The TV Brand Builders by Andy Bryant

Author:Andy Bryant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kogan Page
Published: 2016-03-10T09:02:44+00:00

THE FIGHT TO BE FIRST

A further point of advantage is always sought out in ‘who is first’. The gag told by rivals about Sky News’s claim has always been: ‘Never wrong for long’. But the fact that it is used as a defensive joke by their rivals shows the degree to which the channel’s relentless focus, for years, on the ‘first’ message has cut through. In news promotion, as with any form of advertising, persistence – even persistence built on the flimsiest credibility – will have an effect. The fictionalized race for first pictures from even the most mundane local events in Dan Gilroy’s 2014 film Nightcrawler is a high-octane but extremely credible portrayal of the pressure that surrounds news executives.

But the debate around Sky News’s ‘First for Breaking News’ line extended beyond mere joking, when a 2009 report by Cardiff University, ‘The Thirst to be First’, called into question the veracity of the claim.

The university’s report examined the output of three rolling news channels, including ITV News and BBC News. The central question surrounded the percentage of what was claimed as ‘breaking news’ actually being wholly predictable or routine events. Some even diaried in advance. The Cardiff report asserted that for Sky News it was an astonishing 79.4 per cent, compared with ITV’s 32.1 per cent and the BBC’s 12.5 per cent. The report concluded:

The growth in breaking news is a perfect example of a victory of style over substance. Breaking news is there because it has a certain feel, rather than because of the significance of its content.10

A furious Sky rebuttal claimed that the report was BBC funded and only took a brief snapshot of the channel, which was not representative. Peter Horrocks, then the head of BBC News 24, claimed that the findings revealed the ‘First for Breaking News’ line to be: ‘Nothing more than a marketing trick’.11 The whole affair was a skirmish in the increasingly fractious battle between the rolling news channels, but it is interesting that the dismissive words of Horrocks use the word ‘marketing’ as a pejorative. Of course it was a marketing trick. Highly effective, single-minded and relentlessly pursued marketing.

In one remark, though, the tension mentioned at the beginning of this chapter between editorial probity and advertising reductiveness is laid bare. Robert Tansey, Sky’s brand director, content products, believes that even today it is ‘still motivating internally as well as being motivating to the consumer’:

If you talk to the journalists at Sky News they’re still very proud of the fact that they’re more fleet of foot, more nimble, better at getting to the stories more quickly than any other news organization.12

Wind forward to 2014 and Peter Horrocks, by then in a global role responsible for the BBC’s international rolling news channel, is quoted in an official press release trumpeting a new study that showed:

We are just as fast as our competitors and are number one for breaking news from around the world. The BBC’s breaking news is authentic news – rather than the non-existent or minor developments in stories that other broadcasters label ‘breaking news’.

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