New BBC One North

All the regional news centres (except those like London, Plymouth and Salford which are relatively new and HD) will be getting a new production system in the next few years - something that is long over due. This of course will mean they'll be producing the news in HD,

Depends how they do the changeover - one big switch over or a phased region by region. I'd have thought each has it's benefits - on satellite probably better doing it in one go as it will require jiggling of transponders.

But the output standard of the region won't stop it getting an HD region, they'll just up-convert the studio output until it is

With the Sheffield/Liverpool problem, I guess people from Inverness might have the same problem with BBC Scotland where they may turn to North Tonight on STV which is more focussed on their region than Glasgow based Reporting Scotland

Yes Northern Ireland and North East England (Lisnagarvey and Stagshaw) both operated on 261m for a while, a shared programme was not ideal for either area.

I agree that the news of having more journalists covering the ground is good news, lots of people sat in a central newsroom recycling press releases or what's trending on social media is being done by too many other organisations and the BBC is doing something different there.

I don't think it's necessarily accent but local knowledge and context that counts.

I'm reminded of a traffic report recently on Radio Leeds that claimed an incident 100 yards from my front door was in a completely different village. I can only assume that somebody who doesn't know the patch well enough was using a map of council wards.

In the latter days of Inrix providing the broadcasts I heard them commit the Cardinal sin of mispronouncing a local village name which is notorious for having a correct pronunciation, the one the locals use and the totally incorrect (but phonetically most likely) one that the BBC Pronunciation Unit apparently insists is correct.

I can forgive Radio 2 getting that wrong but not Radio Leeds (or the Hairy Bikers who cocked it up in the voiceover for a show they spent a week here filming)

I'd say regional accents are relatively safer in the UK than they are in nations like France.

In the UK there's a lot of representation of different accents on national media, compared to let's say France, where even local media newscasters feel "forced" to use Parisian influenced pronunciations.

In France regional accents do still exists, but much weaker and less pronounced, particularly in younger and urban speakers.

In Italy you do get a lot of regional accents and dialects, but on media, you get much less strong regional accents than in the UK (from newscasters and "official" people), let's say.

In Spain, it's similar. You do get regional languages, but on Castilian, you feel a bit of discrimination if you don't speak similar to "official" Castilian

Likewise, in my area, the settlement of Salfords near Redhill is nearly always incorrectly pronounced on local radio travel reports like Salford in Greater Manchester - possibly because that's a city we tend to hear quite a lot about in broadcasting. There is one travel presenter who gets it correct - it should be pronounces 'Sal' as in 'Sally'.

Yes The North East did , until Jan 1963, 261 metres.

The rest of the north (NW and Yorks) has 434 metres

tx.mb21.co.uk/info/bbc-am/bbc-am.shtml

Pure guess, this wouldn't be Sla-witt, would it?

Knowing an area is important, so reading from a screen with no guidance it's little wonder that placenames that don't follow the norm get mangled.
Hopefully this is something that more staff spread around the UK will help with, although the listeners and viewers are never shy in pointing out the mistakes.

Perhaps, although on the downside, I'd say Sheffield has less in common with Hull & Lincolnshire than it does with the more urban West Riding, of which it is traditionally a part of. It's not an exact science, of course, and in a highly urbanised country with a near continuous string of settlements from one end to the other, there can never be a line drawn in this respect that'll ever be 100% definitive. It's why I'm not in favour of splitting BBC North West entirely but rather making it a more confederal arrangement based on the three local radio areas. Similar would be appropriate for Sheffield/South Yorks.

Launching a series of commercial city based channels who can sell their content back to the BBC in return for a slice of the licence fee.