TV News Programmes - Heading Off Air?

In his expert piece for Celebro Media Networks, James Rodgers argues that among the triumphs, the recent history of television also tells tales of false prophecies and of successful track records coming to an inglorious end. The TV news programmes may prove to be more enduring than was once predicted – even if we have plenty of other ways of getting it than through our TV.

Delivered originally by satellite or cable, and later on digital terrestrial, 24 hour news channels have been among the winning formats. Here in the UK, we think of the way that CNN stung the BBC into action after its coverage of the 1991 invasion of Iraq. The BBC, then still years away from its own continuous news channel, was forced to pay its transatlantic counterpart the ultimate compliment: the January night that year when the allied attack on Bagdad began, the BBC took its own programming off air. In its place, it rebroadcast CNN.

It was not yet the ‘flak-jacketed correspondent on a rooftop’ coverage which was to become such a staple of conflict reporting in the decades which followed. The coverage was lo-tech: correspondent Peter Arnett on the phone. Still, something had changed. The BBC realized that. It took almost seven years – until November 1997 – but its own continuous news channel followed.

In an echo of the way that the BBC followed CNN, many more took the trail which the pioneers had blazed. Al-Jazeera changed TV News in the Arabic-speaking world, and, in turn, inspired its own imitators. Russia and France launched their own international news channels, Russia Today and France 24, broadcasting in English.

As a BBC producer in the 1990s, I worked on the launch of the channel which was then known as ‘BBC News 24’. In 2008 it took its current name, BBC News.

Like all launches, it was a mixture of excitement and frustration; trial and error (no lack of that last one). Like any launch in the last 20 years or so, editorial innovation was accompanied by technological development. We used new software. It had so many teething troubles that even a very senior editor on the launch team once joked that the channel’s logo should be an egg timer. Certainly, we all tired of seeing that symbol appear as we tried to save scripts or open items in running orders.

Still, there was a sense that this was the future. Eventually, we imagined then, BBC1 – the BBC’s flagship channel in the UK – would no longer make its own news bulletins. Instead, they would opt in to News Channel output at those familiar times when the audience expected to see news.

This was one of the false prophecies of that era. For, in effect, the opposite has happened. While the BBC’s star correspondents and producers are no longer permitted to treat the News Channel – seen then as something of an annoying younger sibling – with the barely disguised disdain they did at the time, effort remains focused on those main bulletins, especially the Corporation’s flagship ‘Ten o’clock News’, at 2200. They are broadcast on the News Channel, not the other way round.

While those ‘built bulletins’, as producers might call conventional half-hour news programmes, have lost audiences in recent years, they are still very much part of the scene. Perhaps they will not be forever – but nothing has yet come along to provide what they have provided for decades: a summary of the day’s events for a general audience.   

‘News is something that some chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read,’ said Coker, a cynical reporter in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel Scoop. These fictitious 20th century readers have their counterparts in reality, and in the present. They will not necessarily want to wade through streams of social media to find what they are looking for. Those who do want to follow every twist and turn of a developing story may still appreciate someone summing it up for them, and explaining its significance.

In that sense, the TV News programme looks safe for the foreseeable future. A glance at the ratings for the third week of May, as published on the ITV website[1], shows BBC News bulletins sitting in the top 10 – especially prominently on May 22nd, the day of the killing of a soldier on the streets of London.

The question is perhaps more whether rolling news will survive in its current form. The main idea for those of us working on the launch of the BBC News channel was obviously to bring events live to an audience, but also to use the additional time 24 hour news offered for more detailed coverage. In general, though, that is not what has happened. Watch a News Channel on the day of a major breaking story, and you will find much of it is given to ‘what we know so far’. Repetition often forces context into second place.

No one should imagine that TV News programmes will ever return to the days of guaranteed massive audiences. Apart from on days of national crisis or national sporting triumph, there are just too many channels fighting for the same viewers – not to mention competition from online media.

Here there is a generation issue, too – people who have grown up with smartphones and tablets may well be more inclined to look first to them rather than to the news channels. CNN, which led the field, is now falling behind. Jim Walton, the network’s president since 2003, stepped down last summer saying ‘new thinking’ was needed[2]. In the UK, the 24 hour news channels are yet to challenge in ratings terms the bulletins on mainstream channels.  

Perhaps the most useful way to look at the issue is to consider it a question not of format, but of platform. Newspapers all over the world, and especially in wealthy countries, seem largely to have accepted that print has, at best, an uncertain future. The outlook for the newspaper itself may be better – if we think of a newspaper as something delivered to a tablet or e-reader. In the same way, the TV news programme may prove to be more enduring than was once predicted – even if we have plenty of other ways of getting it than through our TV.

James Rodgers, PhD is Lecturer in Journalism at City University London. He is a former journalist for BBC News, GMTV, and Reuters TV. He is the author of ‘Reporting Conflict’ (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), and ‘No Road Home: fighting for land and faith in Gaza’ (Abramis, 2013).

[1] http://www.itvmedia.co.uk/highlights/ratings, accessed 28 May 2013.

[2] See NBC News Business, July 27, 2012. ‘CNN head Jim Walton quits, saying network needs fresh leadership’. http://www.nbcnews.com/business/cnn-head-jim-walton-quits-saying-network-needs-fresh-leadership-913629, accessed 29 May 2013.

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