Great fire of London?
- 13 Nov 07, 04:59 PM
Much discussion, both inside the newsroom and elsewhere, about News 24's rolling coverage of .
"Where's the news?" asked several viewers - and a couple of very senior أغر؟´«أ½ bosses - once it began to emerge that...
• No one had been hurt;
• The police were confident that there was no terrorist involvement;
• The fire was relatively quickly brought under control.
Among the flood of text messages to News 24 - most of which provided some very helpful information in the early stages of the story - were a couple which, shall we say, questioned our news judgement:
• "So boring - have you any pictures of paint drying instead?"
• "We don't care in the rest of the country, you London-centric numpties!"
So, why did we run - for so long - with a story about a fire in a disused warehouse?
When we first spotted - from Television Centre, several miles away - a massive plume of smoke over East London, we had no idea of what exactly what we were dealing with. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but - at that time - we could not be sure we weren't in the early stages of reporting what could have been a huge story: another terrorist attack on London, or a major explosion involving multiple casualties.
It would, I think, have been grossly irresponsible to have left the developing story before establishing the basic facts.
This highlights the fundamental difference between a continuous news channel and a traditional bulletin: it is our job to report the news as it unfolds, as it develops. And this sometimes means reporting "live" on incidents at some length which, in the end, turn out to be less than earth-shattering.
The second factor was the immediate response of so many people in and for many, many miles around London: "I can see smoke from Watford. What's going on?". There was clearly a thirst for information, which we tried to provide as comprehensively as possible.
The final reason for covering the fire in the way we did was the availability of live pictures - from fixed cameras on at least two أغر؟´«أ½ buildings in central London, and later from the أغر؟´«أ½ News helicopter. There is something compelling about live images which appeal not only to journalists - you can never be quite sure what is going to happen next, and our audiences generally seem to appreciate this type of unmediated coverage. And, let's be honest, the pictures were pretty dramatic. Which is why - controversially - we stuck with them for over an hour.
Were we London-centric? Up to a point: had the fire been in, say, Newcastle and we had live pictures available, I daresay we would have covered it in much the same way.
To those who felt it was a waste of airtime, I apologise, but would like to offer some statistics in mitigation:
• the number of people watching News 24 doubled during the first half hour of the live coverage of the fire;
• when News 24 carried on covering the fire instead of simulcasting the One O'Clock News, our audience was three to four times higher than normal;
• our online - and statistics - show the item about the fire was the most read on the أغر؟´«أ½ News website - beating the next most popular story by a factor of three to one.
Update, Wed 02:05 PM: Thanks for all your comments - I've responded to some of them here.
Simon Waldman is morning editor on أغر؟´«أ½ News
