Much comment in the media this week about the £500,000 relaunch of BBC News - much of it based around two comments made on the BBC Editors' blog that the white screen with the fancy globe could give someone some sort of fit.
What I find remarkable isn't so much the fact that the BBC has relaunched its services, and promised better cross-platform working in a new-media newsroom, but the fact that the result has made it seem so cheap.
I don't mean the studio re-design or even the new logos, but the fact that BBC News Channel now pretty much supplies all the news bulletins for BBC 1.
While the Ten O'Clock News and the Six O'Clock News have survived in tact, other bulletins haven't been so lucky.
At 6pm on Sunday, Michelle Hussein began the news on The News Channel, rattled through the headlines, complete with the graphics, and then ran through the story about the woman held hostage with her kids in a cellar in Austria.
Then, at 6.04pm she said "There will be more news when BBC 1 viewers join us" and went on to talk about how you can get BBC headlines on your mobile.
Then, all of a sudden, she starts to read the headlines again, only this time in a different order, before viewers of the News Channel see the same opening graphics, and, then, for the second time in five minutes, she says hello to us.
This time, the story about the Austrian hostage runs after the Grangemouth strike and a gun attack in Kabul. Then, at the end, she announces that "now it's time to cross to our newsrooms around the country" before BBC 1 viewers get their weekend fix of local news.
Those of us watching The News Channel just get a news presenter who is silent for a few seconds, before carrying on with other headlines.
To my mind, if the BBC wants the kudos of competing with Sky News, it needs to do the job properly. People who watch the BBC News Channel at teatime on Sunday aren't the same people who'd watch a brief recap of the weekend's news on BBC 1. If they really must be the same bulletins, at least make the BBC 1 take of the news begin at a sensible time - on the hour or the half hour, rather than having the silly scenario of watching five minutes of news before they start all over again.
Can you imagine if a newspaper had a front page, then repeated it again on page five for those just picking up that page?
Surely the fact that the BBC New Channel was leading with a different story to the BBC 1 bulletin which began five minutes later tells producers this: They can't be merged together like this.
It was clumsy, it was crass. It was the best possible advert for Sky News.
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