In the wake of last week’s Ofcom report which suggested ITV could end its public service commitment , MPs have asked the broadcaster for clarification on its plans for regional news.
Chair of the culture committee, John Whittingdale, Conservative MP called for greater public funding to ensure future public service material broadcast on commercial TV remained the most viable option.
Celebrity tittle tattle blogger Perez Hilton- real name Mario Lavandeira – has agreed to write a regular column for the ITV.com to promote its new show Gossip Girl.
Hilton will write a weekly column after each episode of the ITV2 gossip-girl show.
The blog, which will start tonight after the airing of the first episode, is the latest move by the vacuous ‘personality’ to broaden his appeal beyond the blogosphere.
He has also recently taken up presenting roles with MTV and launched his own show on VH1
Last week we reported on ITV News’ video blogs from its correspondents in the field and suggested that the tone and style of the posts were too similar to traditional broadcast news formats.
Ian Rumsey, head of output for ITV News, sent us this response, which lays out the reasons behind the experiment:
We’ve been experimenting with vlogs for some time and our correspondents and presenters are now providing an added dimension to our online content.
I don’t quite understand what you mean by a ‘traditional piece of broadcast news’.
These vlogs are far from traditional broadcast news. They’re rougher, edgier, sometimes more opinionated and don’t cover the same territory as our news pieces.
Earlier this year, we had Juliet Bremner showing us round the canteen and shower block in Basra. That’s far from traditional and a long way from the story she delivered for our on-air programmes.
Of course, they’re presenter driven – the whole idea is that they are not a report but a piece of behind-the-scenes filming that features the lives and conditions of our correspondents on location.
The launch of the News at Ten has seen an even greater premium placed upon eyewitness reports made by our top correspondents in the UK and right around the globe. To work in tandem with that on-air strategy, our web content taps into our location reporting – with a difference.
The stories we’re sent from location – whether in the UK or in far-away destinations – are polished, highly produced, edited pieces of reportage for television news.
So, to offer that added value we’ve asked our reporters to turn the camera, to show viewers what the locations they visit are really like, to talk to them in greater depth about the people, the places they encounter, to share the anecdotes and impressions they take away with them when they leave. The story behind getting the story.
The lives our news teams lead and the jobs they do are exciting and unpredictable, and I think we can let people in on what it’s like to really be there with them.
I think if you watched the on-air pieces that went across the week, you’d know that there was plenty of muck and bullets flying around. Clearly they provide the content for our news stories. Our vlogs reflect something different. We’re not going to ask someone to do a vlog for the web while they’re in the middle of a ‘blood and guts’ situation.
Finally, ITV News runs a very lean newsgathering operation – at home and abroad. What may seem like ‘millions of people’ to the uninitiated eye is actually a very small team compared to the plethora of staff the BBC is able to send on major stories.
At yesterday’s AOP forum on widgets, plenty of examples were given as to how these applications are used by content providers, but few answers were given on their impact in terms of audience numbers.
Brand controller at ITV consumer, Richard Waterworth, explained the channel’s creation of Facebook applications to promote ITV2 show ‘The Secret Diary of a Call Girl’, but admitted when questioned that quantifying the contribution these kind of widgets make to audience growth is not yet possible.
“It’s absolutely still true that the power of cross-promotion from ITV on air eclipses all this other activity… the way that Facebook works and these widgets work are not comparable in terms of numbers, but what it’s about is building momentum in certain points of a campaign,” he said.
There is scope then for online news providers to use widgets to build buzz about sections on their sites or current projects – just as US sites Washingtonpost.com and USAToday.com have done.
But with metrics for widgets in their infancy it is unclear when or how these applications could become real audience drivers for news websites rather than just flashy marketing toys.
According to Ivan Pope, founder of Snipperoo, sites including news sites looking to widgetise will have to accept that it is a give and take process:
“In order to aggregate you have to disaggregate something… you have to blow up all your content into small fragments and widgetise everything you’ve got and make it available for people to reaggregate into their own view.
“The era of websites which are controlled by a central entity is coming to an end… people want to be in control of where they exist.”
Such widgetisation of content would be a concern for news providers wanting to track where their content ends up and where their audience comes from. This could cause problems for news sites developing widgets for the mobile web, as David Ashbrook, senior research engineer for Vodafone’s devices team, explains in the clip below:
[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/davidashcroft.mp3]To iron out these problems more deals are needed between content providers and with mobile networks – events that could lead to, as Snipperoo’s Pope suggests, the fragmentation of the internet and websites as we know it.
Nick Hayworth, channels manager of ITV Local London, outlined how the broadband wing of the local TV service was trying to win back favour with its lost viewership – the trick? Mixing citizen journalism and more traditional news online.
To maintain the public trust and integrity of each, he added, a clear separation is placed between citizen media and professional journalism on the site.
“The problems of trust occur for us when we start to carry mini documentaries or standalone citizen news videos, since ITV Local was launched we have been sent hundreds of videos made by local people that effect them, in those films there are often some strongly held opinions and scenes that sometimes tell us in very graphic ways some of the major social and political issues.”
ITV, he says, maintains the standard of citizen journalism content and keeps its 39 local borough channels in London distinct from its traditional news through ‘compliance, labelling and separation’.
Listen here for his definition of what this means:
[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/itv.mp3]We reported here a few weeks ago that ITV had set up and was about to launch a Cit Journo platform called Uploaded.
“For the first time, viewers’ contributions will not just be an add-on to coverage of the big stories – they will become an integral part of all three ITV News bulletins every day… A Citizen Exclusives section will give everyone a platform to contact the ITV News team directly if they have captured amazing exclusive footage.”
It launched yesterday, according to the pr blurb to:
“creating the UK’s first nationwide network of citizen correspondents who can shape TV news
coverage on a daily basis.”
ITV sees the site as a big unwashed debating arena, the best posts of which will find their way into its TV news offerings. Delegates at the Future of News conference, in London last month, were more skeptical.
“Isn’t this just a vox pop by another name?’ came the cry from the floor.
Au contraire, claimed Deborah Turness, editor of ITV News, this is active civic participation in news, feeding the news agenda.
But don’t editors then select the talking heads according to their editorial line? How is that any different from a vox pop if there isn’t any input to the editorial process from those contributing to debates?