“The tal­en­ted and ded­ic­ated Sky News Ire­land team has pro­duced a high qual­ity product, some out­stand­ing journ­al­ism and attrac­ted a loyal audi­ence.” [DS]

Someone from Sky net­work might say exactly the same thing when they shut down Sky News. It is a highly pro­fes­sional oper­a­tion and has pro­duced some excel­lent journ­al­ism, but it has failed to find an audi­ence. Invest­ment needs to be refocused.

Sky News Ire­land, like Sky News, was never an invest­ment that was going to gen­er­ate a return.

Things are very dif­fer­ent in the United States where CNN is still the most prof­it­able of the cable news chan­nels. Fox News is snap­ping hard at its heels. One of Fox’s ongo­ing prob­lems has been that it was locked into long-term cable agree­ments at very low prices when it star­ted. Those agree­ments are now com­ing to an end, and Fox is scal­ing its fees up three and fourfold. With increased advert­ising rev­en­ues com­ing in, that should spell prof­it­ab­il­ity for Fox – just as the tide of pub­lic sym­pathy turns against its edit­or­ial cheer­lead­ing. Bear in mind though, that Fox’s very con­sid­er­able start-up costs have prob­ably yet to be recouped.

What’s good for Fox is bad news for CNN. CNN got to charge a premium ten years ago on its licence fees, as the only real show in town. Still CNN might just drop a slot – it won’t stop mak­ing money.

This might once have been the story for Sky News. When it began, it was alone in a field of one. But then the BBC intro­duced a news chan­nel that meant Sky News couldn’t really charge for car­riage. Even ITN, one of the most cost-effective news­gath­er­ing oper­a­tions any­where in the world, dis­covered that up against the BBC they couldn’t make the num­bers work. Their news chan­nel suc­cumbed too.

Reduced com­pet­i­tion in 24-hour news is the mar­ket impact of BBC inter­ven­tion. Review­ing the cov­er­age of 7/7 recently, I was reminded how well both Sky News and the ITV news chan­nel per­formed that day. Only the polit­ics of shut­ting their chan­nel down pre­ven­ted ITN from enter­ing the cov­er­age for awards.

When or if Sky decides that the rev­enue game is lost in 24-hour news, will we get the same absence of pub­lic out­cry that fol­lowed ITV’s decision? If we accept the BBC’s charter renewal argu­ment that news is a pub­lic good, and we accept too that com­pet­i­tion is healthy then there’s a case for arguing that just as on good old-fashioned ter­restrial TV, news should be a require­ment – and it should be prop­erly funded.