A long time ago, I wrote the plan to run ITV News in Lon­don (repla­cing LNN), mod­elled on the oper­at­ing struc­ture for Five News. It involved reformat­ting shows and cut­ting staff­ing to the bare min­imum required to get on air.

Noth­ing wrong with that. It was a more effi­cient use of resources.

But it wasn’t really designed to involve the pro­cess you and I would know as journ­al­ism. It was inten­ded to pro­duce a happy sim­u­la­tion of a tele­vi­sion news broad­cast to a stand­ard adequate enough to sat­isfy regulators.

Five News shared resources — as did the new ITV Lon­don when it star­ted — with the rest of ITN. The biggest and most expens­ive of these resources were the satel­lite trucks and need­less to say, the deploy­ment of said trucks went to the people pay­ing the most money — ITV’s national news and Chan­nel 4 News.

The edit­or­ial decision-making pro­cess played second-fiddle to the nego­ti­ation and horse-trading around satel­lite dishes, tech­ni­cians’ over­time and work­ing hours without which stor­ies and guests (even cheaper!) couldn’t make it on air.

Now I love tele­vi­sion news, but it’s an impres­sion­istic not an inform­at­ive medium. Its poetry is images not ad-libbed stu­dio con­ver­sa­tions. ITV’s regional news pro­grammes — pro­duced from stu­dio hubs far removed from the polit­ic­ally and geo­graph­ic­ally diverse areas they serve, and man­u­fac­tured to a pro­cess I had a hand in shap­ing — have, by force of that pro­cess, become hybrid forms of fac­tual entertainment.

And there’s noth­ing wrong with that either. But in its cur­rent ema­ci­ated form ITV regional news is not really worth sav­ing as an instru­ment of ‘pub­lic ser­vice’ news inform­a­tion. So why have the BBC and ITV signed a memor­andum of under­stand­ing to share resources?

Well, the BBC is des­per­ate to use part­ner­ship as a line of defence against the pred­a­tions of Chan­nel 4 and oth­ers who might ques­tion the casu­istry that sees its pop­u­list and enter­tain­ing main­stream TV pro­grammes labelled as ‘pub­lic ser­vice’. Part­ner­ship pro­pos­als beats enforced budget cuts. The BBC shows will­ing. Refusal to part­ner looks churlish.

But in the case of ITV’s regional news, part­ner­ship simply sus­tains some­thing that neither the mar­ket, nor the term ‘pub­lic ser­vice’ really support.

One BBC regional news head lamen­ted to me recently that no one covered court cases in his area — not the local papers, not ITV, not the agen­cies — no one. He also poin­ted out that he could have used his mul­ti­me­dia news­room to pro­duce hyper­local sites, and even news­pa­per copy — but he wasn’t allowed to, because the local news­pa­per lobby had weighed in to point out that he would drive them out of business.

It’s easy to feel sym­pathy for both sides. The com­mer­cial local news media and the BBC regional journ­al­ists who just want to do a bet­ter job.

But they’re not really the issue.

The issue is big­ger and it affects all of us, not simply journ­al­ists. It’s about the col­lapse of plur­al­ity of media pro­vi­sion and how we adjust to that. Because plur­al­ity has collapsed.

And the BBC can’t take its place, and the part­ner­ships the BBC offers are simply life sup­port machines for local news com­pan­ies caught in a down­ward spiral of cost-cutting, audi­ence decline, and share price collapse.

Allow­ing the BBC in to hyper­local would have killed those com­pan­ies quicker. Part­ner­ship will ease their dying. Yet the ques­tion of how (or if ) we use pub­lic money to inform cit­izens about the gov­ernance and the good times in their loc­al­it­ies in a way that isn’t simply puff and spin goes unasked. And the polit­ical and pop­u­lar will to address it is almost entirely absent.

So expect part­ner­ships — or rather forced mar­riages — with all the hap­pi­ness asso­ci­ated with rela­tion­ships born of expediency…

[Thanks to Paul Brad­shaw for kick­ing me to write some­thing. More at the Online Journ­al­ism Blog.]