"It's Five O'Clock, welcome to PM with Chris Lowe and Claire English..."

Radio In 1998, then-budding broadcast journalist Stuart Clarkson recorded a series of news programmes for an A-Level project. He's retained them in and in 2013 recorded snatches from similar or same programmes and offered up a comparison. Needless to say it's fascinating for hearing how different channels cover the same stories and especially hearing the 90s opening of the PM programme which I now try to listen to every day. As he says:

"We start with the pips and the openers for PM, presented by Chris Lowe and Claire English. Nice present tense openers with good audio. Then into the news bulletin with the legendary Brian Perkins, which is only 90 seconds in duration and a copy-only summary. Most of the wording is similar to the Radio 2 bulletin (GNS), although a few of the sentences have been turned round to make the copy read in a more snappy way. It sounds less ‘Radio 4′ than the Radio 2 news!"

I'd say that's intensified - quite often news readers across the services are reading the same text, which is also replicated on the BBC News website. Nevertheless the running order of the headlines does change, with different emphasise on Today in comparison to BBC Breakfast.