The return of News At Ten

The old wis­dom would have been that the com­ing News At Ten battle is between two types of tele­vi­sion news. One side, the Beeb, driven by the need to inform. At its best patri­cian and pro­voc­at­ive. At its worst dull. The other side, ITN, driven by the need to tell stor­ies, at its best emo­tion­ally enga­ging, at its worst crass. And so let battle commence.

Except that time has mixed it all up. On the BBC side is former ITN golden boy Craig Oliver, who knows News At Ten so well he rein­ven­ted it for BBC1. On ITV’s, Alex Chand­ler, who has worked his way up through the ITV News ranks, and who has spent more time at ITN when News At Ten was off air than when it was on.

The real battle to cre­ate two news pro­grammes is not between the edit­ors but between two com­pletely dif­fer­ent meth­ods of pro­du­cing the news on television.

Take the BBC. Its 10pm news has a rel­at­ively mod­est budget, but it draws on the resources of the entire cor­por­a­tion – the world’s biggest broad­cast news­gath­er­ing out­fit – to fill half an hour.

The editor can order from long menus of home or for­eign news filtered and pre­pared by exper­i­enced teams. It’s the edit­or­ial equi­val­ent of din­ing at a hotel buf­fet, where suc­cess is meas­ured not by how beau­ti­fully the food is presen­ted on the plate, but by the quant­ity which has been stacked upon it.

So the job of the editor is not fill a run­ning order from those lists, but to act upon them and to shape the stor­ies in con­ver­sa­tions with report­ers. The ten­sion is between the incre­mental changes in a story and the need for a pro­gramme to tell it coher­ently. Without that ten­sion, an algorithm could con­struct a run­ning order.

And this is where the sheer size of the BBC com­plic­ates the job. The very range of stor­ies it can cover — the scale of its report­ing oper­a­tion — means that the 10pm is just one of a num­ber of outlets.

The uni­form “BBC-ness” of the mater­ial com­ing into a pro­gramme can over­whelm any indi­vidual char­ac­ter the bul­letin might aspire to. Craig Oliver has sharpened up the 10 no end but at the BBC, his is one edit­or­ial voice among many import­ant voices.

The BBC has strength in depth. You can rely on the play­ers to per­form. But where you can’t, chan­ging them is dif­fi­cult. Report­ers report on dif­fer­ent lines to dif­fer­ent managers.

The con­trast at ITN couldn’t be greater. News At Ten was the oper­a­tional focus of a bespoke news­gath­er­ing machine. Its report­ers were a family.

There were so few of them that they had to get on air reg­u­larly. An editor would know their indi­vidual strengths and weak­nesses so well that assign­ments could almost be tailored to them.

The small­ness meant that many of the con­ver­sa­tions were unne­ces­sary. The machine worked slickly and quickly. Report­ers knew what was expec­ted of them. When they failed to meet expect­a­tions, retri­bu­tion was swift.

And unlike the BBC where par­al­lel teams might col­lide, ITN report­ers knew that if they didn’t get the story, no one else would.

So how will the new News At Ten line up? On a good night the pro­gramme will be able to line up the likes of Bill Neely, Penny Mar­shall, Tom Bradby, Julian Manyon, Jon Irvine, Keir Sim­mons and half a dozen more besides.

The names are impress­ive, but they are a thin blue line. Report­ers have to make air. Fewer stor­ies can afford to fall down. If a big story fails to make the grade at the Beeb there are many oth­ers wait­ing in line to take its place.

The money that ITN gets to make the national and inter­na­tional news is just £30 mil­lion, and that cash has to fund other bul­let­ins too.

Whilst cash can still be found for presenter salar­ies, the budget for news­gath­er­ing stretches ever tighter. To bal­ance the books the tap will have to be turned off some weeks. View­ers don’t get told. No graphic appears to say that this week the news is run­ning on empty.

For­eign news suf­fers most. Every pound spent has to be seen on air. No bad thing, ITV bosses might say, and few would argue that ITN is not adept at parsi­mony. Fewer still would argue that parsi­mony has given way simply to poverty.

So, for Patrick O’Brian fans, the con­test shapes up as an under­manned sloop against an unwieldy ship of the line.

But to look at the battle purely in journ­al­istic terms is to miss the point. This is not an encounter the audi­ence is cry­ing out for. It watched News At Ten come and go with barely a mur­mur. Its mod­ern incarn­a­tion is a far cry from the pro­gramme that sat in the top ten and com­manded a reg­u­lar audi­ence of 12 mil­lion five nights a week in the late 1960s.

So will this be tele­vi­sion news’ mel­an­choly, long, with­draw­ing roar? Let’s hope that amid the cuts, there’s still some thrust.

[My column from Press Gaz­ette]

Tagged as: ITN, ITV News, News At Ten