At 9am, the BBC’s two news channels came together under a single brand. But it’s still a work in progress.
The combined news channel soft-launched Monday with Ben Thompson taking viewers through the service’s first three hours on air.
But viewers encountered a number of bumps along the way. With the BBC promising more transparency and discussions with reporters in the newsroom, the day’s first live newsroom piece with Paul Moss, the BBC’s Europe Regional Editor, was dogged by audio glitches. At 12, the BBC News red box titles were replaced with the revised branding, but with a premature cut at the end of the music. The BBC News flipper at the bottom of the screen reverted to a static web address during the course of the morning on both UK and international feeds.
The soft-launch follows a week which saw a number of news presenters and producers sign off from the UK News Channel for the last time. It also saw the end of some long-running strands: Outside Source ended after nine years on air, with original presenter Ros Atkins returning to present the show.
The new BBC News will be dominated by former World News daytime presenters, the first of which, Lucy Hockings, made her debut at 12:00.
UK-specific content
UK viewers were treated to edits of interviews with some of the new presenters during ad-breaks during the first hour. Later in the day, the BBC began to roll-out a new ‘across the UK’ feature featuring short clips of recent reports from BBC regional news services broadcast during breaks.
Meanwhile, UK viewers also received additional coverage of current UK stories, including an interview on football referee cameras and a report from the Olivier Awards, during the final minutes of the 9:00 and 11:00 hours, as the international feed broke away for feature programmes. A pattern that is set to continue through the afternoon and evening.
The first hours of the new service saw no UK news story trigger the BBC’s secret ‘threshold’ for triggering a standalone UK breaking news feed. A story about teacher strikes in England formed part of the combined UK/international news agenda, albeit initially incorrectly captioned as a story about ‘UK teachers’, later revised to ‘Teachers in England’.
By 3pm that had changed, with UK viewers breaking away for coverage of the sentencing of the killer of Olivia Pratt-Korbel, while international viewers stuck with Matthew Amroliwala and coverage of events in Ukraine and Donald Trump’s journey to New York for his court appearance.
Meanwhile, during times when the UK feed was simulcasting BBC One’s news bulletin, the international feed continued to feature England’s teacher strike, instead of using the standalone time to feature more international stories.
Bottom line
The BBC promised there would be no ‘big bang’ launch. Instead further changes will slowly appear on the new service during the next few weeks. This will also include a two hour morning simulcast of Nicky Campbell’s Radio 5 Live show, directly after Breakfast.
Marc Thornham