Despite all its annoyances (which I’ll no doubt talk about another time), you really can’t beat rolling news when a story is about to unfold. The Suffolk Murders reached a major point tonight with the announcement that a 43 year-old man named Steve Wright (left) has been charged with the murder of all five women.

Shamefully, I’ve forgotten the name of the BBC News correspondent that covered the press conference at 10.15 tonight, but he made it compelling viewing. A big rarity, in my opinion, as it’s hard to keep interest up when you’re essentially just a bloke in a room, waiting for more blokes in a room to turn up….to the room. Good viewing – and well handled by the BBC.

I have to say, though, that they poorly balanced the coverage of Richard Hammond’s interview. Yes, we’re all happy that he’s back and a-ok. But, it didn’t warrant the coverage it did. They went even further to suggest the “pictures” [of the interview] were exclusive. Well of course they were. The BBC giving the BBC an exclusive. Bravo.
The short news piece on the license fee increase was fairly balanced – which must be tricky for them – but ruined in a moment when the analyst on News 24 mistakenly said “we” when trying to be unbiased.

Tomorrow will bring countless reports on Steve Wright. Interesting to see how the tabloids handle it, considering the request by the Crown Prosecution Service to tread carefully. ‘Innocent until proven guilty’ isn’t a mantra that the red tops tend to stick to – but I’ll be cautiously optimistic that the wishes of the police are met.

This caught my eye too. Those poor folks in Seattle (as George Bush would probably say) have been without electricity for some while now. A day or two ago even the printing presses were shut down because of outages with the major publications, The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer*, releasing the days pages on the web for free. Very noble, but then you could argue that without electricity, access to the web is rather tricky.

Anyway, today, the Seattle Times is back in action, and with it a very interesting front page. The top half of the front page is dedicated to public service messages for the affected public. Not only that, but the same messages are written in six different languages.

Often we look to photos or eyewitness accounts to fill pages in a disaster (who can forget the images on Sept 12th 2001, for example), but this for me remains equally as poignant.

Poynter Online discusses the design issues with the page here, if you’re interested. Even if you’re not, the Poynter set of sites is brilliant, and well worth a look.

In the mean time, I’m left watching Hollyoaks in the City. A horrible program. I love Hollyoaks – a hell of a lot, trust me – but something about this post-watershed version makes me cringe. It’s as if the Channel Four executives have said, “Right, everyone, it’s late night…what’s the most controversial thing you can think of?”

The synopsis of this episode (according to Tiscali’s guide) is, brace yourselves, that Lisa is taken to a warehouse, only to find that she is now in a snuff movie. Wow. And Troy, poor Troy, has now found that his family have witnessed his gay porn movie that has found its way onto the internet.

They’re trying to be imaginative – but it comes across as just, well, lazy.

Goodnight!

(Thanks to News Designer for information in this post)

*Intelligencer?! That’s a new one to me!