The British are coming, the British are coming!
The British are coming again, this time with
cameras, microphones, and notebooks.
The British are coming again, this time with cameras, microphones, and notebooks.
This invasion is of the journalistic kind as the British news media enter the American market or seek to raise their profile. The most recent example is the BBC World division of the BBC, which was to start a campaign on Thursday to introduce Americans to a 24-hour news network on cable television to compete against CNN and Fox News Channel.
The TV and print adverts are here.
“We hope very much this is the start of a series of deals,” said Richard Sambrook, chief executive at BBC World in London, who is working with Discovery Communications on American distribution for BBC World News.
The United States “is the only region in the world where we’re not available on a 24-hour basis,” Sambrook said.
The BBC news network is the third recent example of the British media aiming at Americans. In February, The Economist, the weekly newsmagazine published by Pearson, started testing a campaign in Baltimore to increase subscription and newsstand sales in the United States.
And The Times of London, owned by News Corp., announced last week that it would begin publishing a daily newspaper for American readers, starting Tuesday, with an initial print run of close to 10,000 copies to be distributed in New York and Washington.
“This has the feeling of Americans deciding they need something outside the system to get a perspective on what’s going on,” said Nick Shore, principal at Way Group in New York, a strategic consulting company. “It’s a global version of a second opinion.”
The interest in world news delivered from someplace outside the United States could be a reaction to “the Wal- Martization of America,” Shore said - that is, responding to perceptions of news that originates domestically is homogenized or corporatized.
Overdue. In fact, since about half our visitors are from the United States, please, please call your cable or satellite provider and tell them you want BBC World. BTW -- they intend to be the first 24/7 news service telecasting entirely in high definition. Also overdue.
Aside from the fact we certainly could use some non-lapdog news sources in the US.
Posted: Fri - June 2, 2006 at 05:55 AM