Format of 24-hour news prevents 'shoe leather reporting'

The "static nature" of 24-hour news channels undermines the credibility of the journalists presenting them, former BBC News 24 presenter Peter Sissons said yesterday.

Speaking as part of Coventry University's Coventry Conversations programme, Sissons, who retired from broadcasting last summer, said the structure of rolling news channels gets in the way of a reporter's job.

"Hour after hour you would be going to a reporter on the spot, somewhere standing on the street corner, who is glued to that corner by the outside broadcast unit, because he is going into the programme every half-hour for an update. He or she cannot possibly know what's going on, because he or she hasn't got the time to go and find out what is going on," Sissons told the audience.

"On many occasions, when I've been in the studio anchoring and I had a reporter on location, I've had to say to the gallery: 'We are going over to "Fred" now, does he know that this has happened a mile or two from him?' and often the answer would be 'No, he doesn't, so don't ask him about it.'

"What they had to do was put him off for a bit until they could read the Reuters copy to him to let him know what's going on."

Sissons is not the first former 24-hour news channel journalist to criticise the format: in a Coventry Conversations event in October, former head of Sky News Nick Pollard said such channels practise inauthentic journalism.

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