ITV News: Rotas & Presenters

Ohh go back to your sad life and get out of min!

But this barely constitutes typical forum discussion. It's someone keeping lone tabs on who presented the 5.30 bulletin and then publicly fretting when one presenter goes missing for a few days. And it's boring.

I don't see the difference between this and someone posting in the main forum about the idents BBC2 use throughout the day, documenting every junction, every day. "Zoetrope has been used 45 times in the past 12 days, Tent only 6 times - could this signal imminent maternity leave?".

I'd expect to be banned and having "Rotas" in the thread title shouldn't prevent posts in this part of the board being scrutinised similarly. We have a certain *minority* of the membership who post tediously about something that should be confined to journals and spreadsheets, receive soft criticism, respond angrily, then carry on posting.

It's a public forum but there are certain rules and etiquette we must all abide by to maintain it as an accessible place to visit. Some are sticking two fingers up and treating it as their personal diary.

If enough people tell you something is dull, tiresome and making them murderous then you bloody stop posting. We've surely surpassed that point in terms of rota "discussion" now?

Jonny, would rather it was in here and manageable than in the pres thread and hard to sift out - for when the day does come that all rota discussion is banned.

I'd be all for that, the problem has always been it leaks into other threads and brings down the IQ of the forum as a whole. People like that shouldn't be encouraged, it's like taking fat people to mcdonalds and handing them vouchers.

Is there any need for two separate anchor teams to handle the 6.30 and 10? Lots of local stations in the US have the same anchor teams at both 6pm and 11pm.

Your point being?

We're not in America, and it's national television.

I think we are all aware (one would hope) that we are not in America, but however I can see where they are coming from.
Quite a few US networks have fewer main presenters, where as ITV News seems to have quite a lot of "Newscasters".
On one day from first bulletin at 5.30 to the news at ten you could have a total of 6 different presenters covering 4 bulletins, something you probably won't see over on NBC in America for their main network news bulletins.

Well, aside from the breakfast programme, don't the US networks only have one newscast per day? I'm sure the last time I was in the States ABC, CBS and NBC had an evening newscast at 1830 and news at other times of the day was local.

Anyway, what's wrong with there being a variety of presenters? Everyone seems to criticise the BBC for over-using Tim Willcox, so surely some variety is better? And in any case, the BBC is a much worse offender for having too many newsreaders than ITV. The only main newscasters I can think of are Mark, Alastair, Mary and Julie - between them they pretty much cover most weekdays. You can't count the weekend bulletins and the Morning News because more often than not they're covered by freelancers, which is not unusual - even the BBC use odd faces at weekends.

Have you ever thought that there's a lot more to a newsreaders job than just that 30 minutes on air? There's a lot of preparation to be done: meetings to be had, interviews to be recorded, scripts to be written, rehearsals... the list is almost endless. On the few occasions I've visited ITN I've seen Mark Austin in the newsroom in the early afternoon for News at Ten. Can you imagine if one newscasting team was doing both the Evening News and News at Ten on a regular basis? They'd be constantly in and out of the newsroom and studio for hours on end! You might say that Alastair Stewart regularly does the Lunchtime News and Evening News without too much trouble, and both he and Katie Derham did the Lunchtime News and London Tonight. Well, in both of those examples, there was a co-presenter for the later programme who could get involved with preparation while the other was absent reading the Lunchtime News. Newscasters don't just twiddle their thumbs between bulletins - hence why they get paid so much!

And what's that gotta do with efficient use of resources and making a profit? ITV always complain about News being a loss making exercise, it would be helpful if they didn't waste money on more big name anchors than is strictly necessary. I'm quite sure there's other things we can point to as being wasteful spending. People are always critical of the BBC 'spending wastefully', yet they refuse to criticise commercial companies for doing the same thing.

Heck, why have two anchors on each bulletin. The BBC do okay with single anchors on the One, Six and Ten. Why does ITV News have to be double anchored?

2. All three networks have a (very) early morning bulletin as well as the evening news

On weekends some anchors (as they are known in the US) will do the breakfast programme (with a co-anchor) and the evening news. Lester Holt on NBC, and in the past Russ Mitchell on CBS on Saturdays. Now that is a long day!