NBC splits from Euronews

Breaking: US broadcaster NBC News has ended its relationship wit European news broadcaster Euronews, with Egyptian businessman Naguib Sawiris' MGN buying out its shares in the company, according to an internal memo

— Mark Di Stefano (@MarkDiStef) April 20, 2020

No big surprise given the new relationship with Sky. Amazed Euronews has survived this long really though doesn't it get some EU funding?

From the day that Sky and NBC announced they joint World News venture it was clear that their priority was not EuroNews. It also explains why they eventually opted not to rename the channel EuroNews NBC.

I really can’t remember the last time I watched EuroNews properly. It doesn’t help that it’s the only major news channel on Sky that doesn’t broadcast in HD.

Saw that coming miles away.

"No Comment"

Perhaps they can have another go at putting together a decent schedule? The Raw Politics programmes were good and there was at one point a decent line-up being formed.

I think the mistake they made was introducing a schedule at all. The one thing Euronews had going for it in days gone by was you knew exactly what you were going to get - a quick gallop through the main stories of the day without any frills, decent business coverage and entertaining strands on European arts and culture. The rot set in with Lambie Nairn’s rebrand in 2016 (what the flying chuff was a Prime Edition?) then a year later, Deborah Turness ruined the channel in pursuit of a younger audience who were never going to watch it anyway. The horrendous brand recognition scores speak for themselves:

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/media/explore/tv_channel/EuroNews

The sooner they revert to agency footage with voiceover and ditch the garish, ugly, intrusive graphics, the better.

Here's the more complete writeup from the FT, which says that the transaction was more or less amicable. Naguib Sawiris will own 88% of the operation, with EBU members and other local sources owning the rest. I guess Sawiris sees Euronews as an important tool to combat the misinformation from RT. I also noticed that Tesa Arcilla announced a few days ago that she's joining NBC Sky World News as a correspondent.

https://www.ft.com/content/0f5d1cbe-a94e-4801-ab23-6480e487e6ee



Part of me also misses the simplicity of the original format, but on the other hand, they needed to do something different if they wanted to appeal to a larger audience in these times. If all they're going to do is run agency footage that every other news channel has access to, then Euronews is never going to provide viewers a compelling reason to choose them over anything else. The move to establishing bureaux and in-vision correspondents started several years ago, and it was a good idea. From what I read, Euronews was already planning on doing in-vision, anchored newscasts before NBC bought a stake. It seems like NBC only accelerated those plans and added another source of content, but maybe not much else.

As far as presentation, I agree with you -- the Lambie Nairn and David Lowe redesign was and is a mess. The 2008 redesign was the best.

I wonder will Darren McCaffrey who used to work for Sky News also join NBC Sky World News.

Did she? I don't have any recollection of that. I know that she bounced around a number of different operations for a while, including AJE and RT.

Not sure if this is in the cards, but it might be cool if NBC Sky World News were to give Bill Neely a prominent slot like what Christiane Amanpour has on CNNI.

No surprise here. I mean if Sky is the chosen partner for NBC's new international news channel, then what value does Euronews add to the Comcast portfolio?

Yes, she's becoming Asia Pacific Correspondent.