It’s hard to get away from the news these days. From the moment we wake up in the morning to when we bed down for the night we run a gauntlet of various radio and television news programmes, not to mention the multitude of newspapers screaming out from the news stands.
Then of course, there is the internet, with its instant access to what’s going on at any point on the globe. So what can a television news programme do in an attempt to attract viewers but still get the facts of what’s going on across?
Áine Ni Chaoindealbhain, general manager of Sky News Ireland, believes that the key to good news reporting is being able to present the news in a manner that it is accessible to the most amount of people possible. “We tell stories differently, we’re much more visual driven than a lot of news programmes," she says. "A lot of people watch Sky at home but it’s also very much a drop-in channel. People view it in pubs, hotels and train stations, so you have to be visual and be able to show the story as well as tell the story; you have to be able to cater for the person who catches ten seconds of the bulletin in the pub.”
TV news has always enjoyed the unique position of being able to use actual footage and pictures to support a story and help make it easier for the audience to understand. This visual element is taken to new heights by those involved in Sky News Ireland’s daily bulletins.
Mark Lappin, one of the show’s executive producers, is adamant that the attention to visual detail contributes significantly to helping the audience understand what is going on in the world around them. “Looking at stories and trying to do them a different way is our main focus here,” says Lappin. “There is a large focus not only on pictures but graphics as well. We do a lot of 3D graphics here which you just won’t see anywhere else and they really help us get all dimensions of a story across. For example we would never simply say, ‘Today the Government did this’, rather, we will try to get across how whatever it is they have done will affect people in their daily lives.”
This view is echoed by Joe Walsh, the programme’s news editor: “It’s important to find a balance in a bulletin because you can’t have a bulletin that’s purely driven towards a news agenda, there has to be an element that drags people into a story because it affects their lives.” Walsh is constantly aware that there is little room for error in news: “Driving a bulletin is a different ballgame to driving a rolling news agenda where you can always go back to things. We have two cracks at it here and our bulletins have to tell the news of the day in the best way possible.”
One of the main aims of the station is to look at the news from around the world from an Irish perspective. “We try as much as possible to get an Irish element into the international stories,” says Walsh. “It’s important for us to develop stories here that carry across to an international audience. Sometimes stories aren’t just local or national - some stories carry across to an international audience and can easily cross borders.”
One of the most recent examples of a story that wasn’t confined to any particular locality was about a young Dublin heroin addict. Rachel Keogh has been addicted to heroin since she was 15 and was the subject of a special feature on Sky News Ireland last month. Immediately after the report was broadcast, interview requests started to come in from all over the world, and it led to Sky doing a special week long investigation of heroin users in Dublin and examining the facilities that are in place to help them.
Alison O’Reilly, one of the reporters involved in that story, explains the research that goes into such a controversial piece: “Basically it involved a whole week of me just going down to the city centre and trying to find people who knew about drugs and the drug problem here," she explains. "Essentially it was just me with my microphone and a cameraman walking around the Liffey boardwalk, and we got the best stories just doing that.” O’Reilly is a firm believer that everyone will talk to you if you just treat them right and explain what you want to do: “I don’t mind doing stuff like that at all," she says. "I speak to everybody the same way no matter who they are, because I love talking to people and I love listening to people.”
Surely it can be a little unnerving trawling the streets looking for drug users to talk to for a story like that?
“I would always assess a situation from afar for a few minutes and then I would just go for it," she says. “A lot of people can be quite hostile at the start until you explain what you want to do. I don’t really have a lot of problems with people because I just like to level with them. It wasn’t frightening - I found heroin users to be very articulate and intelligent people. We didn’t have any problems with them, we just found that they wanted to tell their stories, and really they just want help, because there is a real lack of facilities out there.”
Human interest pieces like the Rachel Keogh story really grab the public’s attention and, by concentrating on an individual’s story, it can sometimes be easier to get across the significance of a particular issue. These kind of stories also require the reporter to be able to adapt to a situation quickly and be capable of realising if the story could be better told a different way. O’Reilly says that although this can be difficult, it can nonetheless lead to the most interesting results.
“Before Christmas we went to where the Mayor was having drinks with members of the Simon community who had just been given permanent accommodation for the first time in their lives," she recalls, "but when we got there, we decided not to do a straight report of that. Instead, we just started chatting to one of these people and went up to see the bedsit that he had been given. He was an amazing, intelligent character who has written two plays and a book. I nearly didn’t want to leave because his story was so heartbreaking.”
Although O’Reilly agrees that such stories can be very draining to work on, she says that the end result is always worth it.
“What it all really boils down to is the simple fact that our story gave somebody a little bit of hope," she concludes. "We can help people get a little bit of hope and dignity from telling their story and that’s all that’s important really.”