General Presentation/Logistics Questions

To be fair, ENPS is pretty old hat now. iNews is more popular outside the BBC, and I don't know any news programme where presenters don't have access to scripts on set...

ENPS takes the lead with the US National Broadcasters though - the downside to it is the fact it relies on ActiveX and IE8 for everything and Windows servers

iNews works on Macs and I know it's what ITV use throughout their News Group - something that ENPS doesn't quite do properly!

Especially if they've seen Anchorman.

Zeinab Badawi presents her REPORTERS programme from a spiral staircase which overlooks the BBC Newsroom. It gives a good perspective of the hundreds to PCs, telephones, keyboards and all other digital equipment I presume one would find in a newsroom.

For want of a better description, is there a single IT Department who handles the whole thing, or are there specialist internal departments who handle faults, issues, upgrades to each individual type of equipment?

Obviously, a Global news operation can't afford to have it's systems go on the blink for anything more than few minutes, so one imagines the IT team is actually quite large at TVC? IT team may be a naff description. Perhaps Technical Support is more apt?

Whatever it may be called, they must be a SWAT team.


Edit: a rather black yet necessary element of news logistics: Obit announcements. Clearly, the recent passing of both Abdel Basset Ali Al Meghrahi and Robin Gibb were clear classic cases of preprepared Obits being played out. In other words, the passing of both of these individuals was predicted some time back, due to health conditions. One couldn't help but notice that the reports were very generic and devoid of specific references of the locations of the deaths.

On the other hand, the passing last week of Donna Summer was probably less anticipated, verified by the scrambling of reports and footage upon the announcement.

Which news department is responsible for having such announcements always kept updated? I recall we did discuss this earlier in this thread, but never really got around to finding out who is the custodian of these. Is there an obit desk or a librarian of sorts who keeps it up to date?

Rather a lot of it is outsourced. IT and telephony support used to be provided in-house, but was spun off to a wholly-owned subsidiary called BBC Technology in the late 90s, which was then sold off in 2004 to Siemens. More recently, Siemens sold off their IT Solutions & Services arm, and the contract is now in the hands of Atos. (Telephony are subcontracted back to SECL, which is also no longer a part of Siemens, but still licenses the name.)
The level of support is much maligned - particularly in the pages of Private Eye - but having seen how other large companies handle their IT, I'd say that on the whole, it ain't all that bad!
A different department of Atos also look after things like the ringmain TVs and RF distribution around TVC.
News have their own engineers who look after their own broadcast kit; project managers who do new installations; location teams who go out with the SNG trucks and run their OBs. I think there is a small amount of crossover in the newsroom, and BBC engineers look after some of their PCs too.

When you call IT support, there's a queue-jump option for "if you're experiencing a problem which will affect a transmission in the next half hour" - and they'll get someone down ASAP.

Yep - there's the Obituary Unit. I was in their office once, and spotted a whiteboard with a list of names - never did figure out if the ones who were ticked off were the obits that were 'done', or those who'd snuffed it...

As Thegeek says the BBC has an obituary unit, although I believe that it has been significantly reduced in size in recent years.

Most places won't have dedicated people to look after them so will there just be an editor who's given the responsibility to keep across them but then the work to update will be done by producers and reporters as needed. The obits themselves as well as scripts, and phone numbers for contributors will be kept on the new production systems so they can be found easily when the time comes.

The obit packages usually get updated on the day to add newer video, if so they normally get re-voiced as the chances are that the original reporter won't be available. Of course there might be the case where someone dies and the obit was voiced by a reporter who's left, that would require a very quick dub!

Would they ever put out an obit voiced by an ex-reporter? I am sure I recently saw one which fell into this category. I think it was someone like Jeremy Vine or Shaun Ley who voiced it - both are still BBC staff - just not reporters. Of course I could be completely mistaken, but I remember thinking it was odd at the time.

If they're still at the BBC then I don't think there'd be a problem with it. If they'd left to got to Sky then there would

Another reporter related issue that does arise is that the the usual rule in TV news is to only have a reporter only appear on 1 item in a bulletin. So if a reporter has voiced the obit but has another report then one will have to be revoiced.... and of course if they appear in-vision on the on the day package then it has to be the obit. You rarely get in vision reporters in obits

There was just a fault on Reporting Scotland with a report on Lockerbie/Megrahi. The video and background sound started playing fine but there was no voice-over from the reporter. It then cut back to Jackie Bird and after a time they played it out ok. What would cause this fault on a pre-prepared package?

News packages are made with 'split-track' audio. Instead of having 2 stereo audio tracks the left is the reporters voice and the right the 'nat sound' from the filming. This is done so it's easy to re-use the footage without having a reporter talking all over it.

When it's played out on air the two tracks are merged into one in the studio's sound desk. There's a few ways that one track can be missing, for example the channel on the sound desk which the report was being played through could have been set wrongly, or when the report was exported from the edit suite one of the audio tracks was deselected (and no-one checked it before hand)

One issue with this way of doing things is that if you actually want to broadcast a stereo item on the same source as you do the reports - for example the opening titles - then you either have to play it through a dedicated channel on the desk or remember to un-mono the channel and then put it back again afterwards

Makes sense, thanks. I had thought when it was exported the audio would have been merged. Sort of follows on from your previous point about editing obits - this presumably makes it easier to change the voice-over but leave the video and it's track and vice versa.

No, because once it's merged together it cannot be re-split. Therefore every item would have to be exported (or 'published') twice - one copy for transmission and one for reuse and archive, which overcomplicates things.