Chris

Ouch!

In a way it reminds me of the launch of Today in the mid 1980s. Made much, pre-launch, of the fact that it would substantially be printed in full colour, but when it came to it, most pages were slightly off-register (the four colour plates weren’t aligned properly, so the pictures looked muddy, with colourful haloes around the edges). Sometimes they were dreadfully misaligned. Correctly lining up the CMYK plates prior to rolling the printing press is basic stuff, but at launch they simply hadn’t managed to hire anyone good enough to get it bang on, first time, every time, under the pressure of daily newspaper deadlines.

Some of the stuff GBN is getting wrong at the moment is the sort of thing that a competent crew from a small production company would spot, correct and re-take, if they were out making a corporate video. The problem GBN has is it’s making its mistakes live on air. The lighting, costuming and audio shortcomings should be remedied within a few days, even if, as seems to be the case, they’ve been unable to attract hires with substantial experience of producing live news. If you can’t spot these sorts of mistakes and you don’t know how to correct them, you really shouldn’t be working with TV cameras in any context whatsoever.

The editorial direction is another matter entirely. This is obviously where all the money has been spent so you would hope they’d know what they’re doing. That remains to be seen.