Good Morning Britain to return, but is it the change needed?

Earlier this week, we had perhaps the worst kept secret in broadcasting revealed to be true.  Good Morning Britain was indeed to return to ITV, although this time the hosts would be Susannah Reid, joining from BBC Breakfast; Ben Sheppard, former GMTV host; Charlotte Hawkins, joining from Sky News; and Sean Fletcher, joining from Sky Sports News and previously with BBC News Channel.

But this is not the first time ITV has changed the name of their breakfast programme.  In fact, Daybreak came about as a result of perceived problems with GMTV. 

But is another change of name and personnel what is required, or is it a case of moving the deckchairs on the Titanic?

In my analysis of Daybreak, and it's competition, BBC Breakfast, I noticed that whilst Breakfast looks like it comes from a BBC News studio, the look of Daybreak contrasts quite wildly with ITV News, despite having ITV News branded bulletins as part of Daybreak.  If anything, ITV needs to make it more like ITV News.  At the very least, the news bulletins every half hour should come from the ITV News virtual studio, albeit the colour scheme of the studio should reflect the Good Morning Britain look, to distinguish it from other ITV News bulletins, in the same way that ITV News at Ten does from the other bulletins.  

Editorially, the ITV News agenda has improved massively since the days of the 1999-2004 editorial debacle that was the excessively tabloid ITV News, which had replaced ITN News, even though the new look ITV News was still produced by ITN.  But the morning agenda, which has been carried through GMTV and Daybreak, hasn't caught up quite.  At times, it does catch up, and at other times, it seems to go backwards to being more tabloid again.  GMB needs to be popular, not tabloid.  There is a distinct difference, and it needs to be explained.

Tabloid is what you see in the red-tops, over-hyped, editorialised, and generally overdoing everything kind of news.  Another form of tabloid agenda is one that has been popularised by some local US TV stations, 'If It Bleeds, It Leads'. That's tabloid.  Shock value over News Value.

Popular News, as I call it, is the kind of news that actually isn't overhyped, isn't sensationalised, and isn't necessarily showbiz-based, but it is based on what people actually need to know.  It includes news about the economy and consumer related items, essential news about politics, mostly about real issues rather than the endless debates about Europe in the Westminster bubble; and it would also include some news about crime, although not in the hyper-sensentionalised 'if it bleeds, it leads' way that tabloid news does.

If ITV wants Good Morning Britain to be more successful than Daybreak, then it needs to totally embrace the current ITV News agenda, which is more like what I call 'Popular News'.  

But more than that, it needs to avoid the trap of going for competitions through the morning. Competitions are not required at that time of the morning, because most people who have the TV on at that time of day, can't stop to think about what the answer is, so don't bother with them.  Radio is learning this, and slowly moving away from competitions during their breakfast shows.

More than that though, GMB needs to cover things like Sport, which seems to get very little coverage currently on Daybreak.  Having Sean Fletcher as part of the team seems to indicate they are taking that angle more seriously.  Another angle that needs more coverage in the mornings is regional news.  6 minutes of regional updates across 3 bulletins, one per hour, isn't enough, when your competition is running 18 minutes of regional updates across 6 bulletins, twice an hour.  The contrast is stark, very stark.  If anything, even just a doubling of the number of updates, making theirs twice an hour, would be an improvement, but more than that, they do need to make their updates longer, and do something with them that makes them not just a copy of what the BBC does, but distinctive.

Some showbiz news will be a part of the programme, especially around the time of the awards ceremonies, like The Oscars.   But overdoing showbiz news is not a good thing, especially in the mornings.  ITV News has a lot of resources across the country, and using those resources wisely for the right stories, is going to be part of making GMB a success.

If they make a few changes of substance alongside the returning name and the new presenters, then it could help turn ITV's fortunes around.  If not, then it will simply be moving the deckchairs on the sinking ship.  Only time will tell us, if that is what happens.

CNNI Weekends: Needs Improvement

CNN International is quite frankly one of the better news channels out there.  But it is a commercial operation and thusly, needs to make a profit. 

But it has to be said that when CNNI airs on Freeview at the weekend, the only live programmes are 2 editions of World Report at 7pm UK 7 11pm UK, and World Sport at 10.30pm UK.  That’s just 1.5 hours of live programming out of 5 hours.  There’s really not enough live news, especially when you consider that France 24 has 10 minute news bulletins every 30 minutes, all the time, even weekends.

Perhaps the best way for CNN to maximise the programming is to share with CNN Domestic.  Far from ideal, but perhaps a better solution than the over-reliance on taped programming that seems to be the case now.

NaVloPoMo 2009 – Day 1

The first video for National Vlog Posting Month, and again, a different style of video from what you're used to from me.  You might even say it was... golden!

Editorialising The News

I have a confession to make. I would call myself something of a news junkie. I regularly have one of the 24 hour news channels on in the background, and I download lots of news podcasts from different broadcasters all over the world. The reason for this is simple: it gives me a wide variety of different perspectives on the news, and on how the media itself reports the news.

But I do have another motive for my possible over-consumption of news programming. It gives me a better chance to separate the facts of a news item from any unintentional or deliberate bias that might be injected into a story, and also allows me to eliminate the ‘tabloid’ hype and clichés that are used to ‘sell’ you the story. It gives me a purer, more factual perspective on the news, and it has shown up a trend that started in newspapers, but is showing through in broadcasting and the new media.

I call it “Politicising” or “Editorialising” the story. Like so many trends, this one seemed to start in the United States a number of years ago, quite probably around the time when the media regulator there, the Federal Communications Commission, decided to do away with an ‘equal time’ rule, which allowed aggrieved parties equal time to respond. This rule was done away with in 1985, during the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan.

Now let me get one thing straight. You had conservative talk show hosts prior to 1985, and they did not give equal time to all issues, but there was far less difference between perspectives than there is now. But in 1994, the political world in the USA was turned upside down by the election of a Republican Congress, under the political leadership of House Speaker Newt Gingrinch Gingrich, Majority Leader Dick Armey and Majority Whip Tom Delay aka “The Hammer”.

In 1995, this triumvirate of Republican leaders managed to get not only Conservative radio talk show hosts, but Conservative newspaper editors to all speak with one voice rather than many voices, in opposition to the Democratic President, Bill Clinton. Clinton was incredibly popular with both Democrats and Independents, but Republicans hated him, with a greater vengeance than had ever been seen against any Democrat before.

It was around this time that the Republican message about the so-called ‘Liberal Media’ first became really widely known, and even slightly considered to be even possibly accurate. In 1996, Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News Channel to be a conservative news network, as opposed to CNN, which got labelled the Clinton News Network by some conservatives. It was the first time that the news itself was becoming well and truly politicised in the broadcast medium.

Until this time, in broadcast news at least, the news was the news and that was it. You may have had bulletins created for a younger audience for example, but targeting the news with a particular political bias was regarded as an absolute no-no. However, conservatives felt that the mainstream media, or as conservative radio talk show host Rush "Limburger" Limbaugh calls them, the ‘drive-by media’, were not being critical enough of the Clinton administration, hence the idea that the mainstream media had a liberal bias. Of course, few anticipated the story that was going to engulf the news media in 1998.

Before news of the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, Republicans had been so desperate to pin anything on Bill Clinton, that they were practically begging the media, especially Fox News, to throw them even a small bone to gnaw on. But when the story broke in January 1998, both Republicans and the media realised that they hadn’t been given a small bone to gnaw on, but a huge, meaty, 8 course feast to gorge on - and gorge on it they did!

For over a year, the media became more and more divided over the Lewinsky scandal, and whilst Republicans did not get the impeachment that they wanted, the real result of this effort came in 2000, with the most politically divisive election that there had ever been between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W Bush. It ended in the ‘hanging chads’ debacle in Florida, and a win for George W Bush, a win that Fox News had declared on the night, only to have to retract it later the same night.

What had really been happening was that the conservative media had been moving further and further away from the rest of the media. But that seemed to be over, on September 11th 2001.

Almost every media outlet around the world was united in shock and outrage at the deliberate crashing of two planes into the World Trade Center in New York City. This single act managed to do what had hitherto seemed impossible, uniting the conservative and mainstream media in the US. For about 2 years, these two arms of the media would act as one.

However, a new media form, which had been coming together since 1994, would be partially responsible for the re-separation of the conservative and mainstream media: the weblog, aka blog. Bloggers had been around for quite a few years, but in 2002, this new internet media format, which had been used for years as a rebroadcast, and latterly a new broadcast medium, suddenly started to make itself widely known on both the US and world stage.

This new medium has become as politically divided as the rest of the media, and in some ways is still finding its feet. Some proposals to regulate the format, such as a Blogger’s Code Of Conduct, have been regarded by some political bloggers as tantamount to censorship.

Blogging grew from being a text-only medium, to an audio and then video medium. Blogs can be exclusively text, exclusively audio, exclusively video, or any combination of all three. Some bloggers have crossed over into other media, such as Michelle Malkin and Ariana Huffington. But there are many more out there for whom the blog is perhaps as close to fame as they will ever come.

With blogs being liberal, conservative, and all political points in-between, we have seen the development of true ‘liberal media’. Liberal Blogs now sit alongside the liberal talk radio network Air America Radio and Sirius Left on sateliite radio and liberal newspapers as being the real ‘liberal media’. Conservative media is representated by conservative newspapers and blogs, conservative talk radio, and of course, the ever-controversial Fox News Channel.

The rest of the news media, mainly radio news and most TV news, including the public /public-service media, try to maintain going down the political centre, even if they cannot claim to be unbiased. But of course, the politically biased dislike any media that do not agree with them.

There are a number of blogs that attack the public media for not being biased in their direction. Most are politically conservative, but one, surprisingly perhaps, is Liberal.

Today, through ‘user-generated content’, such as blogs, podcasts, public access TV channels, and Current TV, there are millions of voices out there. And while some have suggested that this would lead to democratization of the media, it could be argued instead that something like the opposite is happening - something that none of us ever dared imagine. We are seeing the news media as a whole, and individual news stories, used as political pawns, rather than as something that we use to base solutions on. This process of politicisation is only going to get worse, until the media get their act together en masse, stop trying to promote political viewpoints, and go back to doing what they do best: just reporting the facts and getting to ‘the truth’.

Regional Rollercoaster

Out of all the channels that currently exist, only 3 channels provide a terrestrial regional service to the English regions, BBC-1, BBC-2 and ITV. Every other service available is national, pan-European or even international in focus.

So why are there so few regional services? The short answer is money. To provide a basic regional service, for instance to the West, South, East, Midlands, North, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, you have to find eight new locations for studios. To run the entire service from your broadcast headquarters, at least eight new transmission suites need to be built and suddenly we're talking hundreds of millions of pounds. Currently only Sky could even consider something like that.

The BBC offer a 14-region terrestrial service, covering the South West, West, South, South East, East, East Midlands, West Midlands, North West, North, North East and Cumbria, Channel Islands, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, and are in the process of carving a 15th region out of the South East for London. A comprehensive service like this is the most expensive route to take, with the pick of the regional bunch, ITV, having 27 regional divisions operated by 15 licensees in 14 regions. A 27-region service requires 27 transmission suites, at a time where ITV tries to consolidate into a single company.

Even without consolidation, regional output has already suffered. The BBC used to produce some great regional feature programming, including "Floyd on Food" and "Secret Nature", both from the Southwest. The BBC picked up these shows nationally as well as many other programmes from the regions. The three main regional production centres for the network, Bristol, Birmingham and Manchester, specialise in certain types of productions. The only things the individual regions produce are local news, weekly topical news documentaries and a regional parliamentary programme. All are news based with no feature-based material at all - no fun stuff.

You might have expected ITV to pick up the slack here but the picture is similarly bleak. For instance, Westward and TSW had been great providers of regional programming, some of it being shown on the network. Successor company Westcountry, however, have produced only news and factual programming, with a tiny amount of entertainment-related material produced by local independents. Even after Carlton rebranded Westcountry, things did not really improved. Although the "Carlton Production" slide is seen a lot, the great majority of these productions are from London and the Midlands.

So regional programming has already suffered on television, and it looks like it will continue to suffer under a single ITV company coupled with light-touch regulation. Because being regional eats up money and profits, expect to see even less in the future.