it’s been one hell of a spell for the world’s news gatherers; in the midst of covering the countdown to the US Presidential Elections – a race being played out in a more public arena than ever before – the economic crisis finally hit home. It’s not as if no-one saw it coming, over a year ago MEASAT chief operating officer Paul Brown-Kenyon contributed an article to Television Asia Plus considering the potential impact of the sub-prime lending debacle upon the satellite industry. But nobody could predict exactly when, and how, the crisis would manifest itself. And apart from having to cover the macro implications of both the US Election and the financial meltdown, news organizations are duty bound the answer the man in the street’s question – how will it impact me? “CNBC was in our element in covering the recent historical events that affected the global economy,” John Casey, director, news and programming, CNBC Asia Pacific. “What happened on Wall Street reverberated around the world, and CNBC was in a prime position to provide the best coverage of the story. We were able to make and execute decisions with a moment’s notice. We were able to switch schedules and provide hits into all the CNBC networks around the world. With the latest financial turmoil, never before have we witnessed market volatility and heavy news flow. Live TV is the best way to tell the story. Our viewers and the market players could not wait for tomorrow’s newspapers and not rely on other network with different core competencies. So they tuned into CNBC.” Casey says CNBC recorded a 106 percent increase in viewership across all time bands on 15 September, 2008 in Singapore. “The 10pm time band recorded an unprecedented 291 percent increase. CNBC recorded the highest increase in viewership of all news networks in Singapore*. CNBC.com also recorded an increase in page views and saw more than 14.6 million page views on Monday and 15.4 million page views on Tuesday. (*Source: TNS Singapore, All Individual Age 25+ in cable homes, Universe:1,418,932; Sample:932) Asked about standing out editorially, consistently and during times of crisis, Bill Dorman, managing editor for Bloomberg Television in the Asia-Pacific said it’s always a challenge to punch through the clutter of so many channels. “We concentrate on our strengths – telling the business news story in a way that’s relevant to our audience in the Asia-Pacific region and using the strengths of Bloomberg’s international news organization. This means that we’re able to report live and talk first to newsmakers from Wall Street to Washington, as well as make use of our network of more than 140 news bureaus around the world. In addition to our reporting from Asia, we’ve been able to have contributions from Europe, the US and the Middle East to round out different angles of this ongoing story.” Dorman says one of Bloomberg TV’s strengths is its ability to go live to more than a dozen camera locations around the Asia Pacific region. “We’ve made frequent use of that reach in covering the financial turbulence story. One example is the camera we’ve recently installed in Bangkok – in the week that Lehman Brothers tumbled and Wall Street shuddered, we were able to bring our viewers live reaction from the Thai Finance Minister and the head of the country’s central bank, as well as newsmakers from other parts of the world.” Regarding the US Presidential race, Ellana Lee, managing editor CNN Asia Pacific outlines the network’s regional approach to events. “Our nine bureaux across Asia Pacific have allowed us to hear a wide range of individual viewpoints and reactions while our unrivalled regional on air and online newsgathering teams have ensured the relevance of this election for audiences across the Asia Pacific. We visited the Japanese fishing town of ‘Obama’ who rallied support for the presidential candidate and bought first reactions from Beijing, Bangkok, Seoul, Tokyo, Delhi and Islamabad on the Obama and McCain nominations.” Elsewhere, Lee says coverage included CNN’s chief national correspondent John King accompanying Cindy McCain before conducting a one-on-one interview with her in Hanoi while an exclusive report by John Vause from Jakarta was the first to dispel myths that Barack Obama attended a madrassah style school. “Whilst we don’t have regional viewing figures, we know that our coverage of the Presidential race has broken all records on cnn.com. A global audience of 1.5 million watched the first vice presidential debate streaming live on 5 October, making it the second highest figure ever behind the first night of the Republican Convention with 1.8 million. CNN’s political ticker blog set a record of 4.8 million page views on 27 September, the blog’s highest trafficked day ever while CNN anchor Jonathan Mann’s blogs, written during the debate, generated more than 1000 responses that day alone – the biggest ever response to a CNN International blog. Also on Saturday 27 September, the day after the first debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, traffic to the international edition of cnn.com was double the usual amount.” At BBC World News, senior broadcast journalist/editor Katie Dahlstrom shares her thoughts on being a non-US news organization covering the Presidential Race. “The main challenge is to achieve balance in our coverage and to unpick the complexity of American society. We’ve sought to break down the stereotypes of how people around the world sometimes perceive America, and bring to our audiences the patchwork quilt that in fact makes up American society.” Dahlstrom also extols the virtues of being a public broadcaster, “We’re seen as independent, able to ask more difficult questions and get contributors to explain their views more thoroughly and more discursively. As a non-US news organisation, broadcasting to an international audience, I think Americans were even more willing to talk to us about their country and forthcoming election.” Explains Dahlstrom, “The BBC’s Global News division sent a team of journalists on a bus trip across the US. Simply having the BBC US08 Election bus, with the branding it has, made us stand out. Likewise having a huge online presence and dynamic PR and marketing campaigns have brought us American coverage we otherwise wouldn’t have had. The evidence is that people are coming to see the bus, emailing in to ask where it will be in their town, and tuning in both on radio and TV. Rather than just speaking with the candidates and political parties involved, the BBC US08 Election Bus Tour is travelling to meet with the electorate. We really want to find out and report on the key issues which everyday Americans face and what they want from their next president. And, underlying all of our reports are the BBC’s core values of impartiality and neutrality. Many Americans we have visited have told us how much they really value our editorial approach.” Also enjoying a different perspective on events is TV5MONDE, which despite being a general entertainment channel, is covering both the financial crisis and the US Elections for its French-speaking audiences around the world. Explains Alexandre Muller, managing director, Asia – TV5MONDE, “It is comparatively easier for us to address that particular topic than for other international channels, thanks to our multinational French-speaking point of view. We rely on opinions and footage from journalists from France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada and Africa, which makes our treatment of information more diverse, balanced and non-partisan. Throughout the world, and in the US in particular, we manage to provide our viewers with a different news source complimentary to other networks.” TV5MONDE recently showed a 52’ special edition on the financial crisis, following the refusal by Congress to pass the Paulson plan. “As far as the presidential election, we’re showing the three presidential debates (and the vice-presidents’ debate) live on all our eight channels (including Asia), and viewers have the possibility to watch it online afterwards on our dedicated ‘US election’ website along with a handful of complimentary information on US presidential history (fact sheets, videos, quizzes, blogs etc.).” Asked about the technological challenges of covering events, and to multiple platforms, CNBC Asia’s Casey said the infrastructure has been in place for a long time already. “There were no technological challenges that we faced when relaying the events from the US. In fact, we had an advantage. In 2005, we launched a show called Worldwide Exchange. It is the first truly worldwide business news program that is broadcast simultaneously on CNBC around the world, and we set up our technological infrastructure for this program. So, because we had our infrastructure in place, we did not have challenges of relaying the events from the US.” CNN’s Lee was similarly upbeat. “We are so accustomed to relaying events from the US that we have not encountered any challenges to date. Our network of bureaux are supported by the CNN ‘Election Express’, the first and only fully high-definition mobile news bureau running around the States. It is a studio, an editing room and a production facility in a 45-foot bus. Wired with WiFi and robust internet connectivity, the satellite truck maintains a tracking BGAN transmission platform that allows CNN correspondents to transmit video wherever and whenever they are. Lee goes on to describe ‘the gee-whizziest TV-news gizmo since the animated weather map’, “CNN’s ‘Magic Wall’ is a big technology leap. Unlike anything else seen on TV, the device facilitates CNN’s correspondents explaining complicated election statistics with a simple poke, touch or wave, setting a series of zooming maps, flying pie charts and playing videos. The magic wall truly brings to life stats and figures that may otherwise seem a little dry.” Says BBC World News’ Dahlstrom, “Technologically it is no different than broadcasting from any other country, and in many cases easier. Our team of technical and sound engineers provided a multi-platform infrastructure on the bus – radio via Inmarsat bGan, TV pictures via videophone and uplink dishes, video for the web and online material via 3G network cards. The challenge is not only to get the news to our audience as soon as possible, but also primarily to ensure its accuracy – something which is essential to us.” Adds Bloomberg TV’s Dorman, “Through a combination of satellites and internal links, we’ve been able to keep up with live reports and developments from the US and elsewhere. One challenge has been when several events happen at once. For example, on the morning of Friday 26 September (Asia time) we juggled several live news conferences from Capitol Hill with live reports from Asia on the instant reaction of the market to the latest Congressional debate about the Bush administration’s bailout plan.” “News by its nature carries an immediacy – in the web 2.0 world, that immediacy now carries across a number of platforms. One development that we’ve seen is an increasing popularity of our website – both in Asia and around the world. We’ve seen our website traffic more than double in the past year by any relevant measure – including number of page views and number of unique users. Many of the challenges remain the same: to get the story first, but most importantly to get the story right.”