Reconnecting with the Viewers: Sky News’ Election Coverage

Abstract

Sky News launched as Britain’s first 24 hour TV news channel in 1989. So 2005 was the fourth General Election which we have covered. We started to plan the overall approach for our coverage in 2003, about 18 months before what turned out to be polling day.From the outset we felt that we needed to take a new approach for a very simple reason. In 1992 and 1997 the General Election had shown an increase or ‘spike’ in our audience ratings but in 2001 the level of viewing had been slightly but significantly down on what we would normally expect our audience to be at that time of the year. It had also taken some time to rebuild the audience back to ‘normal’ levels. 2001 was the first election for the now-defunct ITV News Channel and BBC News 24 was much less established then. But this slump in viewing was not as a result of the proliferation of news channels. Indeed all channels experienced a dip in normal levels of news viewing in 2001, whether they were traditional terrestrial stations such as BBC 1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 4 or available like the 24 hour news channels only to multi-channel viewers on satellite, cable or Freeview.KeywordsPrime MinisterMinute DurationTelevision InterviewNews ChannelBritish ElectionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.