Sky News (Sky News)

Member Name: SugarSpun

Product:	Sky News
Date:	11/10/09 (27 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Excellent reporters breaking news quickly

Disadvantages: Tabloid format is advertising-heavy

Sky News is a 24 hour news channel. It's been going since 1989 and has won a bunch of awards for breaking news stories.

It's a fairly good balance between rolling news and features, although the features normally turn up overnight when the majority of viewers are sleeping and they don't want to pay live news reporters to report to nobody. Which makes a lot of sense, I suppose. They also have specific business, sports, entertainment and politics reports at specific times of day/week and cover Prime Minister's Question Time monthly.

They're also very good about cutting into whatever they were doing when news breaks, and they keep a running tape of headlines across the bottom of the screen at all times. Something else I like is that they'll ditch regular programming for a special event - again, a very sensible attitude to breaking important news. Coverage of scheduled annual events is also very good - they do the Oscars very well indeed.

The reporters tend to be high quality, accomplished journalists as well. Eamonn Holmes does the breakfast show and he's wonderful.

There are a couple of things I don't like, however. The first thing is that the format is incredibly loud and tabloid, but that's purely an aesthetic complaint on my part and not something to massively whinge about. The second is that they're very advertising-heavy. I was watching Sky News a while ago and there was an advert roughly every 8 minutes, whether it was for their website, another Sky News show, one of their sponsors or a paid-commercial break. Too much, Sky News. You're clearly not short of revenue, cut it out.

Overall a great channel and well worthwhile, but an excess of advertising and a very tabloid format puts me off a bit. BBC News is a lot calmer, although it's a little slower to break new stories and their breakfast show's not as good.

Summary: Great channel but could be better