Breaking News is the proving ground of a newsroom. In a breaking news scenario, all the machinery of the newsroom clicks together to tackle what is happening now, and deliver the events of the day to the audience as they arrive.
“Breaking news is our bread and butter,” explains Dylan Dronfield, Senior News Editor at Sky News. “That’s what Sky News was originally billed as doing.”
“Don’t take this as me being rude, but as a Brit who’s proud of and grown up with our amazing content,” he urged broadcasters to experiment “with different platforms and technologies – I really believe there’s an enormous opportunity for original British content.
“We need some positive opportunities for export right now and the [online] audience is there, it’s growing and it’s going to double in the next five years.”
It is a motto she has picked up from Fleabag’s creator and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
“We wanted to shoot it like a drama and cut it like a comedy,” she explains. “Sometimes it feels like drama is comedy’s big older brother.”
For Hampson and Waller-Bridge, it wasn’t enough to create a ‘typical’ comedy. “We were trying to go for the ambition of drama, but not at the expense of the laughs.”
The awards recognise the huge variety of skills involved in programme production from editing to lighting, and costume design to digital effects.
BBC dramas lead the way in nominations. Taboo, which stars Tom Hardy is up for six awards, whilst Broken and Three Girls received four nominations each.
Three Girls director Philippa Lowthorpe received a nomination in the Director - Drama category alongside Euros Lyn for Damilola, Our Loved Boy and Julian Jarrold for The Witnesses for the Prosecution, all for BBC One.
Watch Lord Puttnam's presentation on the major threats to the media industry, followed by a question and answer session with Ed Vaizey MP.
Click here to read the event report and to watch highlights from the event.
Daniel Lawrence Taylor discusses his new timetravelling sitcom Timewasters
In his new series, Simon Reeve travels to Russia on the centenary of the Revolution to find out what life is really like in the Federation
It’s violent. It’s explosive. And it’s going out live on Dave, "the Home of Witty Banter".
It doesn’t. For inspiration, I look at Victoria’s own watercolours of Christmas at Windsor. Albert wanted to recreate the Christmases of his Coburg childhood and he put up a tree for each of their nine children, hanging them from the ceiling with tables, called altars, for presents underneath. For all their cosy, domestic image Victoria and Albert, weren’t afraid of a little bling.
You can’t just get up one morning and decide to be an explorer.
Well, you can, but you’re not going to get on television with that attitude. You’ve got to jump through lots of hoops to get there and it’s not just a case of how many countries you’ve been to. You don’t have to join the Army to get into TV, but I think it’s good to have some level of expertise or niche knowledge. Once you’re an expert in anything, in any industry, people will come to you. That’s where you want to be.
