Just turned over to BBC News 24 (or whatever they are calling it now) and there was one of those mini ads they run to promote themselves – and this one had the verbal strap-line of “Get the latest weather, every half hour on BBC News”
It made me think – is the weather forecast so difficult to predict that I need the “latest” weather report?
Can’t they rerun one from a couple of hours ago instead of delivering the “latest” report?
I can understand needing the latest news for fast moving stories – even if the BBC, and most of the others, basically seem to just run the same stories in the same order every 30 minutes and only jump into action when something they are interested in happens.
I’ve often wondered if a news channel which basically ran breaking news as it happens from all around the world would prove popular – a sort of Reuters or AP news TV channel. That would prove to be much more interesting I think – rather than just churning out the same story every 30 minutes with negligible changes.
There is so much breaking news happening all the time, and yet the all-day news channels just churn out reruns of the lunchtime/evening news programs. It seems such a waste of the potential for the channel.
Anyhow, I am now looking forward to the latest weather report in 26 minutes time – to see what exciting and urgent changes have happened to the forecast since I last saw it.
The first thing I thought was surely you can look out the window for the latest weather! But I suppose they mean weather forecast. :P
I like the idea of a “wire” news channel, News 24 is a bit lazy, I suspect there’s probably an American channel that does this, Bloomberg springs to mind but I haven’t really seen its output and it’s more business oriented. Although I guess that it might actually be a bit dull since you’d be stuck without any footage or reporters on the scene if you were reporting the latest wire stories, and it would lack the narrative that goes into standard packages.
Bloomberg is a good model – although I agree it is very business oriented and also I find the on-screen graphics to be far too fussy.
Something similar which basically relied on breaking news wires and a few journalists to put in a bit of background would be wonderful I think.
I know I can have various RSS feeds and the like for my computer – but a TV (or radio) as background noise would be better.
Would have been better off with a half-hourly snow depth report, this week.