Sky News

I presume Ashish was on when the story broke since he was doing NSW last night. But when I switched over to Sky at about 9.30 Anna Botting was presenting solo interviewing David Learmount from Flight International magazine which added some expert views to the coverage. Then it was mainly Anna talking to Robert Nisbert for the next hour with them occasionally joining Fox

Sky's coverage seemed good to me, considering the limited US resources of their own they have. Obviously there is Fox but I doubt they had any New York correspondents spare for Sky to use, unlike the BBC which had their own on the scene.

The one thing that might have been helpful is a summary report every half hour or so for the benefit of those just tuning in - the BBC managed to prepare one. Since Ashish was taken off air Im sure he could have done one

Ashish was indeed on air when the story broke, he was stuttering and stumbling over his words and much of the coverage at the time was taken direct from Fox News. I do like him from what I've seen of him, but having the TV on in the background last night I noticed that while he was perfectly fine reading from the autocue, whenever any breaking stories came in and he had to go off-script, he struggled.

Anna started at 9pm.

Also last night there was a special Jeff Randall Live from Heathrow which had a pretty bad start. After the titles, Jeff introduced the programme and welcomed his two guests, everything was ready to start the interview, but clearly he continued to read what was next on his autocue - "OK, coming up after the break...!" Cue a very long, embaressing silence as the two guests shift uncomfortably in their seats, before he finally turned to them and started asking the questions.

Here's a little challenge for the weekend...

Post a cap of Sky News between 0900-1700 whereby the breaking news ticker is not active.

Rules
1. Time on Sky News clock must be between aforementioned times.
2. "News Alert" tickers do not count, must be 'normal' black, white and red ticker.
3. Deadline Monday 1700.

Good luck. You'll need it.

Re: Sky's coverage of last night's US plane crash.

I think they suffered a little bit without the newswall. CNNi launched on Freeview last night and they made good use of a screen showing clearly the plane's flight path and where it ended up. Something similar on Sky News would have been effective, perhaps they could have kept Ashish on for this with Anna at the news desk handling interviews etc.

I also felt that the newswall would have been really good to use here.

They had a lot of graphics on Sunrise this morning that would normally be presented from newswall i.e. 3D models

Hopefully won't be too long before the studio is operational.

I noticed yesterday during the heathrow expansion coverage they had a newswall position set up in the virtual studio.

The newswall graphic itself was still the fake newsroom backing, but they used it to overlay graphics about the areas to be demolished etc.

They've also been using it for business news updates.

Sky seem to have a Sky News Today format on air now rather than the usual NSW. Andrew Wilson as main presenter and Ashish Joshi reading headlines. Looks like its because of Obama's train journey today

Were Saturday Live/Weekend Lunchtime on as normal earlier?

No breaking news right now. I've not got screen cap equipment though. It's the first of two Sunday Lives today.

This CSO studio Sky are using is very bad compared to Sky's usual standards presentation wise. I would have expected something better than this, especially as its in use for over a month.

The printed backdrops is what make it look fake, not the actual green screen!

So its the printed backdrops you think are bad, not the studio or the CSO implimentation...

They were left overs from years back I believe, and as such I think they do the job well enough...

Its a shame the studio webcam doesn't work anymore, we could of had a nice snippet of what the new set may look like.

I presume they are going to be in the CSO studio for another week or two?