Sky News

Sky News is one of the longest running channels in the Sky TV package. It prides itself on its ability to cover breaking news as and when it happens, and if it transpires that this will mean abandoning its source of income (ie dropping a commercial break or three), then that's what they will do, so if they suddenly go bankrupt, you'll know why. :-)

In comparison with the other two British based rolling news services, Sky News has a top range of reporters, all devoted (or so we're told) to bringing us, the viewer, the latest news and reports. The list of reporters, to a new viewer of Sky News, doesn't really ring any bells. The reports they produce are generally high standard, each hour is packed to the brim with the news, from Foot and Mouth to Politics to Foreign affairs, all presented from Sky News Center. We're not told where it is, but its most likely to be Inner London.

The news is presented from a wooden table built on the back of some deep blue padding. Its this deep blue that surrounds the whole output of the channel. Blue is used on the captions, on the backdrop of the studio, a portion of their (square) logo is blue, the newsroom at work behind the presenters uses a blue window as well. Sky were the first to launch a rolling news service and blue had been set as a standard for this sort of work because its an appropriate colour for all kinds of news stories. So if we're covering something sombre, the blue helps to set the tone. Covering something light-hearted - the blue lifts the spirits as well.

Visual wise, Sky News uses one corner of the screen to tell you the current time (it's the only channel of the three to use a 12hr clock, the BBC and ITN use 24hr format), the address of their website and also to remind you what their logo looks like. The captions for reports appear to the right of this graphic. These captions normally take the bottom two lines, where the graphic would reside if it was stretched across the screen.

During interviews, a third line to the caption system is added. This is red and slots onto the side of the piece of the caption used for the clock. It typically holds a heading of the story being followed or failing that, it has the words "Breaking News" in it, and where a caption would be, there is a summary of the news that has just broke. Because this takes up the bottom three lines of the screen, it can be left on screen during a report until there's time for a presenter to provide more details on the story.

Sky News is a general market production, attempting to lead the rest of the field. With its Sky News Active service as well, Sky is doing very well indeed.