MO
A long article, but worth a read...
What's everyone think of this? I disagree that rolling news on TV is on its way out anytime soon. However, I do think that they should learn a lot from the web, and use a lot of the info available on the web - possibly onscreen.
Something like using the LATEST: ticker on BBC News online for the News 24 ticker. More use of blogs etc. Making a lot more content from News online available via the red button.
I disagree with his point that news channels are slower than the internet. Sometimes it is, most of the time it isn't. Even when it is, what's the first thing you do if you see, "Huge bomb blast in central London. More soon..." on the news online ticker? You head for a telly and put News 24 on!
One interesting point he makes is about 'BREAKING NEWS' straps. He says that a story about Ariel Sharon having a massive stroke gets the same strap as one about Portsmouth sacking its manager. Perhaps he's right. Perhaps news channels should find a way of grading these straps, perhaps getting bigger depending on the size of the story (just like news online changing their front page for big big stories).
MediaGuardian posted:
Rolling news RIP
While the 24-hour news giants fight for a relatively small number of viewers they are overlooking the biggest threat to their existence. Paul Mason explains.
Monday January 16, 2006
The Guardian
It has been war between the TV executives lately in the battle for audience share in rolling news. But here is a real breaking story - what if the bosses are fighting the wrong battle? According to Barb, the average Sky viewer watches the channel for nine minutes a week; BBC News 24 also scores nine minutes. With the demise of the ITV News Channel, the rival executives will now be scrapping over the two minutes a week it garnered from its viewers before it closed. Added to Fox News, which gets a - surely notional - one minute per week, the combined market for rolling news is thus 21 minutes a week, per person. Given the average TV viewer watches the box for 26 and a half hours a week, that is an awfully small universe to be getting excited about. Even if you count average seven-day reach - the number of people who see a rolling news channel at some point during the week - Sky's 11.6% and News 24's 13.2% (Barb multichannel homes, December 18 2005) still mean, given the choice, eight out of 10 viewers do not watch.
Until now, there has at least been a business rationale for rolling news. If 24-hour news is "the future" of TV - capturing an ever greater proportion of the audience while stimulating new styles and technologies for broadcast news - then it makes sense to invest in it.
Digital age
But rolling news is no longer the future. In 2004 the average broadband household spent 16 hours a week online. As anyone who uses any half-decent news platform on the web understands, the internet is faster, delivers instant depth and unrivalled interactivity. Rolling news - and here I mean the concept of a separate channel and its traditional front-end studio format - is the genre of television least suited to survive the transition to the digital age.
With news websites starting to fill up with audio and video clips, we are seeing just the beginning of "convergence". When TV over broadband is fully fledged, and the video stream is the dominant element on the page, seamlessly linked to background material and even services, Sky News and News 24 will suddenly look old-fashioned. Almost every other product in the digital broadcast space is a finite piece of video, designed to be downloaded, repeated, paused, shared and even "mashed up".
The battle of the "Breaking news" straps is just a symptom of how rolling news has run up against the limits of its technical capacity. The visual harangue of "Breaking news" is necessary to attract the viewer's attention, but head-to-head competition dictates it must be done as loudly for "Sharon suffers stroke" as for "Portsmouth sacks manager". The problem is, unless the rolling news channel consists of an endlessly repeated bulletin, there must be a delay before the viewer actually gets the news, if by news we mean something more than a line of wire copy copied and pasted from Reuters and AP.
Retro feel
All the evidence suggests that audiences want a timely, authored, edited summary of what has happened - "breaking" or otherwise - updated to reflect new knowledge and events. Now they can get it on the web in an instant. The BBC website's "Watch a summary" button takes you to a looped three-minute bulletin read out over pictures. Reuters' website provides something similar, updated hourly.
To me, these "instant news" bulletins, which have a radio-style retro feel about them, seem to speak the syntax of the web, and of converged media, better than the rolling channel format. You do not have to wait for some commentator to shut up, or for the quarter-hour summary. You do not have to bother trying to decipher the multiple meanings of the onscreen straps, captions and tickers that are the trademark of rolling news: all the depth and all the choice is available simultaneously.
I am not saying the current tactical battle between Sky and the BBC is irrelevant. Nor do I subscribe to the view that 24-hour news has been a waste of time and money. It has tuned up TV news organisations to respond to both local and global events much faster than a decade ago. And it has freed up editorial thinking. All this will survive.
But the rise of the instant broadcast news summary throws into sharp focus some of the inadequacies of the rolling format that we have, up to now, lived with because they seemed necessary.
Old-school TV journos complain that there is "not much TV" on 24-hour news - that is, not enough authored video and too much reporting live to camera from the fence lines and police tape at the edge of minor crises. But live airtime is cheap - tape has to be viewed, edited, voiced and checked for copyright. In addition to which, in order to produce it, the journalist has to leave the live position. And the longer the videotape is running, the bigger the danger that something will "happen" meanwhile. So rolling news was always going to be a world of talking heads.
In the process, we lost the concept of "story" - an editorial process whose outcome is a narrative with a beginning, middle and end, and hopefully a meaning. During the rise of rolling news that was something we just had to live with. Now we don't.
The internet as a medium has no fear of the finished narrative: "on-demand" news, downloaded as individual stories or bulletins, fits naturally with the interactive instincts of web users, which they are bringing to broadband TV as it emerges. The finished story also fits in with the economics of broadband. Everything else in this medium is designed to be stored, shared or sold.
It is not hard to imagine how "instant news" bulletins could evolve to become the front end of an integrated broadband news service, with links to text, archive, live camera positions and longer analytical packages. It is not hard to imagine the 24-hour newsgathering operations evolving to meet the needs of cross-media instant news. But it is hard to imagine an entire channel devoted to rolling news surviving that transition.
Rolling news diehards argue it cannot be equalled in a crisis; that its finest hours have been - as with the bombing of Baghdad in 1991, or the bombing of London in 2005 - when the camera simply follows compelling action, and the whole world tunes in. That is true. But in every crisis worth its name network channels like BBC1 and ITV1 switch to rolling news in any case. And on July 7 last year, news websites recorded massive audiences of their own as people searched for reliable information.
Broadband and blogging
The internet, through blogs but also through news aggregators such as Yahoo! and Google, has challenged another myth that some in TV had accepted: that the audience wants immediacy instead of depth. If anything, there is more demand for analysis than immediacy during the parallel rise of broadband and blogging.
In addition, the limitations of rolling news as a news medium are beginning to block its ability to set the pace in terms of design. When it first started, the bosses consoled themselves for the low viewing figures with the promise that, once viewers saw what they were missing - all those dramatic sound stings, breaking news straps, crawling text, blinking arrows and massive sets - they would be drawn to this visual feast. Today the feast is to be found online - and it is not just visual. It is the immersive experience of interaction in real time with real people that compels users to stay online for hours - whether on eBay or World of Warcraft.
Rolling news has been an achievement: it raised the game of TV news organisations in the battle for immediacy, global presence and local relevance. But broadcast news has to move into a cross-platform world now. Rolling news is a medium that cannot be interactive, lacks sufficient power to tell a story and is no longer unrivalled as the way to get moving pictures to a mass audience. As people begin to create and share their own content, and the PC screen merges with the television, it is worth asking "what's the point of rolling news?"
Maybe the persistently small audience share and the demise of the ITV News Channel are messages from the market, and the message is: the "drag and drop" generation wants something better.
Paul Mason is business correspondent for Newsnight
While the 24-hour news giants fight for a relatively small number of viewers they are overlooking the biggest threat to their existence. Paul Mason explains.
Monday January 16, 2006
The Guardian
It has been war between the TV executives lately in the battle for audience share in rolling news. But here is a real breaking story - what if the bosses are fighting the wrong battle? According to Barb, the average Sky viewer watches the channel for nine minutes a week; BBC News 24 also scores nine minutes. With the demise of the ITV News Channel, the rival executives will now be scrapping over the two minutes a week it garnered from its viewers before it closed. Added to Fox News, which gets a - surely notional - one minute per week, the combined market for rolling news is thus 21 minutes a week, per person. Given the average TV viewer watches the box for 26 and a half hours a week, that is an awfully small universe to be getting excited about. Even if you count average seven-day reach - the number of people who see a rolling news channel at some point during the week - Sky's 11.6% and News 24's 13.2% (Barb multichannel homes, December 18 2005) still mean, given the choice, eight out of 10 viewers do not watch.
Until now, there has at least been a business rationale for rolling news. If 24-hour news is "the future" of TV - capturing an ever greater proportion of the audience while stimulating new styles and technologies for broadcast news - then it makes sense to invest in it.
Digital age
But rolling news is no longer the future. In 2004 the average broadband household spent 16 hours a week online. As anyone who uses any half-decent news platform on the web understands, the internet is faster, delivers instant depth and unrivalled interactivity. Rolling news - and here I mean the concept of a separate channel and its traditional front-end studio format - is the genre of television least suited to survive the transition to the digital age.
With news websites starting to fill up with audio and video clips, we are seeing just the beginning of "convergence". When TV over broadband is fully fledged, and the video stream is the dominant element on the page, seamlessly linked to background material and even services, Sky News and News 24 will suddenly look old-fashioned. Almost every other product in the digital broadcast space is a finite piece of video, designed to be downloaded, repeated, paused, shared and even "mashed up".
The battle of the "Breaking news" straps is just a symptom of how rolling news has run up against the limits of its technical capacity. The visual harangue of "Breaking news" is necessary to attract the viewer's attention, but head-to-head competition dictates it must be done as loudly for "Sharon suffers stroke" as for "Portsmouth sacks manager". The problem is, unless the rolling news channel consists of an endlessly repeated bulletin, there must be a delay before the viewer actually gets the news, if by news we mean something more than a line of wire copy copied and pasted from Reuters and AP.
Retro feel
All the evidence suggests that audiences want a timely, authored, edited summary of what has happened - "breaking" or otherwise - updated to reflect new knowledge and events. Now they can get it on the web in an instant. The BBC website's "Watch a summary" button takes you to a looped three-minute bulletin read out over pictures. Reuters' website provides something similar, updated hourly.
To me, these "instant news" bulletins, which have a radio-style retro feel about them, seem to speak the syntax of the web, and of converged media, better than the rolling channel format. You do not have to wait for some commentator to shut up, or for the quarter-hour summary. You do not have to bother trying to decipher the multiple meanings of the onscreen straps, captions and tickers that are the trademark of rolling news: all the depth and all the choice is available simultaneously.
I am not saying the current tactical battle between Sky and the BBC is irrelevant. Nor do I subscribe to the view that 24-hour news has been a waste of time and money. It has tuned up TV news organisations to respond to both local and global events much faster than a decade ago. And it has freed up editorial thinking. All this will survive.
But the rise of the instant broadcast news summary throws into sharp focus some of the inadequacies of the rolling format that we have, up to now, lived with because they seemed necessary.
Old-school TV journos complain that there is "not much TV" on 24-hour news - that is, not enough authored video and too much reporting live to camera from the fence lines and police tape at the edge of minor crises. But live airtime is cheap - tape has to be viewed, edited, voiced and checked for copyright. In addition to which, in order to produce it, the journalist has to leave the live position. And the longer the videotape is running, the bigger the danger that something will "happen" meanwhile. So rolling news was always going to be a world of talking heads.
In the process, we lost the concept of "story" - an editorial process whose outcome is a narrative with a beginning, middle and end, and hopefully a meaning. During the rise of rolling news that was something we just had to live with. Now we don't.
The internet as a medium has no fear of the finished narrative: "on-demand" news, downloaded as individual stories or bulletins, fits naturally with the interactive instincts of web users, which they are bringing to broadband TV as it emerges. The finished story also fits in with the economics of broadband. Everything else in this medium is designed to be stored, shared or sold.
It is not hard to imagine how "instant news" bulletins could evolve to become the front end of an integrated broadband news service, with links to text, archive, live camera positions and longer analytical packages. It is not hard to imagine the 24-hour newsgathering operations evolving to meet the needs of cross-media instant news. But it is hard to imagine an entire channel devoted to rolling news surviving that transition.
Rolling news diehards argue it cannot be equalled in a crisis; that its finest hours have been - as with the bombing of Baghdad in 1991, or the bombing of London in 2005 - when the camera simply follows compelling action, and the whole world tunes in. That is true. But in every crisis worth its name network channels like BBC1 and ITV1 switch to rolling news in any case. And on July 7 last year, news websites recorded massive audiences of their own as people searched for reliable information.
Broadband and blogging
The internet, through blogs but also through news aggregators such as Yahoo! and Google, has challenged another myth that some in TV had accepted: that the audience wants immediacy instead of depth. If anything, there is more demand for analysis than immediacy during the parallel rise of broadband and blogging.
In addition, the limitations of rolling news as a news medium are beginning to block its ability to set the pace in terms of design. When it first started, the bosses consoled themselves for the low viewing figures with the promise that, once viewers saw what they were missing - all those dramatic sound stings, breaking news straps, crawling text, blinking arrows and massive sets - they would be drawn to this visual feast. Today the feast is to be found online - and it is not just visual. It is the immersive experience of interaction in real time with real people that compels users to stay online for hours - whether on eBay or World of Warcraft.
Rolling news has been an achievement: it raised the game of TV news organisations in the battle for immediacy, global presence and local relevance. But broadcast news has to move into a cross-platform world now. Rolling news is a medium that cannot be interactive, lacks sufficient power to tell a story and is no longer unrivalled as the way to get moving pictures to a mass audience. As people begin to create and share their own content, and the PC screen merges with the television, it is worth asking "what's the point of rolling news?"
Maybe the persistently small audience share and the demise of the ITV News Channel are messages from the market, and the message is: the "drag and drop" generation wants something better.
Paul Mason is business correspondent for Newsnight
What's everyone think of this? I disagree that rolling news on TV is on its way out anytime soon. However, I do think that they should learn a lot from the web, and use a lot of the info available on the web - possibly onscreen.
Something like using the LATEST: ticker on BBC News online for the News 24 ticker. More use of blogs etc. Making a lot more content from News online available via the red button.
I disagree with his point that news channels are slower than the internet. Sometimes it is, most of the time it isn't. Even when it is, what's the first thing you do if you see, "Huge bomb blast in central London. More soon..." on the news online ticker? You head for a telly and put News 24 on!
One interesting point he makes is about 'BREAKING NEWS' straps. He says that a story about Ariel Sharon having a massive stroke gets the same strap as one about Portsmouth sacking its manager. Perhaps he's right. Perhaps news channels should find a way of grading these straps, perhaps getting bigger depending on the size of the story (just like news online changing their front page for big big stories).