The future of local TV - another way forward?

It’s been a significant few weeks for local news and journalism in the UK. In Grimsby, Estuary TV became the first of a new wave of local TV stations to go on air. It will broadcast to more than 350,000 households in East Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire. In the next two years more than 50 stations are due to follow - the biggest expansion of local television for a generation.

On the regional press front, major changes are afoot. David Montgomery, the chief executive of Local World has outlined his radical vision on the future of local newspapers. He sees a world where sub-editors and editors are a thing of the past and newspapers are put together by one person, or a handful of people skimming online content.

The importance of both shouldn’t be underestimated. They represent the latest attempts to revive a flagging industry. But while they’ve received a huge amount of attention and comment, other interesting experiments are taking place all over the country, to provide and develop a vibrant and sustainable local media.

At this point I should declare an interest. I have just helped to create Coventry TV. It is an online TV station based in and run by the journalism school at Coventry University.

A couple of years ago I wrote a chapter for an academic book entitled Can Universities Save Local Journalism? I called for universities to play a major role in preserving and reviving the sector.

My point was that journalism schools in the UK should take a lead from the United States. Schools and colleges there perform an intrinsic role in local media. Why isn’t that happening here?

You have an industry in need of content and a raft of journalism students in need of experience. It struck me that combining the two would create an elegant solution.

When I wrote the piece I was still working for the BBC, so could pontificate about the subject without doing anything about it. However, when I left the organisation earlier this year the opportunity arose to put my theory into practice.

I was approached by Coventry University to do some work with its students and the idea started to become reality. We created a partnership with Martin Head who has been running Stratford TV, a local online TV service for Stratford-upon-Avon, for more than a year. We used the template from his website and Coventry TV was born.

The university built a specific module for the project - now a core part of the third-year students’ course. They find the stories and do all the filming, editing and reporting.

But this is not an exercise to build another student website. This site is designed to play a major role in the future of local news and programming in Coventry. We have a tremendous amount of freedom in the news and events we report on, and the way we cover them. The very latest technology means we can be live at breaking news, sporting and entertainment events.

We live-streamed a performance of One Night in November from the Belgrade theatre - a play about the Blitz in Coventry in 1940. It was viewed online by thousands of people, and we had comments from Dresden, Gdansk and Australia.

This was a story from Coventry in Coventry about Coventry, but it had global interest. Local news is no longer just about serving a local audience. It’s about providing news and information on an area that’s of interest to anyone, anywhere.

We are not trying to create a more local version of the regional news programmes that already exist. This is a new kind of local video for a new audience. One of the huge advantages we have is that we are not tied to broadcasting at a specific time to a specific geographic audience. We can go live as and when we want to.

That said, public interest journalism is a big part of what we do. We’ll offer comprehensive coverage of next year’s council and European elections. Sport and entertainment are equally important, so we have a team dedicated to reporting on Coventry City Football Club and Coventry Blaze ice hockey club.

We make sure all of the journalism meets the highest editorial standards. Everything is checked and seen by at least two experienced editors before it makes it on to the website. At the moment this is me, Martin Head or Rachel Mathews, the course director for journalism.

We recognise that undergraduate students simply don’t have the same experience as professional journalists. We spend a great deal of time working with them as they go through all the stages of reporting: from research and planning to publication.

It is essential to have this level of quality control. Not everything will make it on to the site. But we will all learn a great deal from going through this process.

Social media provides the opportunity to speak to our audience and report the latest news. We launched our Facebook page and Twitter account @yourcoventrytv weeks before the website was live.

But if it remains a local news site that is supported and bankrolled by a university I don’t think we will be able to call it a success. To provide something of real value to the future of local journalism it needs to have a proper business model.

We are working with all parts of the university to make this happen, drawing on the expertise of as many people as we can - whether that be business and marketing departments or computer scientists designing the latest mobile and tablet apps.

There’s a long way to go with the project. But if we can build a local TV news service for Coventry that can pay for itself and create employment it will be a valuable contribution to the future of local media in the UK.

This is an edited version of an article first published by Hayward Black Media.

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