If BT and others can do it with voice telephony today, why not Granalton with video tomorrow?
Very many reasons.
Mainly technical reasons mind it must be said.
Whilst it isn't really feasible just now, in a few years, with ITV part of the European wing of an American multinational, what is to stop London being reduced to a small outpost, with all management and technical duties done on the cheap in premises in Warsaw, or Budapest?
Let's hope for their sake that the London management staff are cutting back in the regions for pragmatic reasons, rather than reasons of empire-building as I suspect is partly the case, or they'll all be next within the next few years I'd say....
The cut backs are purely for personal strategy and not other reasons .
They are cutting many costs pre-merger so as to be in a position of power in the new ITV .
On the bigger picture front , they appear to be stripping out every asset and getting as many services outside so as to have a low headcount , purely for re-sale to US . Announced this week on Gra staff website , the ITN international sales agreement for Gra material, yet no mention of all the people in Gra's Clip sales dept that was set up a couple of years ago !!! What about them ?
And so on and so on ......
In the early 90s we had managers playing with people's livelihoods for the sake of their own petty little empires which would only be wiped out in the near future anyway. Whilst vast swathes of competent staff were arbitrarily axed and the companies irreversibly weakened.
Ten years on, they've learnt nothing.
I am fast coming to the conclusion that the faster ITV is bought by an American multi and this shower they call the "management" of ITV is wiped out the better. They aren't working for the good of the company, they're working for the good of themselves.
Can anyone explain to me how a
Victorian
bonded warehouse built for the needs of the 19th century, is more suitable than a modern purpose built
Brenda Smith not in Manchester but from her office on the South Bank posted:
building that was fine for the 1960s but is totally unsuitable for our needs in the 21st century."
It doesn't make sense at all for them to move away from Manchester. Firstly, it's their biggest Northern studio and they have Coronation Street there too. I think ITV will end up as the London Studios and the Manchester Studios.
However, the studios in the "glass" box are really quite small. Certainly not as big as the London Studios anyway. I think it makes sense to move into the warehouse (which is where they film Coronation Street).
The incoming chief executive of ITV’s News Division has insisted to journalists and MPs that there will be “no reduction of journalistic effort in the Maidstone area” following the decision to axe 175 jobs at Meridian Television.
Meridian journalists saw Clive Jones’s statement as “back-pedalling at a rate of knots” from the original line taken by Granada when the redundancies were announced.
“This is a major change,” said one senior journalist. “Originally they said some reporters and cameras would stay and everyone else was going.”
As a result, journalists demanded on Wednesday that Jones’s assurances be included in the document that will be submitted to staff facing redundancy during the consultation period — already delayed from last week.
Appearing before the Commons media select committee on Tuesday, Jones said: “We’re not proposing to diminish the number of journalists. All we’re talking about is moving a presenter and maybe a technical director.”
Other operations will be moved from Southampton and Maidstone to a site near Fareham by the end of 2004.
However, the NUJ, which also submitted evidence on Tuesday, said its campaign to save regional news production “was still on course”.
General secretary Jeremy Dear said journalists feared ITV would implement “a similar strategy” of cuts in the Midlands, home to studios in Abingdon, Birmingham and Nottingham.
In a new development, the union is to approach the Independent Television Commission to demand “total disclosure of its deliberations with Meridian” amid concern that the ITC was not open about the decisions that led to its approval of the job losses.
NUJ broadcast organiser Paul McLaughlin said the union was uneasy about the fact it had not been party to the ITC’s assessment.
“The ITC had no formal consultations with viewers or the NUJ,” he said.
The consultation period for the redundancies has been rescheduled to begin this Friday. Meridian is understood to have told journalists that the delay was due to insufficient details of its proposals. “It begs the question of how the ITC approved something the company itself was not yet sure of,” said McLaughlin.
It has also emerged that the ITC wrote to Tonbridge MP Sir John Stanley reassuring him that parent company Granada would retain editorial staffing levels.
Chairman Sir Robin Biggam wrote: “We’ve been given detailed information that the reporting staff in the South East will remain at its present strength in the Maidstone area, as will the camera teams. The regional editor, news editor, programme producer and several other newsroom journalists will also remain in the sub-region.”
“This is a major back-pedalling from what they said originally,” a Meridian source said.