Sky News

Nominations for the RTS Television Journalism Awards 2021 announced

After an unparalleled and challenging year, the BBC leads the way with 23 nominations across the 19 categories including ‘News Channel of the Year’, and ‘Breaking News’ for the coverage of Boris Johnson being rushed to hospital with Covid-19. ITV and Sky News follow garnering 10 nominations each, both including ‘Scoop of the Year’ and ‘Television Journalist of the Year’, for which the nominees are Alex Crawford for Sky News, Clive Myrie for BBC News, and Robert Moore for ITV News.

John Ryley’s TV Diary

Preparations to celebrate the life of Harriet, my wife, at a memorial service in West Oxfordshire dominated the first half of March. Peritoneum cancer. Aged 58, Harriet died at Christmas.

Honest eulogies, festoons of flowers, elaborate afternoon tea, and the wonderful choir from St Bride’s, the journalists’ church, were all sharply halted with only five days to go when the chief scientific advisor, Sir Patrick Vallance, made clear that all gatherings, “big or small”, should not go ahead.

Tony Hall stresses the importance of the BBC in an age of uncertainty

Tony Hall (Credit: RTS/Richard Kendal)

Earlier, the RTS convention had been told that, as a brand, Netflix today enjoyed the same high levels of public trust as the BBC. As for the TikTok-using, mobile-addicted members of Generation Z, the BBC looked to be completely under the radar.

Now it was the time for Tony Hall, the BBC’s Director-General, to respond. He did so in a wide-ranging, troop-­rallying speech, and argued that, in today’s age of uncertainty, characterised by propaganda and disinformation, the BBC and public service broadcasting were more important than ever.

Sky News appoints first climate change correspondent

Hannah Thomas-Peter (Credit: Sky News)

The new position has been created to demonstrate the channel’s commitment to reporting on climate change.

Thomas-Peter will leave her position as Sky News’s US correspondent, after covering hard-hitting stories across the US, including the #MeToo movement, the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the Trump presidency, the opioid drugs crisis and the rise of the far right.

The reporter also sailed around Britain as part of an expedition for a documentary analysing the effects of ocean plastics on the environment.

Sky's Beth Rigby: The woman shaking up Westminster

Beth Rigby (Credit: Ali Painter/Sky)

Beth Rigby is the stand-out political broadcaster of our times. This is despite the former print journalist having been on our screens for only three years. No one asks the acute, no-nonsense yet empathetic questions like the new political editor of Sky News. And no one does it in her accent.

She drops so many Gs that Rigby dreads party conferences in Birmin’ham. We worked together on the Times, where she was a scoop-winning media editor – and when I saw her first steps on Sky News I knew, as her bosses obviously did, that a star had been born.

Comcast and Disney vie for the Murdoch empire

(Credit: AP)

However it ends, the battle royal for the right to own most of the assets of 21st Century Fox, and all of Sky, reflects deep and significant trends in global media. The resolution (in favour of suitors Disney, Comcast or both) may end up being less important than what the outcome tells us about market dynamics.

This battle is about the response of legacy media to accelerating shifts in consumer behaviour and to the threats posed by the big digital disruptors. In a market where content and distribution are increasingly intermingled and global, size unlocks the prize.