Sky News

Sky News is going to launch a major advertising campaign...

From Digital Spy:


I wonder if this has anything to do with the minor changes they planned for "early 2006"?

Naffness in the extreme. What's the point of a tiny plasma when there's a flippin' huge newswall behind the desk?

The 2pm TOTH was a bit of a mess there.

Yes, it was quite odd for twenty minutes or so. At 13:59:40 the TOTH music started, but the video cut to some random feed, then black, so was replaced with 15 seconds of the animated bumper you get after the weather at xx:xx:40. Looked pretty good actually. The headline sequence fell apart a bit (videos failing), then during the 'Sky News with....' voiceover it could be seen that the newswall was black and a camera was being very quickly pushed into a position to give a side shot, with a camera operator waving at Alan and Paula to get their attention. After cutting to the camera it stayed moving a little, but was a rather clever (and pretty nice looking) shot to hide the newswall. During a report later the sound continued but the video cut to Alan and Paula chatting and laughing, then back to the report. A few similar little things.

It's hardly earth-shattering I know, but it was mildly interesting.

As an aside, do Sky News use camera operators (since we know that News 24 do not)? Or was this just a floor manager doing some rapid camera moving?

The guy waving is a Floor Manager.

The cameras are remotely controlled. The operator sits next to the Floor Manager next to the big blue globe thingy.
I do think they've boom camera operators.

Sky News is going to launch a major advertising campaign...

From Digital Spy:


I wonder if this has anything to do with the minor changes they planned for "early 2006"?

Sky reviews news revamp

Dominic Timms
Tuesday January 17, 2006

Sky has launched a review of its 24-hour news schedules just three months after a multimillion pound revamp ushered in Eamonn Holmes, former Bill Clinton aide James Rubin and a new era of "appointment to view" programming.

The Sky Networks managing director, Dawn Airey, and news chief Nick Pollard are understood to be casting a critical eye on the new-look schedule and how specific shows are performing.

Launched in October, the new schedule brought in new talent such as Holmes and Rubin as the broadcaster moved beyond rolling news to US-style appointment to view shows in a bid to increase viewer loyalty.

The revamp included new breakfast show Sunrise, with Holmes and co-presenter Lorna Dunkley, The Sky Report with rising star Julie Etchingham, and James Rubin's World News Tonight, together with other innovations such as triple presenters and a motorised, revolving anchor position.

Writing in the Guardian, Mr Pollard said the revamp had been designed to take on a resurgent BBC News 24 and to try to iron out the feast-to-famine nature of 24-hour news ratings.

Ratings tend to rocket during big breaking stories such as the London bombings or Beslan but fall back during quieter periods.

The BBC claimed today News 24 was the most watched news channel last year, increasing its weekly reach to 5.1 million viewers in 2005, up from 4.1 million in 2004. Sky News increased its reach from 4 million in 2004 to 4.6 million last year.

In the first two weeks of this year, BBC News 24 claimed a weekly reach of 0.54% against 0.46% for Sky News.

Both channels enjoy an annual average share in multichannel homes of about 0.6%.

A Sky spokesman said today: "We are pleased with how the new schedules are bedding in after Sky News, in effect, reinvented itself."

"There's no formal review of the programmes being held. Like all broadcasters we constantly monitor and improve our output and that process will go on continually."

According to audience ratings body Barb, both Sky News and BBC News 24 attract an average per viewer of just nine minutes' viewing a week out of a mean total of about 26.5 hours a week.

"Sky News has benefited greatly from this big story tune-in factor. We've tended to pull away from News 24 in ratings when major events are unfolding. However, in quieter times our BBC rivals are drawing level," Mr Pollard wrote after the relaunch.

"The result of all that is there's now little to choose between us in overall ratings. One obvious answer to these problems is more appointment-to-view programming.

"Inevitably, people have asked "why change a winning formula"? There are plenty of good reasons but they all come down to one thing: we know we can improve and provide an even better service to our viewers."

ITV announced last month it was axing its rolling news channel to make room for more commercially viable TV services.

In an email to staff before Christmas, the recently appointed BBC TV news chief, Peter Horrocks, announced that News 24 would be one of his priorities, admitting it had "a long way to go" to match Sky's reputation for breaking news.

But writing in the MediaGuardian this week, Newsnight's business correspondent Paul Mason arguef that, instead of competing against each other, 24-hour news channels should look more closely at the threat posed by the internet.

In a world increasingly connected via broadband, television rolling news has run up against "the limits of its technical capacity", he argued.

"Rolling news is a medium that cannot be interactive, lacks sufficient power to tell a story and is no longer unrivalled as a way to moving pictures to a mass audience.

"As people begin to create and share their own content and the PC screen merges with the television, is it worth asking 'what's the point of rolling news?'."