The future starts here

Since its inception, this blog has keenly charted the tortuous issue of the future of regional news on ITV.  In recent years, the only thing certain about that future was the fear that there might not be one.   

Successive management regimes made increasingly gloomy predictions about the ability of the channel to continue to provide one of its founding, core services.   Champions of plurality and competition in regional news watched in dismay as ITV's regions became larger and its staff fewer.  

Alternative propositions - like independently-financed news consortia and sharing resources with the BBC - came and went, finally to be trumped by former Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt's great white hope/elephant (delete as appropriate), the soon-to-be-launched local TV.   Whatever the future looked like and in spite of the exceptional output still being created by those working in its newsrooms, ITV seemed to be inching closer to the regional exit.

Yet despite this relentlessly bleak narrative, last week saw the start of a series of changes designed to create a sustainable and enhanced regional news service for the digital age.   The sprawling super-regions created back in 2009 have made way for the regional and sub-regional coverage that viewers previously knew.   This more targeted output does, however, come at a price - the flagship 6.00p.m. programmes, whilst still 30 minutes in duration, can now include 10 minutes of 'out-of-area' material drawn from other regions entirely.

When mooted by ITV eighteen months ago, it seemed a perplexing prospect.   This shared material would, according to the channel, have "relevance, resonance and application" across more than one region.   Yet within the constraints of a regional programme, it would be a daily challenge to ensure it was logically and seamlessly incorporated.   Surely all but the most unsavvy of viewers would query the sudden presence of stories from outside even their pan-region;  alternatively, if the geography were stripped from a story completely, the result could easily be an issue-led package more suited to the national bulletin.

ITV has, however, tested the model and is convinced it can be made to work.   Although clearly a trade-off for the return of the sub-regions, the out-of-area quota is no mean undertaking in itself and will require deft editorial handling and delicate linkage so as to create a rounded programme in each region.

Of course, the occasional dual-region story has long been a feature of the output.   Granada and ITV West both recently broadcast the story of a woman from Weston-super-Mare who had unearthed memorabilia of the Beatles, a group which - hey presto! - emanated from Granadaland.   Such a gift of a shared story won't come along every day, but if the out-of-area strands are well-woven into the programmes (as ITV obviously intends them to be) and it sustains their increased sub-regional commitments elsewhere, then it could prove an inspired, if unlikely, innovation.

The '20+10' rule will not apply to all the English regions after OFCOM uncharacteristically refused to sanction it in the North West and London.   As regions without any sub-opt-outs, ITV was unable to argue that it was a quid pro quo for more localised coverage.   Instead they pointed to the fact that local TV would be strong in these areas and so viewers would still be well catered for.   This was a shame as it didn't chime with their more positive vision for the other regions and it was ultimately rejected by the regulator.   Meanwhile, the sparsely populated Border region has been rewarded for its continued love affair with regional news (whose viewing share in this area reads like a BARB statistic from 25 years ago) with the generous reinstatement of a full 30-minute Lookaround and a weekly political programme to improve political coverage for those in southern Scotland.

Super-serving the regions after digital switchover?   That was a prospect which even the most optimistic flag-wavers for the ITV service (myself amongst them) failed to forecast.   And at a time when many feared screens would metaphorically be going blank, there's finally some good news about regional news.

Drawing the line between local and regional

The news that STV - the operator of Scotland's two Channel 3 licences - has won the local licences for Edinburgh and Glasgow is another interesting twist in the embryonic story of local TV.

At first glance, it appeared a strange notion for the regional, heritage broadcaster to be setting up in seeming competition with itself.   If its local offering were to prove 'too good', then the regional ratings would surely suffer.   A quality localised service (of the kind an established broadcaster like STV is surely capable) could tempt viewers to rethink their attachment to a wider region and become as alligned with the idea of local news in vision as they are with it in print.

Even more curious is the fact that STV already has one of the most localised services on the ITV network, with separate programmes for North, West and East Scotland and further sub-regional opt-outs within them.   As this blog has mused elsewhere, viewers seem to respond well to the regional so long as it is relevant - a feat STV has apparently achieved.   Direct competition from well-resourced local TV might result in a fight to the death - of either one service or the other.

Yet the channel says it can create local TV stations which can "complement" the established output.   And there are undoubtedly benefits to the idea of having an interest in both regional and local services.   Clearly, there is massive potential for cross-promotion.   News-in-brief items that would never make full packages on a regional programme could be highlighted as being covered in more detail on the local channel, for those interested in finding out more.   One of the biggest challenges facing local TV is generating an awareness amongst its potential audience.   The other big challenge - financial stability - will be partly addressed by economies of scale and use of shared facilities, which ultimately might prove the difference between viability and failure.

The heavy involvement of the broadcast journalism courses at Glasgow and Edinburgh universities not only provides an enviable training ground for students, but also ensures that the local services will look somewhat different to their regional counterparts.   That is not to belittle student efforts in producing high quality output (as one who has sweated blood over in-house university news programmes), but the local stations will necessarily be offering a different style of journalism - and could even flourish for it.

Scheduling will be a trickier issue to resolve.   The local stations are tied to broadcasting news and current affairs output at peak time, inevitably prompting a clash with the flagship regional programmes at some point.   Yet even this shouldn't prove an insurmountable problem.

Perhaps the biggest benefit to the channel of being involved at both the regional and local level is also the most obvious one - whatever choice viewers make, there is every chance they will still be choosing STV.

A bleak week for broadcasting

When Phillip Schofield ambushed David Cameron on This Morning last Thursday, it seemed unlikely that anything would surpass it as that week's nadir in broadcasting.   It was rightly derided for what it was - a futile and ill-judged set-piece, which would do nothing to further a very serious story.  

Yet it was wrongly characterised by some as a terrible example of broadcast journalism.   What happened on This Morning was not broadcast journalism - it was an entertainment programme doing something inappropriate, dissonant and for which it was not remotely equipped.   It also probably caused consternation in the entirely separate ITV News division, whose own brand risked being unfairly tainted by association in the very week that its output was the focus of a promotional campaign to highlight its strongest line-up of news and current affairs programmes in years.  

Phillip Schofield - professional and genuine a broadcaster though he is - is not a journalist.    That is not to say broadcast journalists exhibit perfect judgement in these matters (remember Andrew Marr's rumour-fuelled line of questioning about Gordon Brown's supposed addiction to painkillers?), but they generally adopt the right approach when it matters most.   Leaving journalism to the journalists - what could possibly go wrong in that scenario?

Twenty-four hours later and the BBC is littered with the fallout from the actions of some of the most experienced journalists in the broadcast business.   There is no doubting the magnitude of this latest crisis for the Corporation and the more that emerges, the less that seems to have been done to ensure that this most sensitive of stories was journalistically sound.   Yet in the froth of immediate analysis, it is easy to weave a thread which suggests that the BBC's biggest crime is the bald fact that the story was untrue.

Clearly, no self-respecting journalist or serious news organisation wants to run a false story, even one which has been told in good faith.   That is why all reasonable steps should be taken to stand a story up.   In the majority of cases, such action is sufficient to ensure that any piece which makes it to air is wholly correct.   However, journalistic integrity is not a guarantee of one hundred percent accuracy.   Journalism is not a perfect science, investigative journalism even less so.

In this instance, it was not merely the fact that the story was wrong - but rather why it was wrong.  Newsnight could have justified a similar, anonymised piece, had its journalistic processes been more rigorous.   The emergence of Lord McAlpine's name was the result of social media playing its usual role of rumour-monger-in-chief and (once again) coming to the wrong conclusion.   It was, of course, not helped by loose lips at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, whose collaborative work with the BBC and ITN this blog has previously welcomed. However, traditional media cannot be bound by how the on-line world responds to their journalism, provided that journalism is credible in the first place. 

Ultimately, broadcasters must retain both the right and the nerve to air contentious investigative reports.   Not so much "publish and be damned" as "publish and make sure you're not damned".    The fine tradition of investigative broadcast journalism has just about managed to fend off the threat to its survival from commercial and financial pressures;  it would be a bitter irony, if it were now defeated by its own timidity in the wake of the current debacle.

The media in general (and, sometimes it seems, the BBC itself) love nothing more than a crisis at the BBC.   This has been a time of tumult, but is it really any worse than the near decade-old scandal over Radio 4's claims of a "sexed-up dossier" before the Iraq war?   Then we lost a Director General, a Chairman and, more importantly, the source of the story took his own life.   

Those who say Newsnight is finished either seem to think the programme should re-emerge in another form (through a superficial rebranding) or that the BBC should concentrate all its investigative efforts into Panorama.   Either way, the loss of Newsnight would be a loss indeed.  The programme's daily mix of topical debate and longer-form pieces is of such value that it should be allowed to weather this damaging storm.

A worrying footnote to this affair is the polling evidence produced by the media commentator Steve Hewlett on Newsnight's mea culpa edition last Friday.   Even before the current crisis, a survey in the wake of the furore over the Jimmy Savile investigation, dropped by the BBC, had resulted in a majority of those questioned distrusting the Corporation for the first time in the history of such polls.   Journalists in general always fare badly in trust surveys, but broadcast journalists are usually considered a more believable breed.   If that changes as a result of all this, it will be a much more damaging legacy than any single episode of journalistic failure.