And finally, ITN gets 24-hour news

IT'S an organisation that prides itself on being first.

But ITN has been extraordinarily slow in launching a 24-hour television news station. That finally changed yesterday when the ITN News Channel went on air - some 17 years after the company first contemplated running a round-the-clock news service.

"I remember making a pilot in 1983, but the idea was ahead of its time," says ITN chief executive Stewart Purvis. "At various times we talked to several potential partners including Robert Maxwell, Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch. I make no apologies for ITN not doing it before, because until now operating a 24-hour news channel was never commercially viable." If the idea is viable now - and it's a big "if" - it's only because ITN is devoting a relatively small amount of money to the project. No one there will speak numbers, but no one doubts it is far less than the annual 50 million a year that the BBC spends on News 24.

Some TV news professionals might argue that the ITN News Channel still represents a huge risk for ITN and its partner in the venture, cable giant NTL. Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch found out the hard way that dedicated news stations require deep pockets and nerves of steel.

"We lost money for five years," admits Eason Jordan, president of news gathering and international networks at Ted Turner's CNN. It is a matter of debate whether Sky News, whose budget is a closely guarded secret, makes a profit despite being on air for more than a decade.

Even in the digital age, international news gathering is an expensive business for TV organisations, with no prospect of big ratings. In an average week, Sky News, CNN and News 24 will only be watched by around one per cent of the UK TV audience.

This is why ITN has had to watch from the sidelines as rivals stole all the glory. Purvis, however, considers the wait to have been worthwhile, claiming the new service is a genuine product of the digital age, with its lower entry costs and opportunities for revenue.

He stresses that the TV channel, will not work in isolation: "We will be transmitting web-style pages over digital radio to mobile laptops. The next step will be digital radio and web pages over radio waves to palm-held devices.

The television service is only part of the business equation."

Inevitably, though, most attention will focus on the TV service and the fact that, since yesterday, digital viewers are able to watch a 10pm ITN news bulletin fronted by former News at Ten presenter Julia Somerville, a kind of News At Ten in exile.

WHEN it arrived in 1980, CNN was derided as Chicken Noodle N e t w o r k because of its cheap-and-cheerful approach. Stories were told of how eco-friendly Ted Turner ordered his reporters to run their cars on leaded petrol because it was less expensive.

The early days of News 24 were full of glitches, as BBC hacks attempted to come to terms with a fully automated digital newsroom. By contrast, the launch of Sky News, using far less ambitious technology, was remarkably glitch-free. "But when Rupert Murdoch is the guest of honour, you don't take any chances," recalls an ex-BBC newsman who attended the station's opening-night party. In fact, the first onair edition of Sky News was labelled "test transmission", just in case anything went wrong.

Behind the scenes at ITN's Gray's Inn Road headquarters, there are worries that not enough resources are being invested in the news channel. When new working practices were introduced to turn the newsroom into a 24-hour operation last year, industrial action was narrowly avoided. "To launch a venture like this you've either got to pay people a lot of money or have the kind of management that people are prepared to walk off a cliff for," reckons a TV news veteran.

"I am not sure ITN has that kind of management or is paying those sort of salaries. There is the potential for industrial disputes."

Purvis declines to say how many extra staff have been hired or to give any details of the scale of ITN and NTL's investment.

"All I can say is that we have increased our investment in newsgathering considerably in recent years and that in the short term the new service will incur losses." He promises his news channel will be different from Sky and News 24. Instead of the usual 30-minute segments, the programme is built around 15-minute loops. "Whenever you switch on you'll bump into the news and not a political discussion or a feature show or a phone-in," he says.

'We've got Julia Somerville, and someone called Rachel' FOR the past four weeks, they have been rehearsing, delivering news into a vacuum in preparation for the launch of ITN's 24-hour news channel.

You'd expect it to be a densely populated operation. It actually seems to have hardly any staff at all. True, the gallery, a cramped windowless bunker in the bowels of the ITN building, looks a bit crowded on the day I visit, but only because they're all still clambering up the learning curve together.

After the launch, there will only be four people in here at peak time - two technicians and two editorial staff - and a mere two between 1am and 5am.

The studio itself has been the victim of an even more ruthless depopulation.

Newsreader Ros Childs is in there on her own, sitting at a round clear plastic desk with a blue rim. Around her are four cameras, all unmanned. They only use the other two if a second newsreader comes in to double the forces on a big breaking story, such as last week's Concorde crash in Paris. Childs even has to operate her own Autocue, by means of a foot pedal under the desk.

Every time she presses it, it squeaks.

"When we first started, it was a bit slow," she says. "You had it flat to the ground like an accelerator and it just carried on at its own pace.

They've fixed it now fortunately."

At the top of the hour, Childs gives way to Andrew Harvey. In the gallery, someone presses a button and Harvey's dedicated light setting comes up.

Childs goes back to her desk to prepare for her next stint on camera.

Harvey, Somerville and Carol Barnes are probably the best known names, plus Daljit Dhaliwal from Channel 4 News.

Who's doing the graveyard shift, I ask a director. "Tristana Moore," she says, "and someone called Rachel."

Except when planes crash or prime ministers resign, there will be only one presenter on screen at a time. You can forget all that cult- of-personality bonding between newsreading twosomes, and don't bother tuning in for the joshing jockstrap from the sports department.

One newsreader will deliver all the travel, weather and sport. Frippery be damned. It's all about pace: serving the 12-minute news snack.

Copyright 2000
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