ITV wants to axe some regional news services

There's little point in prerecording the BBC sub-regional opts with the current set up as each sub region has its own production facilities. It'd save nothing and wouldn't aid cost cutting at all. The reason ITV have chosen to record the new subregions is to allow them to dispense with lots of people and close facilities. It would only make sense for the BBC to do the same by closing Jersey, Oxford and Cambridge's studios and galleries and transferring studio production to Plymouth, Southampton and Norwich. As I'm sure ITV will discover in due course, you lose an AWFUL lot of flexibility on a busy news day when you have to record your bulletin. And specials and extended programmes become next to impossible.

Of course, and then I'm sure ITV will run to OFCOM and tell them it's impossible to cover such events and they shouldn't have to make regional news any more.

Now ITV are only having the one regional bulletin per day at the weekends, they should be made to show it at a decent time.

Todays local news is on now - 3.35pm then its a Scooby Doo film, then the ITV news at 5.20.

Why couldnt the local news be on at 5.05 which could then include the football / rugby results. BBC's local news doesnt clash so I cant see the logic!

The only 'logic' I can see is the deliberate running down of ITV Regional News. Nothing new there then, I'm afraid!

Exactly - it's not like they can use the excuse of having the two bulletins closer together to save on cash now.

Of course the BBC are now more regional in England. I think ITV do provide some sort of sub-regional service to match all the BBC's seperate regions except I think BBC Oxford?

It's a shame they couldn't run to keeping the Thames Valley service as a sub-opt of Meridian

Indeed, but even the Thames Valley programme wasn't a mirror of BBC Oxford as it included the Hannington transmitter. Going back one incarnation to Central News South and that wasn't a mirror either as that included Ridge Hill. That said, both TVT and CNS were full(ish) regions, whereas the Oxford transmitter has always been part of a much larger region (Newsroom South East et al) or a sub-opt with daytime and weekend programmes coming pan-regionally from Southampton.

One interesting omission is Cumbria. Strange because when Cumbria was moved into the North West in the eighties, they did have separate daytime bulletins.

When it went back to the North East, it was dropped.

Now that Border's been scrapped, it would seem a logical addition.

My understanding was that BBC North West wasn't very popular in Cumbria, henceforth why it was given back to Newcastle from Manchester. Although you'd think as they started the pratice of a sub-opt, you'd have thought they'd carry it on.

You think that ITV has been able to provide a decent News service for Cumbria and the Borders until recently, you'd think the BBC would have something.

Interesting - I didn't know that. Did these bulletins come from Manchester? If so, does anyone know how/where from?

Seems slightly odd that daytime bulletins should have been sub-opted but not an insert into the main programme as with Look East Cambridge (which must have been started at a similar time) or going back to the mid 80s, the original East Midlands sub-opt into Midlands Today.

I've added the following:

What we see here is typical corporate greed masked by patronising spin. ITV are maximising profit and blaming it on multi-channel TV and not being given a slice of licence fee money.

ITV’s advertising revenue decline is not just a product of competition from digital channels but also their plummetting programme standards.

So revenue has dropped and the cut-backs are in the least profitable areas, initially religious and children’s programming (some might also add intelligent documentaries too), then regional programming and now regional news itself.

To say that transmitters prevent a properly split service for the western half of the area is quite false and frankly insulting. It is all about cost-cutting.

ITV has had a privileged place in the TV spectrum and now say that they have had to make drastic changes prior to digital switchover. Presumably they are expecting to lose an even larger number of viewers. Well, they really are going about that the best way.

ITV’s unique selling point in the confusion of multiple channel choice was its regionality. That has been thrown away and it would seem that they are preparing for life as a national broadcaster scuffling with media giants such as Living and Bravo for a few viewers. Well, there’s precious little on ITV now to distinguish it from those channels.

I am sure that threats to head off to the BBC fror local programming don’t scare ITV one iota. In fact that will simply give them the justification to close the new reduced regional news service.

Of course the best way for people to punish ITV for this is to stay with the BBC after the regional news and give them the ratings (and advertising revenue) thrashing that this pale imitation of Sky 1 deserves.

(Don't expect that to pass their censor but it's worth a try)

Rob.

They came from Radio Cumbria in Carlisle, though not very 'hi-tech', just a talking head to camera, might have had static photographs, but that's all I think ?