Special Reports

Hmmm. But, in the late 1980s and 90s they had summaries practically every hour during daytime right up until tea time on BBC1 or BBC2, and of course they had the main evening news at 9pm with Newsnight at 10.30pm - yet they still had news reports even more frequently than they do now.

Cheers for that, Rob - I was going mad, but I do remember it happening! Honest :blu: I think it's the use of Orangey Yellow that did it!

Even though this is fictional, I think this is how ITV would do breaking news. Haven't seen any clips of *real* special reports with the new look.

EBS?

Why only the East Coast? I know the network's news centres are in New York, but surely the master control supplying the network in the west can do the same thing?


Yes, we've had them since the early 60's - I think the death of JFK spurred on the BBC and ITV to come up with procedures for news flashes. I'm not sure that's what the OP was after though

Emergency Broadcasting System ...

EDIT - Beaten to it.

I've never been too sure why it's the East Coast only, but I'm told it's because LA plays out a West Coast feed originated at KCBS, so they have to take it first, also some news stories only affect certain parts of the country. In some hurricanes the CBS Broadcast Center will transmit a SR to the affected affiliates (by turning off forced recall and alerting the local stations).

It's a clever system, really! Targeted breaking news. It's also possible for CBS News Los Angeles (KCBS/KCAL) to originate SRs for the West Coast too

They were indeed first to break the story: STV News flash

And am I right in thinking Bernard Ponsonby got high praise for his reporting on the issue as well?

I think so, Gaz. I remember BBC News mentioning the fact that "STV's Bernard Ponsonby broke the story".

Who let Kay Burley do the tram report...

Certainly the fashion in the 90s was to fade to black for quite a while, flash up a still caption (either news report or the channel ident), and then go to a sombre news studio. I think that's a better idea for stories of the utmost seriousness. That was how ITV dealt with Diana's death, although the likelihood is it was the simplest option as LWT would have had to get the ITV companies to break into overnight programming and go to a news report, and most stations wouldn't have had continuity announcers at that time of night.

In the instance of Michael Jackson or Benzair Bhutto, stories which are tragic but do not have such a significant impact on the general population of Britain itself, then a sting to attract attention is more appropriate. And given there are a limited amount of ITV stations to contact these days, more practical. I wouldn't expect to see it when the Queen dies though.

STV did indeed break the news of Michael Martin. I believe though the news was first broken on the website, possibly as they knew someone else was likely to do it before Jeremy Kyle finished, and while it was a cracking exclusive it wasn't such earth-shattering news that it merited crashing out of the network. John MacKay clearly throws direct to This Morning on the video (which comes on that page if you wait through the advert), which presumably means they just replaced the continuity announcement. Clever way of doing it, although it slows down how fast you can get on air.

I seem to remember Katie Derham bringing us a breaking news flash in 2012 about Gordon Brown resigning and leaving Downing Street I think it just before the 9pm slot (Or was it before Corrie?). It wasn't very long and she gave us the facts and pointed us to watch the News at Ten.