ITV wants to axe some regional news services

Very amusing-looking feature in G2 in the Guardian today about the proposed axing of services, looking back at the golden age of ITV regional news and some of the current services available.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2168905,00.html

A typical nights overnight figures :

BBC One
Six O'Clock News 3.9million 24% share
Regional News 4.7million 28% share

ITV1
Regional News 3.0 million 19% share
ITV News 3.7 million 22% share

As you can see - all reasonable figures - though BBC Regional news does VERY well, and ITV Regional news does least well, but reducing the investment in ITV Regional news is likely to mean even fewer viewers...

The NUJ is now proposing strike action in favour of the cuts.. I'd wish them well if I thought it was going to do any good. But the only way of making an impact would be if their colleagues in ITV Productions joined them, but that can't happen due to Thatcherite union laws.

Or maybe it could. The ITV unions could do worse than copy the recent actions of the Prison Officers' Association...

I seem to remember the boy Grade trying to get extra ad minutes per hour due ro regional programming - although itv's promotion of regional progs in general is a joke! The reduction of almost half of the regional news, the start of a declining spiral? Who knows!

ITV don't show any ads at all during non-news regional programmes, then they complain about how commercially unviable they are(!) There's no reason for there not to be, it's just cutting of their nose to spite their face.

agreed!

The reason that there are no ads during regional news is not that there is unsold inventory, but that ITV saves up the ad quota to use in more lucrative peak time slots.

Given that it is unlikely that there are many people watching both regional programmes, that's well over 6 million, possibly up to 8 million people watching the local news each night. That isn't far off what you'd expect from the soaps these days.

So this argument that says that "no-one watches the regional news" is exposed for the ignorant tosh that it is.

Yes, it the usual situation, somebody makes the decision and that's it! - you have to prove them wrong.... on air!

while that's fair enough . . . the point is that figure you give of 3 million people watching ITV local news at 6pm, means that there are 3 million people watching 17 different programmes. Surely it makes better sense commercially - i.e. for advertisers to reach a larger audience and therefore pay more to a larger regional service - to have those 3 million split into fewer regional audiences.

Out of the ITV Regions budget, the unions etstinate that £85M is spent on the 17 news shows.

Even if you put all the cost of the news into just the evening news show 5 days a week, that works out as about £327,000 per day for all 17 shows. (under 25k per show per region)

In major TV terms, thats nothing; add to that the GMTV, Morning, Lunch and late slots and the 4 weekend the ITv operation is very cost effective.