This show has turned into Derbyshire in the afternoon. Simon McCoy has nothing to worry about.
To be fair some of the content on Afternoon Live is at times "news" in the very loosest sense of the word - interviews about Tomas Schafenaker about his paintings and an interview with Basil Brush spring to mind.
This show has turned into Derbyshire in the afternoon. Simon McCoy has nothing to worry about.
To be fair some of the content on Afternoon Live is at times "news" in the very loosest sense of the word - interviews about Tomas Schafenaker about his paintings and an interview with Basil Brush spring to mind.
It's the right kind of fluff that he does. Burley interviewing a domestic violence victim in a poorly situated soft area is bread and butter for VD.
Same old Kay Burley Show ident played at the end of every break intro means no more of those nice, wide shots of the box from the outside.
This is exactly what I was about to write! A bad change. I am surprised though that no one mentioned the massive staircase in the backdrop that now glows in the colours of the Kay Burley Show. Quite nice. I am afraid though that the outside shot will disappear completely when the branding for Lunchtime Live is ready. Presentationwise I think the Newshour is weakest of the new line up with an uninspiring orange title card!
Last edited by skyviewer on 25 September 2018 5:51pm - 2 times in total
Labour conference seems to be over 4G as it jumps from pixelated to not quite often. Weird they couldn't get an SNG outside considering they knew the event date for ages?
Feeds from UKI 1483 from their are on 16E today for Sky.
His whole slot has been a complete mess today. Errors, wrong videos, strange pauses, Mark looking lost in the glass box, always look to the side and being caught off guard.
The sofas in the Kay Burley show look absolutely ridiculous how they are waiting room like, and the fact they look in the middle of a massive open space also doesn't do them any favours. They look completely out of place on the glass box, honestly it's shockingly bad, the glass box is just not cut out for these things.
Mark Austin is an excellent presenter, but not sure if the sitting at the side of the desk style really works that well, although they have clearly done good things with the graphics and it's great to have him back.
The number of issues with the automation is still far too high. I've seen more issues in the last 6 months than I've seen in the last 10 years combined and that very much is not a good thing. It should really have bedded in by now.
There is still some great journalism and that's the only thing that has been consistent in Sky News over the past year or two. Really as someone said Beth isn't a natural in front of the camera but clearly she brings a lot to the team and she's an excellent deputy political editor and also the foreign correspondents are first class.
Have to say we're now 6-7 months on since the old Sky News Centre was commissioned for the final time and the automation replaced the old system and for me it's very difficult to say that time has allowed it to bed in, put simply, the current studio set-up is rigid, inflexible, boring and not versatile at all and it's backed up with a buggy automated system that has reduced production quality to the lowest it's been on Sky News over a prolonged period in the last decade.
There's too many fillers, so many times I am home after work and I want the news and I can't see it, they've fell behind in breaking news because they seem to stick religiously to fillers now even when news breaks and it's just really hard to recommend it over the BBC News Channel, which I don't think has ever been great, but just Sky News has gone backwards.
The old Sky News studio, in it's final iteration was far more suitable for a news channel and flexible for all the different kinds of content it needed to produce and whilst the production system was not automated, the production quality was world class and you could watch it for weeks and months on end without missing a beat. The era that started this year has for me took everything apart from the journalism backwards.
What the management of the channel seem not to grasp is that to tell people the news you must first get them to watch. And stay watching. The blandness of the channel means few do.
One of the unfortunate parts of the Comcast takeover is that it appears Sky will continue to run Sky News the way it thinks it should be editorially, despite the visuals being bland.
Now Euronews where Comcast have a 25% share has vastly improved thanks to their investment, even if the lower thirds are bloody awful, but the fact it's gone from a journalist in a booth to semi-live output and an analytical show from Brussels is a vast improvement, along with a FTA HD feed on Hot Bird.
I think Sky have done some decent stuff, such as their campaigns with Ocean Rescue and their new campaign regarding the leaders debates, the evening Press Preview and when they're able to go into breaking news, they're still pretty good at it. But the minimalist presentation and off target
Bit of a damp squib the election debates campaign. A week since they launched and hours of screen time has only got them 4,000 signatures on their petition.
A year of Ocean Rescue and the British public/media credit David Attenborough rather than Sky News.
Sums up the problem, doesn’t it
If they want to do these campaigns and make an impact, they need eyeballs and engagement. The channel seems engineered against that possibility.
They can be doing the best journalism in the world. But if nobody is watching it, reading it, or engaging with it... it doesn’t matter.
I hope the association with NBC starts to address that. Suspect a lot of it comes down to money.
The ‘garden furniture’ dumped in the glass box for Kay Burley’s slot looks terrible, they would have been far better off with barstools and a small side table. The lights added to the big staircase in Sky Central did look good, however, and it was nice to see the atrium view return.
It’s also good to see an identity emerging with the program names, but they have to mean something. What is the point in labelling a slot ‘Lunchtime Live’ if it doesn’t differ at all from a standard two hours of Sky News? Even the branded programs appear dull and uninspired. If The Kay Burley Show is the flagship slot, give the program some titles and some different music.
A step in the right direction, but still a lot more work for Sky News to do.
