Any radio industry members here? It seems the quality of it has gone downhill a bit lately! I last used it a year ago and it was fairly good, although a bit behind the major newsires. Now it seems awful! They've been putting on large bits of audio and expect you to make the cuts yourself.
Strange forum for you to bring this up. I would suggest Digitalspy. However, I do work in radio. IRN has pretty much gone downhill but that comes with mass redundancies and a general reduction in quality across the industry. Remember the old saying 'you pay peanuts you get monkeys' ?
Re. Sky News Radio - they're a far more dedicated team than IRN. Much more prepared to roll up their sleeves and get on with it rather than the old dinosaur that is IRN. However, they're a far smaller team and so a lot more errors are made.
So to summarise - IRN - a bit old hat and stale but reliable. Sky - More exciting, edgy script writing and news hungry journos but very raw and sometimes questionable.
I'll say one thing - if you work at a station that takes IRN as opposed to Sky News Radio, you're a bit better off, as you're a lot less likely to whack up the fader at the top of the hour to be greeted by the soundtrack to channel 998 (finding that the dodgybox you use to receive SNR has reset itself!)
I've heard it happen at least once on a station that took SNR!
Does Sky have an equivalent of the Obit Alarm? And does theirs work properly?
Sky's obit alarm is to just watch Sky News - though give it a good 15 minutes in case they've been a bit too gung ho and who they say is dead is actually still with us.
Anyway, I could bore you with the ins and outs of how poor IRN are - but they're the best for small stations who can rely on good top of the hour national bulletins as well as a steady flow of self explained material. Sky is a lot better in terms of content and what they provide you with (as well as being able to capture anything from Sky News TV too) but it's suited to the bigger stations like LBC, Virgin and Talksport with someone who can sit back and think what they're going to do with the deluge of cuts Sky have just sent them.
But Sky is getting a lot better (their copy is often a lot tighter and cliché free) but I guess it's still early days compared with IRN who've been in the business for over 30 years...albeit now a shadow of its former self.
To finish - both are a lot better than ITN Radio News and Network News (remember those!?) I'm reliably informed that a reader for one of them used to shout "bollox" into an open mic at 5 seconds to the hour just to give stations who lifted the fader a little early a treat.
But this isn't a radio forum, so *points and wags finger* - start talking about TV you crazy kids.
