Where can SKYnews go now...

I think that's open to debate. These things evolve.

I think most newspaper style guides would recommend TalkSport rather than Talk Sport, and I think most wouldn't be keen on using talkSPORT.

EDIT: A quick search of the Guardian archive suggests they sometimes use TalkSport and sometimes use Talksport.

It depends on the context. In an editorial context in a newspaper or magazine, TalkSport would probably be used, but if the publication was running a promotion with talkSPORT they'd probably use the station's own style in any accompanying copy.

There's one thing that Sky does which I find quire irritating - and it's the way they carry out 2-way interviews at the newswall. It just looks un-natural for a newsreader to be facing a 6-foot tall talking head, and what's more, we only tend to see their back. This just seems to go against the conventional wisdom of how 2-ways are carried out - either with split-screens, or smaller monitors.

It's almost as if the interviewee is going to eat the presenter...

How about a newsfloor , where the floor in front of the news desk has a large screen or series of screens (like the Sky Newswall), on which the presenter can either stand next to, or stand on (which would be useful for maps). The camera would obviously have to look down on it from the ceiling, and a mixture of camera angles could be used, some looking straight down at it, and others at an angle. It could work!

don't they already do that with their floormaps allbeit in a slightly different way?

good idea though!

I believe Martin has justified this in the past by saying that on his computer, he has pre-2001 Sky News stuff in a folder called 'Sky News', and 2001-present stuff in a folder called 'SKYnews'.

I've long given up on debating this point oh well, lets do this for old time's sake.

I would disagree that SKYnews is more representative of the corporate ID, because the Sky corporate font has been designed such that the lowercase characters are roughly the same size as the uppercase characters, thus even though it does actually use the characters SKYnews, they all appear at the same height, unlike most other fonts (and certainly the TV Forum font), and thus writing SKYnews here isn't any type of reflection of what appears on screen; writing SKYNEWS would actually be something more like it. And you could take this further, arguing that if you are trying to recreate the logo in plain text, you should actually write SKY(NEWS, but then that starts off the whole SKY|ONE, SKY MOVIES[][][] et al debate again.

If you want (or even care) about what should actually happen however, the channel is called Sky News. The logo reads SKYnews but that only works because of the way the logo is designed and doesn't work at all in plain text, the channel will call themselves Sky News in plain text (or SKY NEWS if using all capitals).

At the end of the day, a brand in a logo or a brand in plain text are two different things. A brand in a logo will result in the designer using all sorts of weird and wonderful (but increasingly these days boring, I still maintain that the best and most memorable logos are iconic and not textual) ways of expressing the brand, resulting in constructions like SKYnews because it works with the font that's been designed for it. In plain text, a brand is just the words typed - and type properly, i.e. Sky News.

If people always tried to mimick corporate logos in plain text, where would end up? Would CBS become 'O' because it's the closest shape, similarly would ABC (UK) become 'V' because it's the closest shape to it's triangle logo? Would we have
(A)
(T)
(V)

because that's as close as you can get to representing ATV's logo? I've seen people type CARLtON* to represent Carlton's logo, but should this be typed every time Carlton is mentioned? I think not. I'm beyond caring about this really, but the graphical world and plain text world are worlds apart, you can't expect SKYnews to be acceptable as plain text, it's Sky News.

But anyway, I digress...

Well, the United Kingdom is, off course, much bigger and has more inhabitants than The Netherlands (the country in which I live), but it's odd to see that we have only two TV-news sources while you have:

* BBC National News;
* BBC News 24;
* BBC Four News (yes, because it's different);
* ITV News;
* ITV News Channel;
* Channel 4 News;
* five news;
* Sky News

First, we haven't got ONE SINGLE news channel at all (although The Netherlands has 16.1 million inhabitants and BBC Monitoring says we're one of the world's most densely populated nations). And then we've got our public NOS Journaal (like BBC National News is over there, but incomparably better) and the RTL Nieuws on RTL 4, a commercial channel. They both have several bulletins a day, but the stories they bring these days are awful: it's about The Netherlands, The Netherlands and more about The Netherlands. Tony Blair, George Bush, the Middle East and bird flu just have five minutes in total just before the programme ends...

The subjects are in the classification of run-away dogs and stolen biscuits at the local bakery. Yes, even our public service, the NOS, does that. (Maybe even worse than its commercial rival). Besides that, non of them really investigates anything. They never have special reports like BBC News has. NOS and RTL just... follow.

Thankfully, there's BBC One (and Two) over here so I can watch the National News (which is thankfully not as 'national' as what you might think it could have been).

And now this discussion about the news channels in the UK. I've got a couple of views on them, which I hope someone might correct them or tell me if I'm wrong...

* BBC News 24 seems rather authorative, bright and solid, but not the one that brings breaking news first.

* Sky News looks very commercial to me, with that bright red and blue (when I first saw it in action, I thought it was a joke: it just didn't look serious at first!). But I think they're doing quite well. I think Sky News is clear, not as intelligent as News 24 but yet more accessible.

* ITV News Channel... I don't know. Mostly the discussion is between Sky and News 24. Is the ITV News Channel some sort of hatch? I cannot make any judgement on the ITV News Channel. What is it like? Tendentious? Political? Focused on world affairs?

Some questions:
- Which of Sky, ITV and BBC [the news channels] is most focused on world affairs insteed of lousy domestic affairs and scandals?

- Which of them has the largest budget and how is that visible for the viewer?

Here is a VERY rough idea of my replacement for the newswall. They would say, now with Kay in the Infobooth/newsbooth/vr base whatever it is called.

Real Media File

This is not a replacement for the Newsroom and Desk, just a replacement for the newswall reports, and the newswall would remain as a newsroom backdrop and used to show live footage for major stories, i.e. gun fire footage during a war etc...

Well how about Channel Five turning into five ? Most of us might type BBC but we all now type five rather Five?

It's much more focussed on UK stories than the other two news channels - I think they are trying to turn this into a strength. Certainly they make better use of the regional newsrooms than the BBC do, and one of the reasons I like watching the ITV NC is because I know I will see stories from the regions that will be ignored by News 24 and Sky News.

Five call themselves Five in plain text not five - see www.five.tv/home/frameset/?content=98901&

Though they are not entirely consistent on this matter.

News 24 technically has the largest amount of world coverage, but that's because they and BBC World have a single combined news service overnight. Overall, I'd say they all fairly equally cover the world picture. The agenda of News 24 and ITVNC largely mirrors their network news services on BBC1 and ITV. Sky News of course can set it's own agenda, but it's generally still pretty much the same as the rest.

Whilst I'm sure dedicated watchers of news channels could cite differences in the way they handle world affairs, but as a casual watcher of all 3, I can't really say that there is much difference between them. If anything, ITVNC is maybe a bit more 'I'm a celeb' type oriented than the rest, but then the whole of ITV News has a slightly more tabloid feel. But it's certainly nothing like the differences between US services, where most national news programmes focus on domestic issues, and worldwide news channels can vary wildly (i.e. the difference between CNN International and Fox News Channel).


News 24 has the largest budget (aswell as all of BBC News' resources) but that certainly isn't visible on screen.

Sky News has the next largest, and I must say out of the 3 they make the best use of theirs, running an entire newsgathering operation aswell as their channel, and generally still managing to be the most succesful in their field.

ITVNC has the smallest, it was born out of the ITN News Channel (a shoestring run doomed to failure venture by ITN themselves), subsequently purchased and revamped into the ITV News Channel in 2002. It's the cheapest channel to run, using the ITV Network news set, and being able to use ITN's newsgathering operation for ITV News (the network news that is). It's the only one of the 3 which doesn't have it's own dedicated set, some see that as a strength, others as a weakness.


I've chosen to ignore that because it's a crap brand, it's still Channel 5 (or C5) for me, and it's always going to be.

Well, thank you SO FAR for your (plain) answers. But a new question has come up: why did ITN decide to start a news channel on its own while the UK already had BBC News 24 and Sky News?