Royal Birth

Also stateside until a few minutes ago ABC News Live was simulcasting Sky News, and is continuing to carry Sky News as a stream on their website. Which is quite interesting given that Sky is now closely connected to NBC.

First impressions flicking between Sky and BBC is that Sky definitely seem to have the upper hand in terms of coverage at the moment. They seem to have been more prepared for the news and had everyone in Windsor quite quickly, despite it being a bank holiday.

Bad timing really as todays news for the couple of hours beforehand was dominated by the UN report in to Natures Emergency - pretty timely given the climate change protests recently and all the Attenborough coverage, and something I suspect with it being a published report the news companies had plenty to run with before it was even released.

ITV at least will be glad that they've once again opted for a full evening bulletin on a Bank Holiday.

The Easel announcing the birth of The Duke & Duchess of Sussex is now up in Buckingham Palace in the last minute.

BBC News Online is putting up the World simulcast on their live coverage page about the Royal Birth on their website.

The BBC cameras there had a shot of Jonathan Samuels from Sky News talking to a journalist in a pink coat in one of the camera shots.

That agreement pre dates Comcast purchasing Sky by 2 years, brought about by the new agreement between the BBC and CBS that replaced the one between the BBC and ABC.


At the time (and still now) ITN had their agreement with NBC, so the only option for Sky was to link up with ABC (having previously had a long term agreement with CBS).

Presumably in the the future NBC will switch their U.K. partner to Sky and ITN will move to ABC, but these agreements tend to be for the long term, so it might not be any time soon.

Dear oh dear, what's just happened to Nicholas Witchell?

He's got into such a stutter and tried to go back to his piece a couple of times before throwing back to Ben Brown.

I hope he is OK, maybe he just had brain fade.

That was very strange - he really seemed to be struggling - very unlike him. Hope he’s okay.

Noticed this myself. Perhaps he didn't want to put his foot in it by saying the wrong thing, considering he isn't well-liked by the Royals. Even so, seemed very strange he was stuttering and apologised for this 2-3 times and had to give up midway through his piece to camera?

For those who missed it...

Poor Nicholas Witchell. Did the terminal inanity of Royal correspondence finally overwhelm him? pic.twitter.com/XKx1VveMjR

— Otto English (@Otto_English) May 6, 2019

It seems the social Media brigade (well a minority) have been at it, causing both the Paul Royall (the Editor of The Ten) and Jeremy Bowen to post these tweets.

For those asking about Nick Witchell - he’s absolutely fine. Highly unusually for Nick he lost his train of thought on the #BBCNewsTen and decided to hand back to the studio. This can happen sometimes even to the most experienced and respected in busy live news broadcasting.

— Paul Royall (@paulroyall) May 6, 2019

I’ve seen some snide comments about Nick Witchell. Please stop, they’re not deserved. He’s a respected and experienced broadcaster, doing his job. I don’t know what happened tonight but it’s certainly no reason to be nasty.

— Jeremy Bowen (@BowenBBC) May 6, 2019

It could've been worse. It reminded me of this:



Due to a migraine, according to a doctor who treated her.