ITV News

Eric Kallgren    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 5:15pm on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

The survival of British TV news supplier ITN is in doubt, Maggie Brown and James Robinson reported in The Guardian newspaper on June 1, 2009:

"Last week, ITN revealed that it has a £39.9m pension black hole that it may struggle to fill, forcing directors to concede there is "a material uncertainty [over] its ability to continue as a going concern". It also emerged that the deficit had torpedoed talks with the picture agency Getty Images, which had expressed interest in taking a majority share in ITN. It remains unclear what role ITN will play in a broadcasting industry set to be redrawn after Lord Carter's Digital Britain report is published on 16 June.

ITN was created at the same time as ITV in 1955 to provide the new commercial broadcaster with authoritative independent news. It quickly established itself as a counterweight to the staid and stuffy BBC. Its journalists, many of them ex-BBC, became household names, developing a flair for uncovering the human angles behind the biggest stories.

Given ITN's rich heritage - it has also produced the cerebral Channel 4 News since 1982 - insiders are frustrated that its role as an alternative news provider to the BBC has been largely overlooked in the run-up to Carter's landmark report.

The debate has instead been dominated by regulatory hand-wringing over saving C4 and securing ITV's future as a major commercial broadcaster. Protecting regional news, which ITV says it can no longer afford to fund, has also emerged as a political priority, but ITN has rarely been mooted as a potential solution to that problem, which is surprising given its historic links with ITV's regional network."

The full story:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jun/01/itv-channel4