Why TV news is a making a primetime comeback

Media Leaders
ITV has joined the charge of commercial broadcasters that are prepared to invest in TV news again. But will this lead to greater market fragmentation, and what impact will this have on the BBC’s news coverage?

Something really strange is going on in the world of television, which, until this week, you might have overlooked.

Suddenly news, if not exactly sexy, has become desirable even in the minds of prime-time schedulers who have spent half a lifetime trying to shuffle off the news into a more convenient corner at the margins of peak.

Remember when News at Ten was called News At When? And when attempts were made to squeeze as many resources out of regional news-gathering as regulators would allow?

News didn’t make money. It ate profits and although you had to have the news as part of your obligations as a public service broadcaster, in hard times journalists’ jobs were often cut and expansion was out of the question. The ITV News channel did not last very long.

A change in the ITV psyche

Then almost from nowhere, ITV announced this week that it was planning an hour-long national and international news programme from 6.30 to 7.30pm. During the week the new extended programme will be followed by back-to-soaps.

Emmerdale will have a fixed 7.30 slot and will be followed on Monday, Wednesday and Friday with hour-long editions of Coronation Street. Viewers, it seems prefer the full hour soap.

News, then soaps followed presumably by drama and on to News At Ten.

News and soap the new flavour of the ITV schedule but it is the greater emphasis on news, and with it the biggest expansion of jobs in ITV News for 20 years that catches the eye.

Wow. New correspondents for Wales, Scotland and the North of England with a total of 27 new journalists, producers and multi-skilled camera operators.

Something has changed in the ITV psyche. For all these years Channel 4 News has been left alone to plough a lonely furrow with the full hour format.

As a result, Channel 4 News has enjoyed considerable advantages being able to give important international stories the time they deserve, something that the BBC never attempted.

Why has ITV now decided to follow suit? There is certainly no shortage of news both national and international as well as the continuing implications of huge choices and political, social and economic phenomena. They range from Brexit and Covid-19 to the ultimately existential threat posed by Climate Change.

For good measure, there is the daily soap opera of failures of governance from the current UK government.

But aren’t the general populace fed up with news and the never ending gloom and switching off and relying more on pre-digested mobile bites?

ITV will have to win more of these people back and persuade them it is worthwhile watching an hour of news in the early evening.

Clearly part of the strategy will be try to engage better with those outside the metropolitan bubble and be more relevant to their lives, although commercially it may prove a tad courageous.

Billionaires are throwing money at news

The great thing about news is, of course, the nature of news – an endless procession of surprising developments thrown up by a restless world. An enduring strength of broadcast news is that it is more likely to be consumed live than any other genre of programming – except sport.

So maybe the hope is that a longer news programme will help to anchor an audience for the 90-minute soap experience, although time-shifting of popular drama will hardly go away.

The ITV news expansion is just one symptom of a much wider expansion of television news with billionaires prepared to thrown tens of millions of pounds into the bottomless pit of 24-hour television news.

We now know that Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV channel, due to launch in the Spring, will be branded with a “speech bubble” logo, presumably to emphasis the fact that there will be a lot of talking going on.

Erron Gordon, News UK’s broadcasting executive creative director, explained, primetime television output will feature serious navy blue colouring while things will be freshened up during the day with a lighter blue.

The bottom line is that Murdoch, who has always been interested in news, never wavered in the face of the continuous losses posted by Sky News when he owned it.

The financing of TalkTV, as we now all know, comes with a £50m multimedia, international punt on Piers Morgan.

Meanwhile, GBNews is trying to market its way out of unimpressive ratings before the Murdoch rival hits our screens. The only way is up for the right-of-centre channel, which often averages only around 28,000 viewers in primetime. Its main attraction, the former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, manages to get around 80,000 on Farage.

Again, tens of millions have been committed to find broadcast news space on the right.

The main thrust of GB TV’s new marketing campaign is to use outdoor and the sides of vans to target the BBC and try to reach swing voters.

The unsubtle line reads: “We Ask The Questions You Ask and BBC News Doesn’t” and vans with the slogan have been parked outsside BBC premises in London, Leeds and Sheffield.

We will see whether such campaigns shift the dial enough to make a difference before Murdoch deploys his enormous marketing clout, not least through his own national newspapers.

As a result there could easily be a further fragmentation of the news market and with it increasingly different versions of reality. There is an obvious danger that people will seek out their version of “the facts” and, as they say in the trade, social cohesion could be weakened as a result.

The ITV expansion will also pose questions as to why the licence-fee funded BBC will still only be providing 30 minutes of national and international news in the early evening.

The good news is that this ferment in news provision, despite the different flavours on offer, will all be part of a regulated system under Ofcom with all signed up to principles of accuracy and impartiality.

It will therefore stand in marked contrast to the lies, damaging conspiracy theories and outright fake news routinely pumped out by the social media outlets.

So far their attempts to clean up their acts have so far been inadequate at best.

So it’s a case of the more news, the better. And welcome to ITV’s early evening hour, which will give ITV reporter Paul Brand greater scope to expose even more parties in Downing Street.

Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for Mediatel News on Wednesdays.

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