Month: June 2016

Long haul on BA, and the in flight entertainment offers a news bulletin. Thirty minutes, which is really twenty six once you take out the BA adverts, because the headlines do not start until two and a half minutes in.

Muhammad Ali had died. I timed what followed, because after the first ten minutes I started to suspect what was happening and wanted to be sure I was being fair about it.

The running order

• 02:30, headlines finally begin
• 02:30 to 12:52, Muhammad Ali
• 12:52 to 14:30, roughly two minutes covering three news stories and one sport story, plus a plug for an Ali special coming up later
• 14:30 to 15:30, this day in history
• 15:30 to 22:55, the Ali special segment
• 25:15 to 28:20, a montage of Ali memories

So out of twenty eight minutes, somewhere around twenty five were about one boxer who had died. Three news stories and one sport story got two minutes between them.

Why this is not a complaint about Muhammad Ali

He was, by a wide margin, the most famous athlete who ever lived, and one of the very few sportspeople whose life belongs in a news bulletin rather than the sport section. Ten minutes at the top, entirely deserved. A special segment, fine. Run the montage, I watched it.

The problem is what got squeezed out. This bulletin is not competing with a rolling news channel and a phone in somebody’s pocket. It is the only news a few hundred people are going to see for the next fourteen hours, because there is no signal at cruising altitude and this is the only bulletin loaded on the system. In that context, two minutes of the rest of the world is not editing. It is an obituary with a news bulletin bolted on the side, and passengers landing at the other end will not know what happened while they were in the air.

The tell is the plug. Two minutes in, having established that the lead story is being covered at length, the bulletin stops to advertise more coverage of the same story later in the same bulletin. Nobody does that with a story they think their audience might be finished with.

Which is a shame, because I would have liked to know what else was going on.