Late Breaking News?

BBC News 24 have just reported the death of Francis Crick, who I believe discovered DNA (4:55pm). However I recieved a BBC News Alert (to my computer) about this news just before 4:30pm.

So why the time delay? If BBC News Online found out about it then, then why did it take so long for News 24 to report it as 'Breaking News'.

Funny, I always got the impression that the news alerts were about twenty minutes behind BBC News 24 / Sky News / etc...

I always usually find breaking news first on BBC News Online (not via the alerts, though), and only after that do I see it on BBC News 24 or BBC World.

It only takes a minute or so to put a line of text onto the 'ticker'. One would presume, for a fairly minor piece of breaking news such as this, that they would want to delay announcing the news until they had some VT / obituary / science correspondent to explain what he did in his life. This would take some time; as far as I am aware, the BBC do not do exhaustive 'prominent scientist death rehearsals'.

It would perhaps seem like hyperbole to say "Breaking news - Francis Crick has died" and then announces further updates.

On the other hand, not having seen it, maybe this is exactly what they did at 4:55pm.

They should take inspiration from the javascript ticker on the BBC News site.

"BREAKING NEWS: Bomb attack in Isreal. More soon...."

Would it be too hard for n24 to do

BREAKING NEWS
Francis Crick, who discovered DNA, has died. Obit follows shortly"