The Sky is Falling.

I've been meaning to write something meaningful and entertaining for a wee while now, but it seems I just can't find the motivation. Either that or life is very boring.

Instead I'll do something a little bit introspective on the media industry that I work in.

Sky TV is going head to head with TVNZ and TV3 in providing a New Zealand television news service. Well you can't really call it head to head as Sky has put bugger all in the way of resources into it. All they seem to have done is renamed the rather bare bones approach that had been being done by Prime News. That is a couple of clotheshorses reading the news, and a bare handful of reporters (all North Island based I believe) scrambling to cover the big issues of the day.

What it looks like is simply a spoiler to TVNZ's upcoming 24/7 digital news service (though that's likely to be a disaster as well).

I have a lot of respect for those involved in the programme (I know one or two of them personally), but you can't cover a country when 90 percent of your scant resources are based in Auckland. Furthermore the lack of coverage sticks out like dogs balls when you have to resort to doing phone interviews with someone in the South Island to provide some sort of vestige of information on a significant story.

TV's about pictures, leave the phone interviews to the radio journo's. You look like a bunch of cheap dicks when you do it.

If Sky News is to provide any sort of semi-decent coverage they're going to have to have bureaus in all the main centres - Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, and Christchurch - and access to reliable freelancers/stringers in places like Dunedin Tauranga, Napier, Rotorua, Invercargill, and Northland. Somehow I don't see them coughing up the cash needed to finance that sort of operation. News is an expensive business, and these days it's the beancounters that call the shots, so the chance of an extensive, and professional, Sky News setup is about as likely as celibacy in a brothel.

It seems I'm not the only one that is thinking this way.