Snow - TV's winners and losers.

With big numbers for regional TV news as it covers the big freeze – 9 million watching the various regional shows on Tuesday for instance – the importance of the news and weather information outweighed the traditional poor relation nature of regional programming.

It comes at a time when regional newspaper groups have formed a number of consortia – with ITN, regional broadcasters such as STV and UTV, and independent companies like Ten Alps and Tinopolis – to bid to operate regional news services on ITV, funded by public money, in Scotland, Wales and the North East of England.  Will the newspaper groups news services be able to match the coverage of the existing broadcasters – ITV regionally, ITN nationally, and the BBC?

I was interested to see how the two national news services approached the challenge of covering the snows.   ITN took its news  anchor, Mary Nightingale, to present the evening shows from Manchester, whereas the BBC stayed with its studio presentation and focused on Yorkshire.  To my mind the ITN coverage was in the right place, more direct and better – but the audience, as usual, defaults to the BBC for major stories and so went with the BBC's 10 O'Clock News – 7m vs 3.85m for ITN's News at Ten.

One of the winners – in terms of news presentation, was BBC anchor, Sophie Raworth who presented the BBC coverage and then was brought back the following day to present a half-hour 8pm special,  with an audience of 5.9m.   The programme drew on items which were, essentially, regional news items, and repackaged through BBC News 24.   It highlighted the scale of the BBC’s news organization, compared with its commercial rival.

Will public funds be sufficient to preserve the regional news on ITV?   Clearly audiences seek out the local and regional information they need in difficult times, and will not forgive a service that does not deliver.   The cost of providing a service that meets viewers expectations will not be insignificant – something that might be difficult to accept for regional newspaper groups more familiar with cost savings.  Perhaps they should look at the Channel M experiment in Manchester, where Guardian Media Group spent nearly £15m on its  expensive city channel – only to have to scale it back its local news and programming as advertising revenues failed to match expectations.   The history of newspaper groups and local television – Channel One, Live TV, Channel M – is not a happy one, and does not augur well for the future of regional news.