Euronews live

Bit of a random one but there are no other Euronews threads available to post in.

I'm currently watching their live coverage of the San Francisco plane crash. It is quite possibly the most abysmal coverage I have ever watched of anything. The narrator is literally describing what is on screen: "there are the emergency slides which would have been used to evacuate the plane", "there's some people, some of which may be survivors." For some reason they're mixing live footage of the plane with identical "earlier" footage.

I get that the very nature of Euronews makes it particularly difficult to cover live events but given how many years they've been broadcasting you would have thought they would have figured out how to do it properly by now. Really in a situation like this they only need to have very short periods of live footage with a description before going back to the pre-recorded news rather than dragging it out by describing the picture being shown with no additional information.

It's fair to say though that's the same for most broadcasters in the early moments of such events - looping the same footage over and over again or airing live pictures with little to no information, so the newsreader has to fill by stating the obvious or making assumptions.

Considering Euronews isn't really targetting the live rolling news market I'd have thought their best option would be a brief newsflash inserted into the running order then updated as information is available. Similarly news channels would be better off reporting the breaking news and then moving on to other stories, waiting until they have more info to bring it to viewers, rather than airing continuing distant long shots and speculating what might be happening.

Funnily enough I watched euro news for the first time for this story. Really can't see how it is the most watched news channel in Europe - really uninspiring.

But who's going to want to watch that?

A major incident like this one brings in the viewers, both concerned people who have some link to the story (relatives at the airport?), and onlookers, all of who want up to the minute news on what's happening. If BBC News decided to report the crash, then go back to other stories until they had an update, all those viewers would immediately switch to Sky News. If they did the same, they'd keep going through the dial until they found someone doing live coverage.

That said, hours of looping video and filling is tedious and does no service to any viewers. Maybe there's a more creative solution, possibly involving the likes of Sky's HD info panels, which allows them to have their normal reports playing in a 2/3 screen, while keeping news, updates and a shrunk live video feed of the incident to the side? When there's an actual update on the incident, you can interrupt and go full screen, but when you're filling, those after news of the incident can follow, but other viewers can continue to watch the same reports on other stories they did 15 minutes ago.

BBC News actually did leave the story at least once last night, and aired The Bottom Line as scheduled at 2030 just as the story was breaking