Spanish journalist Ana Blanco retired from TVE on Saturday night (24 February). She was the face of the public network’s news and current affairs programs for 33 years.
As a tribute to her long and respected career, let’s travel back in time to 15 September 1990, the day when she presented her first Telediario!
A closer of Canal 11 Buenos Aires’ 7pm news in July 1988, fronted by two veterans: Franco Salomone and Roberto Maidana. The program ends calmly with tango music and footage of everyday people in the streets of a chilly Argentine capital. The logo of the channel’s news department was an Earth station!
Seven years later, now as the privately-owned Telefe, this is how the news opener was: a mixture of filmed scenes (e.g. a running photographer chasing stories 
) and CGI that allows you to see what’s inside a TV camera.
A 1988 CBS Evening News report about HDTV:
Just a few years later, high-def TV was a reality in the US. Here’s a full HD 5pm newscast produced by Raleigh’s WRAL in October 2000, presented from the North Carolina State Fair.
Most of the program is devoted to explain the revolutionary technology. In the case of 'RAL, Panasonic provided the station with equipment to carry out the conversion to the new format.
An ID and a 1995 report about the launch of RDI (Le Réseau de l’information), Canada’s first French-language news channel.
A 1999 CNN report about TV news themes:
October 1, 2007 saw the launch of now-defunct British women’s interest channel Diva TV and was closed on February 14, 2012.
Saw the Coleman/Bain cameo on the finale of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air again the other day.
[to no one in particular…]
Did the Fresh Prince writers ever think of how this cameo implies that Arnold Jackson is nearly 30 and still living with his adoptive father?
Nice report! By the way, Headline News’ theme of that time was lovely! 
Was it from Score Productions?
I can’t imagine TV news without a sound package that represents its reporting style. It evolved from those old times of teletype sounds and movie marches in the 1960s to specifically-written modern pieces of our days.
Some captures from various 24-hour cable news channels in early-2000s Hong Kong. Seeing i-Cable’s success, it was a time when every local broadcaster have their own news offerings:
The launch lineup consisted of 5 channels: TVB Q (shared between children’s programming and documentaries), TVB E (as in Entertainment), TVB XinHe (a pan-SE Asia Mandarin drama channel), TVB8 (also in Mandarin, but more music-focused), and TVB N (for News). Initially, it was done by the synonymous news department, but under a separate identity, studio and (arguably fresher) faces than the TVB Jade newscasts.
Later, the cable channel simulcast the digital TVB i-News/News Channel, unaffected by the group’s rename to TVB Network Vision, and the broadcaster’s exit from pay TV in 2017. Migrated to their OTT set-top boxes, the channel finally ended for good in 2019.
(Studio image from here)
While all of this was happening, lots of changes occurred within TVB News. With new management firing anchors and journalists loyal to his predecessor left, right and centre, some TVBN faces started to appear on the main 6.30 report. It was also the time when NowTV, a broadband TV service owned by local telco PCCW, started expanding in the information space with their Finance Channel.
The news was their logical next step, but perhaps realizing the lack of credibility with the new brand, they partnered with ATV News to launch a 24-hour news channel (and engineered by, ironically, one of the longtime managers fired from TVB).
The resulting channel didn’t bear much of ATV branding, but had the signature NowTV orange. It ran from the end of 2004 until 2007, when Now launched their own news channel. It was rumoured that PCCW was unsatisfied with ATV’s camerawork and/or the increasingly Pro-China slant in reporting, which led to the split.
The same set was soon used for ATV’s News & Business Channel, which beat TVB as Hong Kong’s first FTA news channel.
Much like TVB i-News at the time, pushback was used to show the channel’s ‘interactivity’, specifically the PIP between live events on the top right hand corner and alternative audio channels. It was permanent on the ATV channel though, with news summary usually taking its place (alongside weather and financial indices below). As ATV condensed its digital offerings in 2009, however, it was replaced by ATV HD/Asia, though the open remained on their newscasts.
A minor player before the two consortia was Hong Kong News Channel, part of local ISP HKBN (Hong Kong Broadband Network)'s bbTV service since 2003. It never was a big name in the market, but it remained part of the bundle when consumers signed up for their internet service.
The earliest capture (top left), broadcast in late 2005, had an odd purple colour scheme on their branding, with a symbol that resembled the holding ISP more than the overarching TV service. The rest of the captures were from 2012, which was possibly towards the end of this 2007 package, with the news open now incorporated the bbTV square.
Their final look came in late 2012 with a new speech bubble symbol. By now, the channel was under license to appear on the TV service, as HKBN’s founder-owner spun off the ISP part of the company in pursuit of his FTA TV license bid, and brought the channel under the new HKTV consortium. There were plans to port it over to the new station should their application was greenlit, but the proposal was notoriously vetoed. The channel ended in September 2013, after failing to find any platform to keep broadcasting. This was the unceremonious moment of the final bulletin.
Ultimately, local cable news channel became a two-horse race between NowTV News and i-Cable; TVB News, meanwhile, had a chokehold on the free TV space, before Hoy Info came along.
A start-up sequence from France’s Antenne 2 in the 1980s, dominated by flying shapes and bubbles.
Here’s a compilation of IDs, promos and segments of the defunct Portuguese news channel RTP Informação, that went to the air on Monday 19 September 2011 at 6:30am. This network (originally known as NTV and RTPN during its early years) was short-lived: it was replaced by RTP3 (its current name) on Monday 5 October 2015.
The visual portions (Earth animations, lower thirds and graphics) were shared with RTP1’s newscasts, that also switched to that package on the same day.
The powerful sound identity (that relies on various musical instruments) was another Elvis Veiguinha composition, this time partnered with fellow musician Tiago Machado. RTP Informação was very chaotic and its idents were revised several times during its brief existence. Here are some examples:
A 1980s news intro from Nicaragua, run by the pro-Soviet Sandinista revolutionary government:
And some 20 years later, this is how the intro of its Cuban equivalent looked like:
CNN en Español celebrated 27 years on the air this March 17th. Here are bits from its early years. First, a 1997 promo launch with appearances from its personalities (some of them spent a very long time working at the channel, like Patricia Janiot, Glenda Umaña or Daniel Viotto, etc.)
Finally, portions of its gorgeous “abstract” look, used between 2001 and November 2010.
A compilation of 1970s and '80s local news opens from the U.S.:
A demo reel and a longer form report featuring the 2014 branding for the Saudi Television Network; after five years using designs from London and Riyadh-based agency Turquoise Branding, the Saudi Broadcasting Authority, in the need to modernise its stodgy image and also to reflect a number of technical upgrades to prepare for HD broadcasting, commissioned the new look to the Lebanon branch of Saatchi and French design practice Les Télécreateurs (now Movement), which coordinated the rebrand of the then nine-channel service in a record-breaking four months.
EDIT 23 MAR: Corrected information about the ad agency.
From 1992, an edition of World Day, which was simulcast on CNN and CNN International, followed by Daywatch (at the 1:00:20 mark), which aired on CNN only:
Bobby Batista, later parodied by Jane Turner on Fast Forward.
And speaking of CNN, here’s the channel’s 1984 election night coverage:
