Sky News

They seem to totally turn down the headlines bed on James Rubin's programme, and then turn it up 15 secs into the headlines, it only does this on his programme for some reason.

I still think content-wise, World News Tonight is a really excellent programme.

From MG

The gap between Sky News and News 24 has narrowed since Sky relaunched a month ago, but the BBC's rolling news network remains ahead of its rival.
After spending tens of millions on a new studio, new presenters such as Eamonn Holmes and a radical revamp of the schedule to deliver "appointment-to-view" programmes as well as breaking news, Sky News' weekly reach is just 500,000 behind News 24.

Figures from Barb show that a month on from the relaunch on October 24, Sky reached 4.3 million viewers over the past week, compared with 4.8 million for News 24.

A month ago, during the week of the revamp, Sky's weekly reach - those who tuned in for three minutes or more - was also 4.3 million viewers, compared with 5.4 million for the BBC's channel.

However, BBC News 24 is still just ahead on share by 0.52% to 0.51%.

Although the lead is narrow, this is still a significant shift from the rest of 2005, when Sky has been ahead on share.

Both channels have lower figures overall compared with earlier in the year, as there have been relatively few big stories in the last few weeks.

The figures will provide ammunition for both news channels in their ongoing battle to win viewers.

The BBC head of TV news, Peter Horrocks, and the head of Sky News, Nick Pollard, have been engaged in a war of words as they both implement their strategies for pre-eminence in rolling news.

Mr Horrocks said: "We're encouraged that four weeks on from Sky's relaunch, we continue to be ahead in both share and reach audience measures as well as continuing to break original stories ahead of Sky."

Sky News said according to its figures it was "back in the lead over the last two weeks".

Has Miranda Schunke got a German father or husband?

With the news that George Best is virtually at Death's door, what's going to happen if he passes away during the Sky News exclusive Cameron/Davis debate programme? They interrupted Prime Ministers Questions yesterday to go to a medical update on Best.

I'd guess the following...

Whoosh - Breaking news strap...and leave the words tell the story...
Carry on the debate until a natural break in the questions...
The cross back to the Sky News Centre for the presenter to fill us in on the obvious...
Obit package, then they may let Sky Sports News take up the slack on this, cross channel promo..
Back to the debate.

Or everything upto the obit package airing, then continue the 'coverage' on Sky News, and shunt the debate onto Sky News Active, and replay the entire debate later this evening on Sky News.

I'd guess the latter is more likely.

The debate would undoubtedly carry on via Active - they may just cut out of it immediately, without Boulton saying anything - and then be replayed, as is scheduled, tonight at 9.

I don't expect they'd shunt people over to Sports News and carry on with it. Would look pretty bad for them.

Without being disrespectful to the Best family- does anyone really think this is newsworthy anymore?

I for one don't know why a doctor is releasing daily updates on his condition.

He's been on death's door for a long time now and it is barely going to be "breaking news" when it happens. So I expect in the hypothetical situation they'll put up a strap and keep on with the Tory debate, running an obit package at the end of it.

Twaddle.

Whilst I really don't care about his condition, and everybody is expecting him to die fairly soon, it will still be big when it happens. If he dies today, you pretty much know what the front page of every newspaper tomorrow will look like.

Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Sun, Mirror, Star, Express, Mail: ''Best dead''

Independent: ''Iraq: Our horror, Bush's shame''

You could argue the same thing about the Queen Mother. Famous person, everyone expecting it for a while, still news when ''it'' actually happens.

As for why a doctor is releasing updates, possibly because there are about 100 members of the media outside asking every five minutes if he's still alive. And given that Best let the News of the World into his hospital room the other day, he probably wants people to know what's going on.

they have never done a cross channel promo with SSN before, AFAIK.

Sky will certainly be first with the news of Best's death.

Ginny Buckley is on this afternoon.

She's pretty good at killing off celebrities.

Or maybe she'll give him a nobel prize