London Live

I don't think it would cost much to adopt that BFM if everything is automated and they just loop the news content they're producing anyway.

The local TV deal with the BBC would probably allow them to use BBC content too.

I simply love this argument that London is too big to cover. Simply delicious. "People over here arent interested whats happening over there". Amazing. Do go on.

You may understand if you lived in London. It's a unique market. London Live, Channel One etc have tried and failed with this. Viewers are used to scheduled bulletins on the BBC and ITV which is more than enough than long winded US style local bulletins.

London is a very difficult market to explain to someone who doesn't live here. It's New York, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles rolled into one in lots of ways. It's one the major centre of UK business, the centre of government, the centre of our entertainment and cultural industries. And above all it is not a single city - it's an evolution of lots of small villages that have run into each other.

it isn't that it's too big to cover - it's that it's that the big stories are covered so heavily by the national network news, and then the BBC and ITV regional news, that what's left over to cover by local TV is so parochially local, it has very little overall interest to most of the people watching...

Viewers in Ealing probably have very little interest in the goings on in Tower Hamlets etc... I live here - I know what I want to see on my TV in news terms...

Channel One was in a totally different time, anyone who claims London is somehow different to Paris or New York is simply wrong.

An easy to run news and info service would have its place and be watched everywhere if they got it right.

I'm going to agree to disagree with you here Jon. You might as well say Dublin could have a city wide news channel, despite not having the market to support it.

LBC London News barely survives by only operating a part-time day rolling news service and that's only due to having Global and the LBC speech brand supporting it.

Nobody watches London Live with it's sub-standard mix of repeats and low budget news, so who is going to watch a local news tv channel? Pure fantasy.

The BBC and ITV do their best with what they have, which would otherwise be sub-standard That's TV style 'journalism' about niche local events that don't make good television.

London doesn't do provincial either. Social media and hyperlocal websites are more than enough for me to find out what's happening locally without the need for a news bulletin to tell me what's happening down the road.

Governance is very different in London too - NYC and Paris have strong city government so many decisions made at a central level will affect everyone; London's mayoralty is relatively weak (powers centre around policing, transport and spatial planning) and lots more power resides with 32 boroughs (and the City Corporation, which runs the square mile financial district) - that decision made in Ealing simply won't be of any interest to someone whose bills go to Tower Hamlets. For example, you couldn't even do a feature on how the bins are collected because recycling's done 33 different ways in London compared with one way in New York City. (And as an aside, those boroughs in themselves are often poorly covered in their own communities, as has tragically been highlighted by the Grenfell Tower disaster: https://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2017/jun/25/grenfell-reflects-the-accountability-vacuum-left-by-crumbling-local-press)

Similarly there's the multitude of NHS bodies which operate at a local level rather than at an easily-visible, strategic level. For transport stories, suburban rail is run by (roughly) 10 different operators with their slice of London, which sit apart from the mayor's transport agency. It's obviously not impossible to cover, but it makes stories which come from official bodies a much harder sell (and partly explains why some of the BBC/ITV broadcast coverage can sometimes be a bit limp, as the reporters don't necessarily have deep contacts at 32 different boroughs).

This is where print media and hyperlocal websites still have the advantage over broadcast media. They have contacts within the London boroughs.

I doubt the BBC, ITV or London Live which is based in Kensington had those contacts at Kensington & Chelsea Council before the Grenfell Tower disaster. The only local authority which got regular coverage on BBC London for example is Westminster which covers an area from the West End to inner parts of NW and W London.

Sounds like a weak or inadequate local broadcast media operation if thats the case.

I don't know, but surely if it were such a great oppprtunity, wouldn't somebody (perhaps even BFM) launch a service in London?

I guess Ted Turner was wrong. Oh well.