I wrote this in early 2023 for a previous version of this website but am putting it back up here, lightly amended, because there may still be interest from journalism students, media historians and bored people in general.
I worked in 24-hour news (radio and television) for 35 years, the PhD period excepted. In the course of the PhD I read many academic journal articles about news operations, some of which were very good and some of which found meaning where it did not deserve to be found. Academics researching non-stop news: I hope you’ll find some useful tips here, especially about the management of news content and the travails of working in news at weekends and during the night.
The first ‘take’ on a story is usually a purely journalistic reaction
First efforts on breaking news, especially in the evening and overnight, are without much managerial oversight. No-one with a solely managerial job will be at their desk overnight in UK broadcasting (except for a UK general or US presidential election), although a manager will almost always phone the programme editor briefly in the evening. Major overnight breaking news at the BBC in which I was involved included the death of Diana, Princess of Wales; Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait that started the first Gulf War; invading US forces entering Baghdad in 2003; the fall of the Berlin Wall; and the Japanese earthquake and tsunami that precipitated the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. The only time, to my knowledge, that a manager was woken up for such news was the death of Diana – but that was to discuss programme schedule changes more than the editorial line. The touch of Western news management is relatively light even during the day* – you won’t often find a manager intervening outside scheduled editorial meetings – although the cold dead hand of set-piece over-commissioning looms over the output desk most of the time. In Chinese state media, however, an initial journalistic response can be followed by a managerial counter-reaction – for example, the reporting of a serious incident by the programme team can be followed by an hour (or several) of news output from which the story is unaccountably absent while managers work out how to play it. See the Hong Kong and Xinjiang chapters of my BBC-CGTN book for examples of this.
If an unknown newsroom journalist is reporting on a story, it does not necessarily mean it is of secondary importance
Correspondents in foreign bureaux – and their producers and shoot-edits – sometimes sleep, even at nights and weekends. You can therefore more or less guarantee that some inconvenient major news will occur on a weekend night. Enter Phil McGap, the sleep-deprived newsroom writer tasked with assembling a ‘holding’ report until expert help can be summoned from overseas. Sometimes that help never arrives because the newsgathering team is needed elsewhere or is on a mountain suffering from altitude sickness and unable to file (this happened).
If an item you were expecting does not appear in a news programme, give it another hour
Output producers usually have more stories than they can fit into a programme, and teams working on hourly bulletins often create two or more versions of a headline story that they run in rotation during their shift. So don’t castigate a news organisation for ignoring the reaction of a given country to a news development unless you’ve cast your net wide enough for representative output.
If middlingly-important news does not appear immediately, or if a planned event is not trailed, it probably doesn’t mean the broadcaster is slow on the uptake
Running an hourly news programme means juggling with the content and managing its flow, especially for an international audience. You might start to run an Asian story in the Asian morning rather than the European early evening, for example, or switch editorial effort away from a Latin American story in the early morning UK time. It can also mean managing your managers and judging when they will have gone to sleep; they will not wish to wake up to the same headline stories they saw, read or heard before they went to bed. Irritatingly, managers who weren’t on the on-call list at the weekend have been known to re-emerge on a Monday and argue strongly for coverage of a story that the weekend team have already done to death.
Proof-reading is difficult on little sleep and insufficient caffeine
Hence the on-screen aston/chyron** a good few years ago naming the BBC’s then Europe Correspondent, Matthew Price, as Matthew Correspondent. Several years later BBC viewers were introduced to his apparent brother, Steve Correspondent. This turned out to be Steve Rosenberg in Moscow who, technically speaking, should have been Steve Editor. Other proof-reading fiascos delivered the cloned ‘human sheep’ that appeared one night in bulletins on World Service News and over which a veil shall be drawn, and the TV graphics backdrop introducing an item about China with the words ‘Shaghai Surprise’, which indeed it must have been to the programme producer.
If an item contains an egregious error, it may not be fixed for several hours even though producers are aware of it
I have never forgotten the TV night-shift during which we covered the result of a European football fixture involving the Turkish side Galatasaray. Or Galatsry, as it first appeared on screen. I exclaimed, ‘that’s wrong!’, and another A was duly added. Just the one. I complained again about Galatasry an hour later. Again, one more A. It took us more hours than As to fix, because the relevant person’s meal break had to be factored in. Obviously more important factual errors should always lead to the item being pulled swiftly pending repair, but bear in mind that there are more stories than producers, even on disproportionately well resourced programmes whose names I shall not mention here.
Programme editors like (and have expertise in) different things
People with more spare time than is sensible, or sleep-deprived PhD candidates conducting content analysis, may witness an hourly news programme that is completely different from the previous hour and wonder what has happened. Shift-change, or editor change, are the most likely explanations. One (now former) BBC radio news editor of my acquaintance who sat in during another team’s lunch break would regularly rewrite every main story and change the headlines before they got back an hour later. The returning team was not always suitably grateful. A diversity of approach to news is almost always in the interests of the viewer, listener or reader, although it can be confusing for content analysts.
If a news feature appears on two consecutive days, word-for-word the same, it does not mean an editor is trying to make a propaganda point
It probably means that a new team has come on duty and the handover has failed to note that the aforementioned feature has already run. No-one wants this to happen, but it does sometimes. Probably best to ignore it, or – if you’re the planning producer – to hope that the management hasn’t twigged.
Tired broadcasters all over the world make mistakes
I have seen dedicated producers in developing countries beat themselves up for being ‘unprofessional’ and ascribing this to the under-resourced broadcaster for which they work. They don’t realise that all of the above errors and inconsistencies can and do also happen in comparatively well-resourced Western newsrooms. I hope the above will prove reassuring, except to editors in Western newsrooms.
Does all of this still matter?
It does at the moment. Linear channels still exist and are watched by large numbers of people. Production and output shifts for TV and radio are long, day and night, and can be exhausting for the over-25s. What is changing is the way that international news organisations use their broadcast centres to host their schedules around the clock. Some of them are moving towards ending night-shifts, or at least minimising the need for them. The BBC’s news channel broadcasts from Washington, Nairobi and Singapore as well as London; the Chinese anglophone state broadcaster CGTN similarly anchors its programmes from Beijing, Nairobi, Washington and London. Maybe nessun dorma no more.
* important proviso – I have not worked in domestic political news so am not commenting thereon. I also stopped working in a newsroom in late 2024 so may have been overtaken by events by the time you read this. It’s also worth pointing out that lack of managerial intervention does not preclude individual subconscious self-censorship in alignment with institutional news values.
**aston/chyron – superimposed text on the lower third of a screen, typically used to introduce a news correspondent or a speaker.
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