The think I have the most of an issue with is the funding of a regional news programme for ITV. If you are going to spend £150m (say) of BBC money, it would be better to break up the BBC regional news service into a network of BBC local news channels.
For a start it would make sense to supplement BBC London with BBC Birmingham and BBC Manchester. This would mean BBC West Midlands and BBC North West becomes a "county" service. The BBC Scotland service could be split into an urban "central belt" service for Edinburgh and Glasgow and a "highland and islands" service (cf. "Grampian region") The BBC North West service could split into three, one for "Tyne", one for "Tees" and one for "Cumbria". BBC North could be BBC West Yorkshire (Leeds, Bradford etc), BBC South Yorkshire (Sheffield) and BBC North Yorkshire (another "county" service). The BBC South region could split as Meridian did, with one for the Hampshire end and another for Sussex. And so on. There are 60.9 million people in the UK, so 30 regional news channels serving a population of about 2 million each would be "local" news. It would CLEARLY be better for there to be ONE news programme with LOCAL news for everyone, than a choice of TWO news programmes that are REGIONAL. Any analysis would show that people would benefit more for news of a more local nature, than a choice of two lots of news that will be about somewhere that is not local. The idea of preserving regional news on ITV is nostalgia and not an analysis of what would benefit the public. You could clearly get 30 x BBC Local News 24-hour channels from £150m a year, couldn't you? 2009/6/16 Ian Forrester <[email protected]> > The Final Digital Britain Report > http://www.culture.gov.uk/what_we_do/broadcasting/6216.aspx > > So what do people think? Time to leave the country or dig a hole and stick > our heads into it? > > Cheers, > > Ian Forrester > > This e-mail is: []secret; []private; [x]public > > Senior Producer, BBC Backstage, BBC R&D > Room 1044, BBC Manchester BH, Oxford Road, M60 1SJ > email: [email protected] > work: +44 (0)1612444063 | mob: +44 (0)7711913293 > > - > Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please > visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. > Unofficial list archive: > http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ > -- Brian Butterworth follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/briantist web: http://www.ukfree.tv - independent digital television and switchover advice, since 2002
