ITV turns off £45m news channel

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
Updated: 03:56 EST, 15 December 2005

AFTER five years and £45million, ITV is closing the news channel it hoped would rival Sky and the BBC.

The ITV News Channel is going off the air with the loss of up to 70 jobs. Despite having had only a fraction of the resources of its competitors, the channel often beat them to breaking stories and was widely admired for its journalism.

Its awards included the Royal Television Society's broadcast of the year for its coverage of the Beslan school siege and presenter of the year for Alastair Stewart.

ITV yesterday defended the decision to close the channel, saying it could no longer justify spending money on a service that was 'little loved by viewers'. It will go off air by the end of January.

Over the last year, the ITV News Channel was watched by an average of 2.4m viewers a week, compared to 4.6m for Sky News and 5.1m for BBC News 24.

ITV spent about £3m a year - but it incurred further losses of around £30m during the channel's lifetime.

The broadcaster promised that the bulk of the money saved would be ploughed into its main bulletins - with a new bureau in China and more journalists covering the North of England and Scotland. There would also be new bulletins on its digital channels, ITV2 and ITV3, it said.

But critics claimed this was 'windowdressing'. Newsreader John Suchet, one of the team that launched the News Channel, said: 'ITV's heart was never in it.'

Suchet, 61, spent 32 years working at ITN - the company which makes the ITV news bulletins. 'The tragedy of ITN is the channel it's on - ITV,' he said. 'They are more interested in making Celebrity Survivor and The X Factor.'