The Wrap’s Gillian Joseph (L) and Anna Botting (R). Picture: Sky
Sky News has replaced its late-night news bulletin with a new show called The Wrap driven by a “desire to bring in a younger audience”.
The launch is part of the UK broadcaster’s 2030 digital strategy , shifting focus away from live, breaking TV news and towards a video-first newsroom.
Taking up the slot of 10pm-midnight every night, The Wrap has replaced Sky News at Ten, Press Preview (a review of the newspapers for the next day), and another news slot at 11pm.
The Wrap will feature live analysis of news with a guest panel and videos taken from Sky journalists’ Tiktoks and Youtube accounts, aiming to provide more “personality-driven” news and flexibility to react more quickly to the news cycle.
The programme, which launched on 26 January, has already had political journalist Kevin McGuire and columnist Sarah Vine feature on its panel.
Presenters Anna Botting and Gillian Joseph have retained the same weekday and weekend slots on The Wrap that they previously held on Sky News at Ten, with Botting presenting Monday to Thursday and Joseph Friday to Sunday.
Creating The Wrap was to “get rid of the comfy slippers and challenge ourselves a bit more”, Botting told Press Gazette, as one of the broadcaster’s longest-serving presenters, having joined in 1995 .
“In terms of resource, we were producing – between 10pm and midnight – three shows. And that’s a lot of hard work, slightly unnecessarily. So again, we’ve wrapped up these three elements.”
‘Desperate’ not to lose ‘loyal audience’
The Wrap has been created with a “desire to bring in a younger audience”, Botting said. “We did have a slightly older audience and less metropolitan audience for Sky News at Ten and the Press Preview.”
While Botting said she does not know who the precise target audience is – though Sky News at Ten “might skew to be a slightly older audience” – the broadcaster is still “desperate not to jettison our really loyal audience”.
The Wrap was “partly” created because “people don’t sit and wait for an appointment to view evening bulletin” anymore, Botting added.
“We know that people don’t digest their news that way now. So that’s partly why we have adapted because people have had their news all day,” she said, referencing phone notifications and Youtube clips.
Read more: [How under-35s’ interest in news has collapsed and what we can do about it]
Botting acknowledged that “really young” audiences still mainly consume news through social media – Sky News’ Tiktok has 9.9 million followers, and one month in 2025 saw 10.5 million people watching a Sky News livestream on Youtube over 7.5 million watching on TV, she said.
“But the point of the new show is that we take what we’re producing for Tiktok and Youtube – like a digi-video – and we now put it in The Wrap.”
Finding a way to incorporate digi-videos – vertical videos recorded on phones for social media – has been central to the creation of The Wrap. This has enabled the show to move away from the format of waiting for a TV package that may take a team “all day to produce”, only to possibly be played once due to interruption of breaking news.
“We’ve got what we call a totem, but it’s a big screen and it allows us to run portrait-facing pictures,” Botting said. “So, we take stuff that’s been specifically made for other platforms and we can run it in the show,” adding this makes the show “completely multi-platform”.
For example, Sky News’ political editor Beth Rigby ’s Electoral Dysfunction, a weekly politics podcast that streams on Spotify and Youtube, is run in the programme.
Botting said The Wrap still retains many features of Sky News at Ten: “We have chunky openers at the top. We allow exactly the stories in an order that we think is significant of that day… But I think all broadcasters are aware that where the eyeballs are is changing.”
Despite Press Preview being shelved, “that part of the job hasn’t changed a lot” for Botting, as a review of the next day’s papers is still a cornerstone of the new programme – even bringing in “more newspaper [coverage] as we’ve rehearsed”.
“I think we realised in rehearsals that the real loyalty of our audience in the evening did come from the Press Preview,” she added. “We’re putting more of the papers in because we know people like it.”
‘Unblocking the newsroom’ with The Wrap
Another benefit to moving away from the TV packages is “unblocking the newsroom”, having “freed up correspondents” to service audiences that have moved to other platforms like Youtube.
“It allows people to produce where people are watching,” said Botting.
She added this shift allows staff to “do what they need to do for the big Sky 2030 strategy, which is to work on this premium video first, digital future… that’s how people are changing the way they digest news”.
“That’s why The Wrap has sort of been created, as part of that dynamism I think,” she said. Sky News is one year into its 2030 strategy.
With the Sky News team given the flexibility to “be a bit more fleet of foot”, The Wrap also aims to “introduce more personality, which to be fair is quite hard, in a strict 27-minute bulletin”, said Botting.
This “will hopefully attract audiences as well, with great calibre guests, more analysis, more understanding of why this massive [period of] geopolitics we’re in now matters to people and what the implications are”, she said.
The programme also has the “deliberate intention” of presenting a balanced panel, which “fulfils, as far as we can, a lively debate show”.
Since its launch on 26 January, the viewing has “held up”, said Botting – “it can only build from there”.
She added there is an aim to become even more multi-platform in the future, with The Wrap set to launch as a newsletter.
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