[cma-l] News sources - what are you doing?

[Clive Glover]

Jabbar

There have been a number of messages on this subject recently on the  
CMA Discussions.

We at Radio Verulam in St Albans switched over to the new Sky-provided  
service yesterday and have already had some positive reactions.  
Frankly, it sounds more professional than the old IRN bulletins which  
often were poorly presented and (to the intense annoyance of our IT  
wizzards) often failed to last the correct time so our automated  
systems either crashed into a longer-than-it-should-be bulletin or  
gave us dead air for a period of some seconds. So far (OK only 24  
hours!) each bulletin has been exactly 2 minutes - great!

Sky News has more correspondents than IRN and are, of course, running  
a 24 hour TV news channel and providing bulletins for other  
broadcasters, notably Five TV. So they should be capable of providing  
a very good service. They have also been running the Sky Radio News  
channel for some time now so it is not actually a new service.

As to cost it was also my first thought!  But as I understand it IRN  
have contracted out the service to Sky so our existing contracts  
stand. Of course they may try to increase the price upon renewal but  
then we will all join together to complain won't we!

Clive Glover

Radio Verulam 92.6 FM
St Albans

On 26 Feb 2009, at 13:12, Jabbar Karim wrote:

> Hi All
>
> We've been informed by the IRN news that from 3rd March, Sky news will
> be taking over and we will be receiving 2 rather than 3 minutes of  
> news
> which we received as standard.
>
> The IRN news has been quite reliable over the past few years but now
> we're faced with a dilemma that we have to go with Sky and we're not
> sure that we want to.
>
> Does anyone have any ideas about other news sources we could take on  
> the
> hour? We were paying £117.50 per year though we think Sky will want to
> charge more.
>
> We'd like to hear if anyone else is facing these issues and what you
> might be doing.
>
> Thank you
>
> Jabbar
> Radio Asian Fever
> 229 Roundhay Road
> Leeds
> LS8 4HS
>
> Tel. 0113 240 2222
> Jabbar. 0788 170 1133
> Sakina. 0787 212 1544
> http://www.radioasianfever.com
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