ITV wants to axe some regional news services

look at it this way. If Ofcom and the labour government had handled the C3 licence situation and DSO properly it would have set a 'renewal' date for the franchises instead of removing it..

ITV would have a chance to bid for DTT capacity in the open market and be the broadcaster it wants to be; or bid for 99% PSB coverage and offer a mixed cash and public service bid - ie local news.

Had that happened you can bet your life that ITV Plc would have lobbied that while its cash bid is low, it has a proven commitment to regional news and undertaked to maintain the existing service until 2016.

You can imaging the PR 'ITV is a trusted brand/track record/only ITV can take on the BBC' etc etc

I agree that ITV is working to maximise shareholder value in the current situation, but that does NOT in any way support the argument that the framing is right or the viewing/economic logic is right - it is not.

Look at it another way.
If the BBC was to lose its licence fee ( and as it operates as a commercial broadcaster it should have done so years ago ) and be forced to compete in the open market like ITV you'd have exactly the same contraction in regional programming that is happening at ITV.
Regional programmes were fine all those years ago when there were just three television channels available - today they're a waste of valuable time and money.

Oh, but there is. At the moment, BBC regional news outperforms the ITV Evening News in the same slot. And until very recently, ITV regional news was outperforming the BBC news at Six.

ITV was conspicuous in its scheduling of regional programming against the BBC's Eastenders. And has not invested much in regional programming. A typical half hour programme is budgeted at around £15,000-20,000. Now multiply that by 14 to get how much money that is spent on every regional slot.

ITV's reasoning is simple. They can spend £100,000-150,000 on a networked show for the same slot, save a ton of money, and try and get more viewers for it. Unfortuantely, in more recent times, such attempts have badly backfired, and they have in fact gotten lower ratings than when airing regional programming. However, they are so blinded by the fact that they are spending less money to programme the same slot, that it doesn't seem to matter.

That's your business lesson for today, guru.

Not sure you and I share the same definition of "very recently". It's been quite a number of years since the Six was outrated by the ITV 1800 regional shows. In some individual regions it may have been outrated - but nationally it has been significantly ahead for a good number of years I believe.

For a while now the pecking order has been :
1830 BBC Regional News
1800 BBC Six O'Clock News
1830 ITV Evening News
1800 ITV Regional News

Although in recent years there's been very few individual regional programmes anyway - alot of the stuff in Central/London has been the same for example.

The thing is ITV have been given the easy way out, especially now non-news programming is being incorporated into the news (yeah, that really makes sense!). The plans for Here and Now might have been a bit obvious, but the idea of a national brand producing programmes at a local level works well IMO, such as Eye Spy for example and their various (but seemingly surprisingly popular around here at least) canal type programmes, which with a bit of creative thinking could be produced as part of the regional quota, and then repackaged as national programming to go out on ITV3 or something or in dead slots on a Sunday afternoon on ITV1.

[B]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by canal-type programmes.
Are you talking Canal+ the French TV channel or a whimsical three-part series about the watery highways and byways of a forgotten era presented by Alan Partridge.
Don't get me wrong - I love yesteryear. Most nights I don a green velvet smoking jacket, pour myself a small glass of sherry and settle down to re-runs of Crossroads.
But we've all moved on since then.

Caroline Oldrey has just presented her final Anglia Tonight programme. She has presented Anglia News West ever since it was introduced.

According to DigiGuide, there will be no more Regional News at 11.15am from Monday 9 Feb. Also, no more lunchtime Regional Summary at the weekends from Saturday 14 Feb.

Tyne Tees reporter Julia Bathram and presenter Alex Watson who left in late 2007 for maternity leaves have returned. Though I thought they would be made redundant (once their maternity leave was paid) but I'm glad they haven't as they are decent.

Many of their reporters must have left, as only a handful of them seem to be appearing nightly though more regularly than before.

Not much of a surprise there then, as that was what ITV wanted from Ofcom.

Although it'll be interesting that there will be no Regional News between 8.10am and 1.55pm, I can see this affecting GMTV soon.

Hopefully they'll give an extra couple of minutes to the ITV News summary in mid-morning then, which were really far too brief compared to the quite lengthy regional summaries.

Hopefully too the end of the lunchtime weekend summary will mean an end to the afternoon summary being at ridiculous times such as 4pm - but I doubt OFCOM had the foresight to put some regulation about that in the new PSB guidelines. It wouldn't be too unreasonable to stipulate that the weekend bulletin is shown between 5pm and 7pm or something.

I doubt it - infact it will probabaly mean they can schedule it any time they wish as there isnt a lunchtime bulletin so no need to leave a gap of at least a couple of hours between bulletins.

It will also be strange having no mid morning bulletin and a gap between 8.10am and 1.55pm. I guess the GMTV presenter will now just does those bulletins and someone from the 6pm presenting team will do the lunchtime news.