On Monday, Sky starts selling Irish news to the Irish. What should we expect in the way of innovation, asks Shane Hegarty.
Last year, Sky News introduced a new weapon to its armoury. A helicopter - or, rather, "SkyCopter" - would be taking to the skies to cover "major stories" such as "motorway, sea and rail disasters, phenomena such as crop circles and extreme weather conditions".
It captured the Sky News attitude neatly. If there's a flood, you won't miss a drop. It'll be on the scene of catastrophes within minutes. But it won't be too snooty about what it covers. When was the last time you turned on the RTÉ news to see a breaking story about crop circles?
From Monday, Sky News will broadcast twice-nightly bulletins to its Irish viewers, at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m., from its studio at Dublin's Earlsfort Terrace. It will have a staff of 21 and bureaux in Limerick and Belfast. Its newsreaders have been plucked from the deepening well of, as the tabloids put it, "news chicks". Gráinne Seoige, Eibhlin Ní Chonghaile and weather girl Lisa Burke were unveiled at a recent press conference. The Sun knew just how to announce it: "PHWOAR O'CLOCK BULLETIN".
Yet Irish viewers shouldn't expect too many surprises from Sky News Ireland. Instead, we might find that it already looks very familiar. Since its arrival 15 years ago, Sky has had an enormous influence on television news in Britain and Ireland, in the form of heavy graphics, attractive newsreaders, viewers' polls and e-mailed opinions, relaxed reporters willing to clown around for the camera, and longer weather forecasts. It was not the world's first 24-hour news channel, nor did it invent all of the developments above , but it used them as none of its competitors had done before. And it worked. The influence of Sky News, then, was visible long before it arrived on these shores.
It arrived on air quite meekly, on February 5th 1989. Top of the news was an item about an eccentric German count buying British kidneys, followed by a story on how Myra Hindley would soon discover if she had cancer.
The first major test was the Hillsborough disaster in April 1989, when Sky News finally got pictures on air at 11 p.m. that night. Before that its reporters had phoned in news from the football ground while a picture of a telephone was superimposed on the scene.
It's unthinkable that the station would be so slow to react today. On September 11th 2001, it was credited with being the first of the British stations to pick up on the story. It has turned response times into a competition, forcing BBC and ITV to speed up their reactions. Its ads often tell us that it got to a story first, rather than that it did it better. In the early days its staff adopted the motto "never wrong for long", and although it has admitted that it runs risks by rushing with a story first, it has developed a reputation for accuracy too.
Sky News has, in fact, become adept at working with whatever pictures it has to hand, so that a rising pall of smoke somewhere in Baghdad can be aired for hours without any real explanation of what it is but with plenty of speculation to fill in the time. In the 24-hour news environment, pictures are replayed over and over again, often deadening their impact, sometimes gratuitously. For instance, the channel,was criticised for repeating footage of a crash at an air show, in which two pilots died.
Meanwhile, it has led the way in turning news into a dramatic production, with graphics roaring on to the screen and presenters striding across giant screens or sitting in front of backdrops of huge fireballs. In doing this, though, it has devalued the once portentous "newsflash", so that the most trifling stories are sometimes treated as if you should gather the family around and start praying. Again, it has worked. When the war in Iraq began,viewers turning to Sky News outnumbered those tuning into to the BBC service, News 24, by three to one. When it relaunched its channel last year, the BBC announced that from now on it would be "unapologetic about grabbing attention".
Sky News has also proven innovative in more subtle ways. In 2003, it reconstructed the Soham murder trial and the Hutton Inquiry from transcripts, winning awards on both occasions. And while the presenters are drowning in on-screen facts, the station has managed successfully to snag viewers who want a short burst of news crammed with information.
While its style might have the tabloid touch, Sky News is rooted in the British tradition of neutral but inquisitive reporting.
Bertie Ahern will launch Sky News Ireland, just as he met Rupert Murdoch and cut the ribbon on News International's Co Meath printing plant when it opened in 2002. But for all the concerns regarding Murdoch's influence over certain world leaders, and their often blatant efforts to please him, tight regulations mean that he has never been able to inject bias into the news channel. In fact, he has complained about its "liberal bias" and has made it clear that he would prefer it to follow the lead of his American channel, Fox News, on which opinion and patriotism take precedence over news.
It will be interesting to see if Sky News Ireland will mean more Irish news on the rest of the day's UK-based bulletins. Sky channels carry more than €15 million worth of Irish advertising a year, yet its Irish content has been thin on the ground. For an international station, Sky News is often overbearingly British. After the Queen Mother's death, Irish viewers looking for other news on its vaunted digital service found that seven screens were blank, one was flying a Union Jack at half-mast, and God Save the Queen was being played repeatedly.
Sky News Ireland is part of a wider plan to regionalise Sky. Murdoch has been looking at starting networks in Italy and India, and already has a local version in Australia. Its arrival here might at first trouble TV3, which struggles for resources, is similar in tone and is affected by Sky News scheduling. How much it concerns RTÉ depends on how many of the 300,000 digital and 900,000 cable households switch on.
Otherwise, only on Monday night will we discover how Sky News intends to sell Irish news to the Irish. If there's a shamrock in the corner of the screen, then we can worry.