Regional News U-Turn

I think a lot of it has to do with the somewhat inward looking (dare I say parochial?) nature of news consumption in the States.

When staying at mum's house in Florida, it never ceased to amaze me the insatiable appetite for any and all local interest stories from Kissimmee, Orange County or any of the myriad small cities/large towns.

"Strip mall in gunpoint terror", "local woman guilty of animal abuse" and so on...

I've got a desire for both national, international and local news when I come in from work - but over the pond I was hard pressed to find anything relating to outwith a 60 mile radius from where I sat - not until the later evening news.

I just don't know whether true "local" news is what Britain wants. Our normal diet of news takes us around the world, via Westminster before we're concerned with "cat in tree".

Local news in England is far too safe, journalists and editors are happy to take what they are fed and not challenge or provoke debate. I'm constantly amazed regions covering several large cities noticeably struggle to fill half an hour's programming - they seem to be stuck in a pure reporting mindset and not look at the bigger picture.

When you say 'size' do you mean TSA or population size? (and where are your figures from?)

I'm sure there's lots of 'markets' smaller than the South West region in the UK, but I bet that the population size is larger. Therefore more content for the news and more people to advertise to

There's much more sense of being part of a city there too, they are much more independent and remote from each other than here. The TV markets there are based around cities so can be more relevant to their audience than say a station like Westcountry that covers a very disperate area or Yorkshire that covers several big cities.


Having worked in local news in a very populous area, even we struggled on some days, there just isn't that much proper meaty regional news.

It's all down to news values; the smaller the area you cover, the less picky you have to be for news. But then a regional news programme covering a large area wouldn't cover most house fires or burglarys because they aren't important enough for them no matter how little on the day news they have to fill their bulletin.

It's all about what's relevant to your audience

5 seems a lot to me for a local station


Nearly all commercial radio stations use IRN for their news, either the hourly bulletins or a service of scripts and clips. IRN is currently provided by Sky, although until a couple of years ago it came from ITN.

The local paper/local radio idea is what the tories have in mind for the local TV stations and what the last government had in mind for the independent regional news providers. There are examples of local paper groups being involved in radio and TV, although there are ownership limits

This isn't exactly a new story, their new Chairman mentioned it a few days into the job

I think he is actually talking about population size though.

Think about it -- 200 areas in a country of 300 million people. 1.5 million average per area. Slightly less than the 1.75 million in the South West area.

The difference between the US and the UK is the distance, in both cultural and absolute terms, of the areas from the capital.

It is probably fair to say that in areas such as the midlands, east and south (as defined by the respective ITV franchise areas) the cultural, and absolute proximity to London means that local news is fairly irrelevant.

The problem is that the further away you get from London -- in any direction -- the less any of that stuff happening down there seems relevant to anything.

That is why areas such as the South West, Borders, and North East benefitted more from local broadcasting than say Oxford or Ipswich, and that is why it was so aggravating when these regions were singled out by ITV.

The only reason why the nations get away with this is that they have a name to call their "country". We have no real ties to London up here, any more than Cardiff does.

In the States (and Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan or any other country with strong regional media) they just haven't had 1000 years of attempted assimilation to deal with.

Size is population size, and the information I used for US markets came from a site called Truckads. And I think you'll find that the only market smaller than the South West in the UK, is the Channel Islands. South West is only around 1.7 million people.

There are other differences too.
The vast sizes of the USA, Canada and Australia compared with Britain makes a difference. They are spread over different time zones.
The States, Canada and Australia are federal countries. They have state or province governments with far more power than our councils. So "local" politics matters more.
The way that television grew up in Britain was not based on television stations set up on a commercial basis, looking for what made sense as an editorial area.
Transmitters were sited according to how many people they'd reach rather than the communities they were going to serve.
People generally identify with their city or county than their amorphous, indistinct "region".
All attempts at creating a "North West" newspaper have failed. I doubt anyone remembers the North West Times or the North West Enquirer. When given a choice, people didn't buy them. They didn't identify with a region that lumped Liverpool with Manchester, Preston and Crewe. But they did buy the Manchester Evening News, Liverpool Echo, Lancashire Evening Post or Crewe Chronicle. That's a choice they made.
In telly terms, everyone in the area that really only became known as "the North West" in the sixties got the same pictures because Winter Hill was found to be a good site to reach seven million people in the 50s. The idea of "regional" television came after that.
And the North West is one of the most coherent regions.
Why people in north west Norfork would identify with news from Leeds is beyond me.
Meanwhile, because local television (not regional, you note) grew up on a station-by-station basis in the States, with some then becoming network affiliates, they focussed on their own markets more. And, I suspect, their viewers identified better with a station that covered their own city.
If television had evolved differently, with stations for Liverpool, a station for Manchester, one for Cheshire etc, things might have been different. They could then perhaps have become network affiliates on the American model and we'd have developed a stronger local news culture on television. If they were commercially viable in the States, where the average television market is much smaller in terms of population than an ITV region, they should have been in Blighty too.