BBC Newsnight

Fear of stumbling into Nick Ferrari or someone similar is why I no longer listen to LBC...

The perils of broadcasting live from a partially open air temporary studio (a marquee) is being demonstrated on Newsnight tonight.

'Heckles from the cheap seats' (in Broughty Ferry) in Dundee are causing an amusing addition to Kirsty Wark's otherwise serious discussion.

For tomorrow's Newsnight, Kirsty Wark is in Edinburgh and newbie Katie Razzall is in London.

I noticed that Kirsty Wark advertised some of her guests as being in Westminster, but there were sat in front of a backdrop that resembled the hard side of Studio B at Broadcasting House, although perhaps with smaller/more screens - I wonder if this was the new studio at Millbank airing for the first time. They didn't show any wide shots during the interview obviously, and it might have been Studio B, but Broadcasting House isn't Westminster and it looked a bit different!

Worth mentioning that Evan begins on 29th September.

Enjoying Newsnight tonight - Evan Davies first programme, Not in the studio, it's from Tory Conference in Birmingham. Feels already like he's been doing Newsnight for ages.

Strange they introduce him in the middle of the Conferences - you'd have thought they'd have him for all or for none.

He started his career at Newsnight, so he probably knows how everything works etc.

I'm pretty sure he was needed on Today until after the referendum, so all wouldn't have been an option. I guess they want him in place before parliament is sitting again and the Westminster bubble resumes.

I've spotted some strange things in tonight's edition of Newsnight, so I decided to conduct an investigation.
http://weatherfieldgazette.co.uk/norris/boringballstitle.png
I was watching the opening sequence into Newsnight, when I noticed that Evan Davis was showing a video to Boris Johnson on YouTube whose title included "boring balls".


As Evan Davis claims that there wasn't much time to find the videos he was showing Boris, the title could suggest that he was searching YouTube for Boring Balls, or that someone in the Newsnight team had uploaded a video to YouTube called Boring Balls. I decided to find out who "Max Deveson" was (the name also visible in that image), to find out.

I discovered that he had a YouTube account that appeared to have no uploads.

see here ……..

CHANNEL on YOUTUBE.COM
01-Oct-2014 @ 00:37
I thought that was strange, so I decided to check the Google cache - lo and behold, there were four videos uploaded including the word "boring" (including an unaired one that appears to feature Ed Miliband).



As can be seen below, the title was blurred when the interview was shown in full, yet not in the titles in the tabs.

I decided to find out exactly who Max Deveson is. It appears he is a BBC Newsnight journalist, according to the following Twitter account.

see here ……..

MAXDEVESON on TWITTER.COM
01-Oct-2014 @ 00:45

I also noticed another strange thing later in the programme. A feature including a YouGov psephologist featured a map of the UK with constituency boundaries marked on it.

The first image includes a partially obscured copyright notice, with only "© David Booth" legible, despite the name continuing underneath the plastic pig on the bottom right of the sheet.


It appears that later on, somebody decided the notice was too obvious - the copyright symbol has been coloured in below, and the rest of the notice has been covered haphazardly with further blue stickers.


All in all, an interesting edition of Newsnight.

EDIT: Further investigation reveals that the map used by Newsnight has a copyright date of 2000, and was made by psephologist Councillor David Boothroyd. It was actually a map of local government areas, and it appears that permission was given to use the image going by the following tweet:

Newsnight use our psephologist's map (David Boothroyd) on their programme tonight. @BBCNewsnight pic.twitter.com/s1SX8BdLrt

— Thorncliffe (@ThorncliffeComm) September 30, 2014

Though this tweet does appear to express some disdain that his name was obscured:

@mikekatz @anthonyjwells @BBCNewsnight Hmm yes, shall I pop down to Broadcasting House with an invoice tomorrow?

— David Boothroyd (@220_d_92_20) September 30, 2014

Actually Broadcasting House is in the London district of Westminster

http://transact.westminster.gov.uk/docstores/publications_store/Westminster_PFRA_Map5.3.pdf

Fantastic forensic investigation, billy. Great work.