As you may know, ITN's website was recently relaunched to nothing more than a corporate gateway with actual news relocated here. But now ITN.co.uk mentions ITN's provision of news for ITV1, C4, C5, along with IRN, EuroNews and LBC, but...
there is no mention of ITN News Channel!
Should we take this to mean the Channel is for the chop?
(Click on the 'ITN.co.uk Has Changed' from the right-hand-side of the ITN homepage for the screen I'm referring to here)
ITN has announced that it is looking for around 120 redundancies - initially via voluntary means. Only 10 of these are likely to be journalists on the ITV output...
I wonder if you might be right - I can't imagine the ITN News Channel is making a huge amount of money (if it isn't losing shed loads)
With the ITV contract reduced in value by about £13m it may be that ITN can no longer afford to run the channel...
The ITN News channel is not completly ITN run as it is a joint venture between ITN and NTL I would think the news channel costs ITN very little to run and i wouldnt think they would shut the channel down even though their audience figures are not exactly promising.
Now I wasn't expecting that till tomorrow! Anyone see it disappear?
(Edited by RW at 10:46 pm on Nov. 23, 2001)
BU
burblebrox
ITN News Channel lost its URL at the same time as the itv.com site took over as the main portal. I'm not surprised they forgot to mention the ITN News Channel on their website as it is a wholly forgettable thing, and their 'interactive' services on ntl: rarely worked.
I gather though it is relatively cheap to run, and that the current round of redundancies won't affect it. From what I hear at Gray's Inn Rd, things are so bad that cutting the News Channel wouldn't actually make a whole lot of difference to ITN's financial position, so they may as well keep it rather than risk a high-profile embarrassment which would send investors running for the hills.
Rather like the recent decision by the Times to let their book columnist go, know full well he only worked one day a week - it's cost cutting, but it's low profile cost cutting!
DC
DaveCheltenham
Quote:
Yes the news 24 URLs gone! Strangly no-ones noticed this!!!!!!
I assume it went only to make room for the iNTERACTIVE Press Red Button. At least you can get rid of that one with Backup. Wasn't ITN one of the ones trying to close down News 24??
The job losses had to come eventually. The rest of ITV has been hell-bent on getting rid of staff in a quite unbelievable display of short-termism, it was bound to hit ITN in the end.
No I don't think the ITN news channel will go. It doesn't fit in with ITV's policy of wasting money on foolish multichannel ventures whilst letting their core businesses rot (and don't forget that ITN is essentially run by Carlton/Granada ie ITV).
Should it go? Yes of course it should. There are already a few too many news channels that no-one watches to go with all the other multichannel crap that no-one watches.
