Sky News Thread - Relaunch on Monday

Sky News annoyingly cut short a live interview with John Reid leading to the top of the hour at 6pm today. It's the big story of the day, and they'd already waited patiently to do a one-to-one.

Jeremy quickly wound up the interview because they wanted to roll the top-of-the-hour titles.

Embarasingly for Sky, because of the timings, John Reid was left with the last word. "Well thank you for your interest, and thanks for talking about the NHS".

Why not drop the titles, they'd already dropped the ads? Bit of a silly decision by the director, or bad communication between them and whoever plays out the titles.

How rude! So the News Channel of the Year is more interested in showing it's titles with 'News Channel of the Year' on them than actually covering the news.

I have never understood why Sky - and especially news 24, not needing ads at all - are so obsessed with TOTH sequences and launching into them at exactly the right time.

Frankly, how many viewers out there actually turn on Sky specifically at the TOTH in order to get the headlines? There doesn't need to be a grand opening sequence; a brief recap like the 15 minute updates would do... it'd probably be more effective... and then just loop back into the top story.

Seems very odd that Sky still bases itself on a traditional news broadcast, when it is trying to be the opposite.

News 24 are even worse. Come rain or shine, they will cut straight to a weather report during the middle of a press conference/when they're waiting for a verdict from a court case, and there's absolutely no need to.

Don't Sky have international deals... and stations round the world probably opting into them at certain times?
And maybe BBC World or BBC America takes News 24 certain times too ? Then the junctions would have to be right to the second.

I do! I usually try and start watching a 24 hour station at the TOTH as I know that I'll get the news in some sort of resonable order. If I miss the TOTH and switch on at, say, 12 past the hour, I'll have missed the top story and will then get a hint of it in the headlines, having to wait for another 50 odd minutes before it's covered again fully.

Saying that, I totally agree that they should abandon the TOTH if something live is happening which they need to cover.

To be honest Sky are usually quite good at abandoning their TOTH sequences when in the middle of something live or big. They will normally abandon things like sport and weather during breaking news, as they did with their year in review series during the tsunami coverage.

With a 24 hour rolling news operation, sometimes the TOTH sequence is automated (i.e. the first ident bit) and therefore if Sky did not inform their presentation department in time, they would have known that the TOTH sequence would roll and therefore they should take it.

The gallery runs the ident (except 12/6am) the director would have told JT to wrap it up.

News 24 shows far too many trails. And I'm sick to the back teeth of seeing that woman (who looks like Jane Hills ugly twin sister with yellow fingernails) advertising BBCi.

The countdown sequence is also a bit pointless. The time-lapse footage dosen't fit in with the rest of the branding with the channel, and very often so many trails are shown, that only 10 seconds of the countdown menu are shown leaving only you 5 seconds to see what's coming up. The countdown could and should be a lot more informative and useful. Instead, it's just clunky and annoying to look at and provides viewers with nothing more than a quick excuse to dance to the music!

If the gallery runs all the idents except the 12 and 6, why don't they run those idents?

Also, why on the midnight TOTH ident is there a gap in sound between the ident running and the headlines?

TX runs the 12 and 6 ID's and at the end of the first part of the ID they cut to the gallery feed, normally the first part of the ID is over laying the first headline so when the logo comes back out the first headline is there. you will notice on the 12/6am ident the logo doesn't come back out, it zooms in then its a clear cut to the gallery.

I'm not sure the reason why.

So couldn't the director have told the gallery that they were going to abandon the ident? Or is it more the case that the director decided it wasn't important enough to drop the TOTH?

The director sits in the gallery next to the vision mixer (VM) and on the other side of the vm is the producer, so they probably decided not to drop ID'S