I understand the Australian media market and obvious their system of commercial broadcasting was much more influenced by North America than anyone else being local region commercial stations as well as ABC and later SBS.
It seems like a neat idea that each of these stations probably sent out people to North American probably owned and operated stations to learn their news-style and promos.
Not only that: In many cases, TV stations around the world hire American news consultants to help make their news more appealing to the audience and therefore more commercially successful. In Europe, for example, television news has traditionally been seen primarily as a public service, which means that, particularly after the advent of fully competitive television news operations across the continent, many broadcasters looked towards the American model for proven audience-building techniques.
Even stations whose look is "European" have adopted some American techniques. Both ITN and BBC used American consultants in the 1990s, for instance. I'm currently reading a book on the history of French television; in the early 1970s, French TV news producers analyzed tapes of the
CBS Evening News
with Walter Cronkite and modeled their evening news after it. They even selected an anchor that had some of Cronkite's mannerisms.
Here is an entire newscast from POP TV in Slovenia, whose look is strongly American-influenced, albeit with some European elements (the clip may be preceded by a short commercial; it takes a few seconds to load):
http://poptv.si/multimedia/novice-369.html
Note the strong emphasis on weather -- a perhaps less obvious but still typical American influence.
P.S. The BTV6 intro above was almost certainly American-made.
Last edited by WW Update on 31 May 2009 9:04am - 6 times in total
