Media Guardian: 'regional news needs public funding'
So ITV's campaign to reduce its costs and indeed what it has to produces, continues with a campaign to get public cash to pay for its regional news programmes.
But should we be giving ITV cash, or should we be looking at another option? As I wrote in Whither ITV?, ITV was always going to change beyond recognition, and given its continual demands for fewer restrictions, and now cash, maybe it would be best to simply allow the network to go national and have done with it. Regional news could then be passed to Channel 4 or a new network of smaller regional stations.
The latter is an especially appealing idea, giving the potential to recreate part of what ITV was created for in the first place - to provide regional television for the UK.
