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AG
AnneG
Does anyone know when there is breaking news such as the liberation of Kanadahar, do they need extra staff in the gallery or can they manage on the staff they already have. I was told they have much more to do when stories are breaking, but I would have thought they could all manage quite happily with the staff they already have.
Going by what our friends in the BBC have told us in recent weeks/months, no not really.
The gallery for News 24 is so automated they only need 1 extra person if they and that's if they are doing a special programme, e.g. the recent George Harrison special, things like the budget coverage and so on.
BBC have a big thing called SCAR which routes all incoming video feeds, and 'traffic' which deals with the audio - and they can send it anywhere in the BBC - they queue up feeds for different purposes, and assign priority to different bulletins, so you'll get someone doing a report on News 24, a few minutes later on BBC1, and probably on 5 Live too. They also have to send a thing called 'clean feed' to the reporter, so they can hear the output from the studio without getting a delay in the form of a very distracting ringing noise in their ears. You can only send clean feed to one place at a time so there's a queue for that as well.
As I understand they bring extra staff for SCAR during big events, e.g. September 11, but for the Sophie Wessex story last night there were only really a couple of OBs, at King Edward XI and Buckingham Palace, so easy to cope without panic.
Of course, the moment you get a story like this breaking, all sorts of journalists get called in to cover it - ectopic (spelling?) pregnancy is potentially life threatening remember..
From just looking at the newsroom on Sky, whenever there's breaking news of some sort of importance it usually gets very busy with a person at every computer screen and more people walking around the place.
As a rule 6am-11pm/12am are the hours when the newsrooms are working at full capacity and unless the story was of significant importance they're unlikely to drag anyone extra in.
As for Sophie Wessex, as soon as the reports came in it was obvious she was pregnant, to me anyway. Even the Sky presenter said 'of course, Sophie Wessex was pregnant' when the news came in, so events like that are a bit predictable and aren't really of enough importance to warrant dragging your extra staff in.
The worst time something big can happen - as the networks found at about 2am in August 1997 - is overnight. As a rule, newsroom aren't fully staffed at 2am and so it's difficult for a network to operate at its usual capacity, then the main teams will most likely be called in.
With this new Sky News Active feed of the newsroom it will be interesting to see just how the activity increases in the newsroom when something happens.