 24 again! You go to bed and he's on air, and you get up and he's still there!
I feel sorry for Mark Simpson (not
our
Mark Simpson!) - so far he's been the only BBC reporter on the scene since last night, so he's been up most of the night when they've wanted live updates...