Steve in Pudsey posted:
What I think Dunedin might have overlooked is that a long weather bulletin is a good opportunity for a changeover of gallery personnel.
This is the classic excuse for the half hourly weather bulletin.
It's very unimaginative. It takes just seconds to think of a dozen more useful uses of 3 minutes every 30- how about slides with details of expected upcoming stories in the next hours/day/week (there's a similar feature on the bbc news website)? How about the market data? How about a timeline slide feature showing key events in the background of the day's top story? How about using the BBC's excellent country profile documents on various countries to educate viewers on a country featured in the news
(for those that don't know- a complete joy)
There are so many other potentially useful, different, interesting and newsworthy uses of 10% of the news channel's output. And yes real business journalism is EXACTLY what the BBC should be doing, whilst leaving consumerism to Watchdog.
The other thing about the half hourly news bulletin is that it surely must lose viewers. It completely breaks up the concept of rolling news. When the handover to weather occurs it feels like the end of another bulletin (which let's face it, BBC news treat it as), rather than another facet of a 24 hour rolling operation. That's why Sky have successfully incorporated their much shorter bulletins into the top of the hour, losing the feeling of- "right that's the end of the news, let's see what else is on". The beeb could learn a lot.
Another aspect of the problem I discussed ad nauseam in the old thread so won't fully rehash here. Other than to say the latest incarnation of BBC weather graphics (can't call them new now), make telling a viewer the weather in their area a much longer process than ever before. The pointless flying around the country wastes time.
It's pretty simple really- a person can't be in more than one place at any one time, so most people want to see where they live (full UK view) rather than a zoomed in bit of the other end of the country. They're also more likely to miss their weather given the 1 second fly-past of where they live. 99% of Britons (yes I made up the figure but I'm fairly sure it's correct) don't move about the country substantially within the time-period of the forecast (24-48 hours) so again don't care about seeing the other end of the country.