London Live

If you have two roving reporters but you assign them to some utter nonsense about dogs and cats, there is no commitment whatsoever, apparent or otherwise.

Nothing I have seen so far on London Live would meet those criteria

Just caught the midnight update. Lead story being what Cameron Diaz thinks of London, the other being a mention of the EU debate.



London Live may as well become 'Showbiz Live' and become national station. I don't think it's providing anything that wouldn't not work in London to the same extent if it wasn't London centric. If they were offering strong London based news content there would then be a point to having the restriction of just local coverage over national.

At the moment the news and local information which is the only real USP they can possibly have is poor or non-existent.

Just the two stories affecting the capital tonight then ?


They may as well have the news bunny waving in the background.

No - we differ far more in lots of ways. We are a smaller country, where major local news stories usually become national stories (so local news has less of a role to play in reporting them as they are featured in the networked bulletin), and where there is much more national government, and far less local government. We also have far fewer homicides...

Plus our network TV operation is fully networked, with no concept of affiliates. The acres of local news that the US has just doesn't really work on a UK scale. In fact it doesn't really work much in Europe at all. Filling a 30 minute regional bulletin is often tricky enough - doing it locally is pushing it.

Those are all valid points, noggin, except:



That is pretty much irrelevant. There are many markets in the U.S. with very low homicide rates, yet that has little bearing on the amount of local news provision in those markets. In fact, it is in medium and smaller TV markets where local TV news still often does a good job of informing people about real issues affecting their communities.

From what I have seen from very small market local news, a lot of it is padded out by reports provided by the network of stories that have nothing local in them and even sports results and interviews with local high school teams.

Then there's the Video News Releases/Planted News.

Right. The quality of local news has certainly declined dramatically in recent years, but there are still stations that do a good job informing their audiences about important local issues -- and many of them get good ratings.

Here's an interesting article from the U.S., potentially relevant to what London Live can aim for in the future -- if it gets enough financial backing and a long-term commitment to news in the morning:




COMPLETE ARTICLE: http://www.mediabistro.com/tvspy/local-morning-shows-beating-national-shows-in-largest-markets_b118429

We've had local radio from the BBC since 1967 (and regional radio from them since the 1920s)
it's not a new thing. BBC LR wasn't terribly popular to start with, not helped by being on FM only,
which back in the 60s and 70s required expensive receivers and outdoor antennas.

However, local radio became very popular (with weekly reaches and shares exceeding 50% in some cities)
when commercial local stations launched in the 70s. They were heavily regulated, were on AM and FM and became hugely popular. There was no doubt that local radio worked, and that legacy continues today, although broadly it's the BBC locals that provide a more solid service than the commercial stations (a complete reversal from 40 years ago)

The UK's mindset is very much 'radio in the mornings, TV in the evenings'. As said in this thread, morning radio audiences dwarf TV's

Regarding the differences between the UK and US markets, it's worth remembering that the US is much bigger country (in terms of both population and geography) than the UK and there are vast cultural and economic differences between the states on the East Coast, the West Coast and in the central belt. And although you can say London is almost like a city state, that it is countered by the fact that the UK media is already very London-centric.

Some of the differences between the UK and US are not through a lack of trying. Witness how many times the UK has failed to pull off a nightly Letterman-style chat show.

In terms of London Live's ability to pull in an audience at breakfast, the UK also has a very strong radio market with five well funded national public radio stations delivering a high quality service and a lot of choice from commercial radio in London.

I think there is an audience for London Live but it's genuinely disappointing how weak and clearly under-resourced their news reporting capability is. A lot of money has been spent on acquisitions to give the channel a full schedule, but the news coverage needs a sand-blasting.

Some slight improvements on Wake Up London this morning - which was presented by Marc again.

One of their live reporters was out covering potholes (a bit of a pernnnial local media story - but at least something more relevant to Londoners than cats vs dogs). The other was at a fish market (again, not exactly ground-breaking journalism, but at least it showed me a part of my city that I wouldn't visit myself).

Vanessa played it straighter this morning, was more informative, and had some notes in her hand rather than constantly moving back over to check her laptop like she was doing yesterday. Still not amazing, but a step in the right direction.

Hopefully things will continue to get better over the next few weeks. With two (decent) live reporters and a dedicated weather and travel presenter, they're not exactly poorly-resourced - they just need to make better editorial decisions and get some of the presentation running more slickly.