TV Regional News

[anti-pacer]

Is your "local" TV news appropriate to you? Has the TV region changed over recent years. Do you live in a region not well covered by your supposedly local news?

 

[cf111]

In Scotland the ITV version for where I live covers an area that could best be describe as Grampian, Highland and Islands and the BBC one covers all of Scotland so neither of them are really "local" in the true sense of the word.

 

[anti-pacer]

In Scotland the ITV version for where I live covers an area that could best be describe as Grampian, Highland and Islands and the BBC one covers all of Scotland so neither of them are really "local" in the true sense of the word.

In the case of Scotland, and Wales, I've never considered your news local. For example if you live in Langholm, just north of Carlisle, you're not going to be interested in what happens in Lerwick. Same with those in Bangor, they're not going to be interested in what goes on in Barry.

 

[infobleep]

I've newer understood why Scotland; Wales and Northern Ireland get national news programs but not regional news ones and England gets regional news but not national news.

On the radio front, would a BBC Radio England station work?

I remember when Radio 1 evening show use to go to the nations every Thursday. England would get Zane Lowe who'd presented every other night of the week, where as the others would get different people.

I always felt the person covering England should be have been different too.

 

[anti-pacer]

I've newer understood why Scotland; Wales and Northern Ireland get national news programs but not regional news ones and England gets regional news but not national news.

On the radio front, would a BBC Radio England station work?

I remember when Radio 1 evening show use to go to the nations every Thursday. England would get Zane Lowe who'd presented every other night of the week, where as the others would get different people.

I always felt the person covering England should be have been different too.

I can understand why NI just has one news programme, given its size.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Is your "local" TV news appropriate to you? Has the TV region changed over recent years. Do you live in a region not well covered by your supposedly local news?

Don't watch it all these days, I'm afraid, news comes online (BBC mainly) or News 24.

 

[Bletchleyite]

On the radio front, would a BBC Radio England station work?

R5 Live is quite England-biased, and there are also the County based local stations.

 

[me123]

There is a strange paradox with local news between England the rest of the UK. Scotland and Wales have our national news in the "regional" slot. It's important for us to have this - matters within the Scottish Government and Welsh Assembly simply aren't broadcast on the national news network, whilst items about devolved issues are broadcast to the whole of the UK anyway.

As Anti-Pacer points out, Scotland and Wales are not regions - North and South Wales are indeed very different from each other, and there's almost a sense that events in Liverpool are more relevant here than something in Swansea. But ultimately the national programming out here really is essential; the devolved administrations need to have the coverage for issues like health and education that is offered in England, allowing them to be held to account. The current system is unbalanced - I recall the day that England went out of the South Africa World Cup as being a particularly extreme. The breakfast news programme was wall-to-wall analysis of a foreign (to me and c7 million others) football team's performance, but the big issues that were facing the Scottish Parliament that week were compressed into a three minute slot.

There have been calls in the past few years for a "Scottish Six" news programme - an hour long Scottish programme that would replace the BBC news at six. This would draw upon the UK national news from the BBC in London as well as giving appropriate attention to Scottish national news items. I understand that a regional element to this would also be incorporated, where there would be proper regional news coverage. The additional costs would be, in part, mitigated by using content from the main BBC news show (such as the pre-recorded segments). However, this seems to have been shelved in favour of a new separate BBC Scotland channel with a 9'clock dedicated news programme.

I ultimately see no reason why a Welsh solution wouldn't work equally well - national news and relevant news from Wales given appropriate prominence, with a regional split to North and South (?South East/South West).

 

[northwichcat]

I've newer understood why Scotland; Wales and Northern Ireland get national news programs but not regional news ones and England gets regional news but not national news.

On the radio front, would a BBC Radio England station work?

I remember when Radio 1 evening show use to go to the nations every Thursday. England would get Zane Lowe who'd presented every other night of the week, where as the others would get different people.

I always felt the person covering England should be have been different too.

Politics and population.

Wales didn't used to have a unified ITV region but the WG pushed for it.

Isn't the most Southern bit of Scotland still covered by ITV Border & Tyne Tees?

Scotland isn't any bigger than Yorkshire in population terms, so does it need to be split?

If anything you could argue Wales on it's own is too small to get it's own ITV region.

 

[Butts]

Politics and population.

Wales didn't used to have a unified ITV region but the WG pushed for it.

Isn't the most Southern bit of Scotland still covered by ITV Border & Tyne Tees?

Scotland isn't any bigger than Yorkshire in population terms, so does it need to be split?

If anything you could argue Wales on it's own is too small to get it's own ITV region.

In the old days it was Border, STV and Grampian so there were actually three franchises covering different parts of Scotland.

 

[SS4]

I get Midlands Today in Brum. Who'd have thunk it?

 

[Butts]

I get Midlands Today in Brum. Who'd have thunk it?

Yes, you have Nick Owen on BBC and Bob Warman on ITV two veterans of the genre.

When I was in Portsmouth just after christmas I couldn't believe Fred Dineage was still on the local ITV version down there. Not sure if Bruce Parker is still on the BBC .

Anyone remember Fred on "How" in the old Southern days and on World of Sport - he must be getting on in years.

There seem to be a lot of Veterans on Local Magazine Programs - any others in other ITV/BBC Regions - apart from Jackie Bird in Scotland.

Some of them may have been about long enough to have featured on Nationwide in it's hey day

 

[sk688]

Bbc London at 630 is quite decent I find, but I don't watch it too often

 

[GusB]

In Scotland the ITV version for where I live covers an area that could best be describe as Grampian, Highland and Islands and the BBC one covers all of Scotland so neither of them are really "local" in the true sense of the word.

I'm in the STV North area as well. They have tried to keep it "local" in that the Tayside/Angus/Fife areas receive their own mini news, but the rest of "the North" is lumped into one big area. Aberdeen news isn't always relevant to someone living in Inverness, and probably even less relevant to those living in the island groups.

Scotland isn't any bigger than Yorkshire in population terms, so does it need to be split?

I would argue that there should be further splitting. We have Reporting Scotland on the BBC (the news where you are - ha!*) which does seem to be heavily skewed towards the central belt. Yes, that's where most of Scotland's population is concentrated, but it's supposed to be our "national" news programme and it largely ignores much of the rest of the country. There's also far too much emphasis on football, but that's just a personal gripe.

The ITV/STV broadcasting areas can be broken up into "micro-regions" for advertising purposes so it would be technically possible to localise news broadcasts further. I'm not sure if the BBC would be able to do this.

I'm interested to see how the new BBC Scotland channel will turn out and whether their proposed flagship news hour will have any more time devoted to covering more "local" issues.

 

[miami]

As you say, Scotland's getting a new program, not replacing the Six or the 1830 regional bulletin, but in addition. I believe the 1830 program for Wales is mainly from Cardiff, and can therefore cover Welsh national news, with a sub-opt from Bangor (in the same way Cambridge has a sub-opt from norwich, or Oxford from Southampton). Not sure there's enough news in Wales to merrit the cost of a dedicated channel.

Regional news, the 1830 showing especially, is very popular - I believe it gets more regular viewers than the 1800 national bulletin (last time I checked more people actually watched the 1700 bulletin than the 1800). The Ten is still the bulletin of note though, the TV equivelent of the Today programme. There's a general move in the BBC to do more 'web first' stuff -- "Internet Fit" is a buzzword that noone really knows what it means, but if you look at the background of many recent appointees, there is a drive to push the internet to the forefront more and more.

As for the original question, living in South Cheshire near the Shropshire/Staffs/Cheshire border, and indeed not too far from Wales, we don't really fit in in any of the BBC regions (I don't have ITV at home but I think the same applies). Our local BBC live news page is the "Staffordshire and Cheshire" page, which fits fairly well, but the general news page seems to be "Stoke and Staffs". There's no local radio for Cheshire, I'm not sure if Stoke would cover Crewe and Nantwich (Yes apparently). I assume Shropshire covers Whitchurch, which is a few miles away. I'm certain neither would cover Northwich or Winsford. Merseyside internet covers Winsford which is off, but if you put in Winsford as your local area it pops up with Manchester. Manchester internet coverts Knutsford as you'd expect. Perhaps Wilmslow and Macclesfield and other Manchester extensions are covered by GMR.

Is Warrington covered by anything BBC? Yes, sometimes Manchester, sometimes Merseyside.

There's always going to be overlaps in any regional based news, at least until every story is geo-tagged.

As I understand it ITV have had to scale back time and time again due to funding pressure -- when I was a lad I had a tour of their Exeter sub-opt, which broke into the Plymouth regional program, as did Barnstaple, Truro and possibly even Torquay. None of those exist now, with Bristol covering the region from Ashchurch near Worester down to the Isles of Scilly.

 

[miami]

The ITV/STV broadcasting areas can be broken up into "micro-regions" for advertising purposes so it would be technically possible to localise news broadcasts further. I'm not sure if the BBC would be able to do this.

They used to be far more split in the days of analog UHF broadcasting. Satellite, and freeview to an extent, caused that to become very expensive. As we move towards internet as a primary delivery channel the technology to deliver local becomes cheaper - and the cost of producing locally works too - to a point, you still need a journalist to create the stories, and once you start scrimping there you run into the problem that local newspapers have.

 

[me123]

Not sure there's enough news in Wales to merrit the cost of a dedicated channel.

Things do happen over here sometimes, you know! Maybe not a dedicated channel for Wales (well, aside from S4C of course), but I see no reason a Welsh news programme wouldn't work, bearing in mind that such a programme would be able to draw on the national content from the main BBC broadcast as appropriate (the pre-recorded segments would be ideal for this). It would mean that Welsh national issues devolved to the assembly could be given appropriate prominence, whilst filtering out the stuff that is completely irrelevant (people in Bangor have little interest in English education policy, for example).

 

[Kite159]

There seems to be at least 2 versions of "Meridian Tonight" on ITV in this area, the one on standard definition covers roughly this area whereas the version found on the HD channel tends to cover more the Kent/Sussex area of the region.

BBC South Today is quite good for this area, being based in Southampton

 

[miami]

Things do happen over here sometimes, you know! Maybe not a dedicated channel for Wales (well, aside from S4C of course), but I see no reason a Welsh news programme wouldn't work, bearing in mind that such a programme would be able to draw on the national content from the main BBC broadcast as appropriate (the pre-recorded segments would be ideal for this). It would mean that Welsh national issues devolved to the assembly could be given appropriate prominence, whilst filtering out the stuff that is completely irrelevant (people in Bangor have little interest in English education policy, for example).

Scotland's population is nearly twice the size of Wales. What services would you cut to fund more political assembly stuff (which I believe is nowhere near the scope of Scotland's powers). Would this just be an extended Wales bulletin? Would you replace the Six - baring in mind that it was found that the Six has enough news to be relevant to Scotland to keep it. If it's a new channel what else would it be filled with? If not replacing the Six, and keeping the 1830 program, what would you remove? Eastenders? The One Show? A Wales only slot on BBC2? How about a red-button only option on the Six?

I suspect that the success or not of the (second - there's Alba as well) BBC Scotland channel could lead to other channels for NI and Wales.

 

[Bevan Price]

I live in St. Helens, and we get BBC North West TV news. Tries its best, but the area covered is a bit too large to provide complete coverage of every town.

On radio, there is BBC Radio Merseyside. In its early days, it used to be quite good for local news, but most of the news bulletins then shrank to a nominal 5 minutes including a mixture of national & local news - which does not leave room for comprehensive local news coverage. They do have some interesting "news magazine" programmes, but unfortunately these are partly filled by muzak - as if there isn't enough time devoted to music for the rest of the day.
Sports coverage is also a little disappointing - yes we hear about the major football & rugby league clubs - but the smaller clubs get barely a mention; you are more likely to hear about Chelsea or Arsenal than the likes of St. Helens Town, Warrington Town, Prescot Cables football clubs, etc. And the local cricket scores, once broadcast on sunday mornings (summer), "disappeared" some years ago, replaced by more time for largely nondescript muzak.

Can also receive BBC GM Radio, which seems fairly similar in content to Merseyside.

ITV also have local news, but see it very rarely, due to time clashes with other programmes.

 

[me123]

Scotland's population is nearly twice the size of Wales. What services would you cut to fund more political assembly stuff (which I believe is nowhere near the scope of Scotland's powers). Would this just be an extended Wales bulletin? Would you replace the Six - baring in mind that it was found that the Six has enough news to be relevant to Scotland to keep it. If it's a new channel what else would it be filled with? If not replacing the Six, and keeping the 1830 program, what would you remove? Eastenders? The One Show? A Wales only slot on BBC2? How about a red-button only option on the Six?

I'd replace the 6pm news with an hour long show in both Scotland and Wales. This would take a lot of content from the main BBC news programme (recorded interviews and news segments and the like), with the editorial stance focussed on the Scottish/Welsh audience. So major news in Health and Education would get relative priority, while relatively minor things from England that are less relevant would get a lower billing, or cut altogether. It would be a relatively low cost solution, in that the major and international stories would still be covered by one national reporting team who send their footage to the Scottish and Welsh programmes in addition to broadcasting it in England. (There's little point in sending multiple journalists to cover a US presidential event, for example). This would obviously be a mutual thing too; if there was a major event in Edinburgh, this could be covered by the Scottish news team and sent around the UK.

 

[GusB]

I'd replace the 6pm news with an hour long show in both Scotland and Wales. This would take a lot of content from the main BBC news programme (recorded interviews and news segments and the like), with the editorial stance focussed on the Scottish/Welsh audience. So major news in Health and Education would get relative priority, while relatively minor things from England that are less relevant would get a lower billing, or cut altogether. It would be a relatively low cost solution, in that the major and international stories would still be covered by one national reporting team who send their footage to the Scottish and Welsh programmes in addition to broadcasting it in England. (There's little point in sending multiple journalists to cover a US presidential event, for example). This would obviously be a mutual thing too; if there was a major event in Edinburgh, this could be covered by the Scottish news team and sent around the UK.

Health and education stories from England are minor news in other parts of the UK!

I'm still very much in favour of the "Scottish Six", and I'd like to see similar happening in NI and Wales too. I don't see why the same couldn't happen in England either, whether it be one single team covering the whole of England, or breaking it down into regions. As you say, you've got the reporting teams there already - it's just a case of re-jigging how it's broadcast. I don't think it will happen, though.

 

[Trainfan344]

I live in Lowestoft. We get Look East, which isn't too bad, covers most local stuff as the region is split into two (East/West) however, on a Sunday at least I find that they just do one programme for the region and we get stuff from Northampton way.

We also get updates when the West Coast Mainline Through Milton Keynes is disrupted which amuses me as when you think of East Anglia, it's not the first rail line that comes to mind!

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

Do any Mancunians ever watch Channel 7 on Freeview which appears to carry much in the way of news specific to Manchester.

 

[AM9]

Here in the home counties, the London news at 18:30 is a pretty good fill for 30 mins.. When I'm visiting othere areas, notably Norfolk and Hampshire, the corresponding regional news programmes seem to struggle to fill their slots, unless there has been a major court case of a bigger than normal traffic jam.
Regional news is just that, everything that happens in a region. It was derived from the different areas of transmitter coverage in VHF days, perpetuated into analogue UHF days. Tied video lines were originally too expensive for anything other than national programme distribution and important national/international news. The fact that a transmitter group can cover over 100 miles accross means that 'local' news as some expect it to be just isn't supportable in journalisitic terms let alone the technical issues on terrestrial and sattelite broacasting.
This is obvious when the quality of journalism and production on the major regions i.e. London and the other metropolitan areas, when compared with more rural regions. That is despite the broadcaster's cost per rural viewer being much higher than for those in higher population-density regions. If the licence fee was based on the cost of delivery per locale, it would be a different situation altogether.

 

[AM9]

Do any Mancunians ever watch Channel 7 on Freeview which appears to carry much in the way of news specific to Manchester.

The London Live service seems to ba a reasonable effort, accepting that much of the material is old entertainment programming from the '80s and '90s. The news is however extended and quite professional.
I just hope that the channel 7 services don't go the way of local commercial radio and get syndicated into a bland advertising medium.

 

[me123]

One of the problem with ultra-regional channels is the problem that there really is nothing on. STV Glasgow is the prime example of this. The programming schedule seems to consist of reruns of Take The High Road and Taggart, with sub regional news that can really scrape the barrel some days. There's also some original content, which from my experience has the production values of a well-produced youtube video rather than of a professional TV programme.

When you look at STV's plans for STV Aberdeen, Dundee and Ayr (yes, really, Ayr is going to have its own TV channel), I have to wonder quite how much there is at the bottom of the barrel to scrape.

 

[AM9]

... When you look at STV's plans for STV Aberdeen, Dundee and Ayr (yes, really, Ayr is going to have its own TV channel), I have to wonder quite how much there is at the bottom of the barrel to scrape.

I think that some of the smaller local stations are going to rely on very local low-cost advertising, - just like the provincial cinemas did with adverts for the local exhaust centre, the ladies (of a certain age) fashion shop, the hairdressers and the Asian restaurant with flock wallpaper.

 

[miami]

I live in Lowestoft. We get Look East, which isn't too bad, covers most local stuff as the region is split into two (East/West) however, on a Sunday at least I find that they just do one programme for the region and we get stuff from Northampton way.

We also get updates when the West Coast Mainline Through Milton Keynes is disrupted which amuses me as when you think of East Anglia, it's not the first rail line that comes to mind!

There was a move at one point to have a milton keynes sub-opt, but again it comes down to money. Where should Milton Keynes be covered from? Nottingham? Birmingham? London? Southampton? Perhaps upgrading Oxford into a Thames Valley opt, covering an arc from Reading to Bedford would have been a good idea.

I think that local radio could do more with video news nowadays, but again it comes down to the delivery channel. Local TV doesn't seem to be doing well for a number of reasons.

 

[DarloRich]

When I lived in the North East we got Look North (BBC) or North East tonight (ITV) with, for a long time, Mike Neville. Both went down hill when he left/retired. He was a proper local news anchor. Respected, knowledgeable, formidable, witty and with a sense of humour and fun. He was on local TV news for 40+ years (32 of them on the BBC) and is a North East legend and institution. You don't get them like that these days.


MK is slightly odd as we seem to get BBC Anglia and ITV Berkshire news.