R2OK!

iwarburton · Joined: 08 Dec 2006 Posts: 2133 Location: Northumberland

I don't know the rights and wrongs of Ofcom's decision to axe swathes of jobs from ITV Regional News.

What I do know is that a good friend of mine works for Tyne Tees News and has a wife, two children and a mortgage.

As it happens he's working away at present, so I don't know whether or not he'll be affected.

But he and his family are much in my thoughts right now.

Ian.

Toggy · Joined: 18 Aug 2008 Posts: 1239

Sorry to hear that, I hope all will be OK.

Ian Robinson · Posted: Tue Sep 30, 2008 9:19 pm Post subject:

It's not quite Ofcom's decision to axe loads of jobs, but they are shamefully responsible. They should stand up to ITV instead of giving in to every request the network makes so they can make more money.

RockitRon · Joined: 07 Dec 2006 Posts: 7646

The same thing has happened with commercial television as has happened with Independent Local Radio. In the 50s ITV was licensed on a regional basis, to 14 different companies with a regional remit to provide local news and some local programming. Today we have just four companies (ITV, Scottish, Ulster and Channel), truly local news has been cut to one half hour each evening Mon-Fri (we now get Birmingham's local news at all other times of the day) and local programming half an hour at Sunday tea-time.

They want to reduce this still further. Well, so long as the BBC are able to maintain their commitment to local news programming out of the license fee I suppose, in all honesty and reality, that's fair enough, but is no comfort to the hundreds of staff (additional to those who have already gone) whose jobs are now in jeopardy.
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Ron