Nottingham’s local TV station Notts TV will close in November after more than a decade on air unless the licence is taken over.
Nottingham Trent University, which owns and subsidises Notts TV, has decided that running the channel no longer benefits its students enough to warrant the investment.
The university said the numbers of students taking placements at Notts TV in return for its funding are now “too small” and it will not renew the licence when it ends in November.
Notts TV’s only other funding comes from local advertising and sponsorship and the BBC’s local democracy reporting scheme.
Notts TV was the fourth local TV launch in 2014 under a policy spearheaded by then-culture secretary Jeremy Hunt.
It is available on Freeview, BT and Virgin Media and in 2022 claimed to have 200,000 viewers a month.
The channel puts out a daily hour-long live local news programme plus weekend bulletins, discussion programmes and live broadcasts from major local events.
A spokesperson for Nottingham Trent University said: “After more than ten years of bringing local news to the city and county, Nottingham Trent University (NTU) will not be seeking to renew its licence from Ofcom to run Notts TV after November 2025 when the current licence expires.
“Notts TV is an independent broadcaster, entirely owned and mostly funded by Nottingham Trent University. In November 2025 Notts TV’s broadcasting licence will be up for renewal. This has provided NTU with an opportunity to consider if Notts TV delivers sufficient benefit to its students at a time when all organisations in and around the public sector are operating with constrained budgets.
“Whilst students who have had placements with Notts TV have gained significant real work experience, the numbers involved have been too small to warrant continued investment.
“NTU hopes that other organisations will step forward to submit proposals to Ofcom to continue focused local broadcasting and pick up the baton that NTU has been holding aloft since May 2014.
“In the meantime, it is NTU’s intention that Notts TV will continue to broadcast for the duration of its remaining licence period at which point it will close down.”
Responding to a Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sports Committee enquiry into the sustainability of local journalism in 2022, Notts TV channel manager Chris Breese called for the Government to ensure that local TV was given certainty.
“At present, there are no provisions in statute for new Ofcom Local TV licences when the current ones expire. This is now creating damaging business uncertainty for our channel and the network as a whole. News plurality is at serious risk in many cities.”
Ofcom subsequently said licence holders would be allowed to extend until November 2026 and then renewed until December 2034 if they chose to do so. The deadline for asking for this licence extension is 31 March.
Of the setup with NTU, Breese said in the same written response: “One of the challenges for journalism is recruitment of quality staff, and this arrangement is vital for sustaining an experienced workforce in the industry at large.”
Breese wrote that Notts TV is evidence that a mixed funding model is required: “Our structure confirms that commercial revenues alone cannot support a high-quality service even in sizeable cities.”
He called for other universities to develop similar models “to help sustain the news service and offer much needed training”.
Notts TV currently holds a contract to employ three local democracy reporters funded by the BBC, with their journalism available for use for free by other local news outlets such as Reach’s Nottinghamshire Live. Reach itself holds the contracts to employ 75 LDRs across the UK. Notts TV became the first local TV channel to hold an LDR contract in 2021.
Breese called on the Government to ensure the BBC commits to future finding of the LDR scheme, calling it a “vital pillar of the channel’s strategy to deliver a multimedia, professional service”, and said the service should also expand into coverage of other “underreported” areas like criminal courts and inquests.
Breese also argued that application processes for public funding and for subsidies from social media companies “appear press-biased” disadvantaging local TV.
Notts TV owes NTU £765,000 as a creditor according to its latest Companies House accounts for the year to 31 July 2023. The channel made revenue of £445,336, up 3% on the year before. It made a loss of £13,049 compared to a profit of £1,345 in 2022.
Notts TV had nine employees on average in the year to July 2023. Breese had reported that the daily news programme was run by four full-time journalists.
Interim chairman of Notts TV Mike Sassi said: “We’re incredibly proud of everything Notts TV has achieved over the last decade. We’ve broadcast more than 2,500 live programmes featuring countless local stories, welcomed more than 5,000 Nottinghamshire people into the studio as guests, and our reporters have won national awards for their journalism.
“We’ve also helped to launch hundreds of careers in media across Britain and beyond with our industry training, and held power to account by hosting the BBC Local Democracy Reporting Service.
“We look forward to bringing you the best of what we do over the next few months, and Notts TV would like to thank everyone who has supported us over the years.”
The news comes less than a month after the closure of London Live, which had been the third such channel to open in 2014, as its licence was bought by David Montgomery’s Local TV Ltd. Montgomery’s Local TV Ltd already owned eight channels in Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Leeds, Liverpool, North Wales, Teesside and Tyne and Wear.
In a closing missive, London Live’s deputy head of news and presenter James Dickman described local news reporting as being on “life support” and said “small stories can remind us perhaps more acutely than things only visible in a bigger picture of what it is to be human and what it is to believe in something bigger than yourself – something needed now more than ever in such difficult times”.
Ben Cooper, chair of the Nottingham branch of the National Union of Journalists, said the group is “deeply concerned” by the Notts TV closure.
“Notts TV performs a vital democratic function, holding local government and other public bodies in Nottinghamshire to account,” he said. “It scrutinises local politicians, on behalf of the people they are meant to represent and serve. It gives a voice to the voiceless.
“It is also an invaluable centre of learning, training, and work experience for those members of the next generation of journalists drawn to Nottingham by the chance of gaining real experience in a professional broadcast environment.
“When a city loses an important media outlet dedicated to fighting for local people, everybody loses out. The level of scrutiny on local government falls, court cases go unreported, matters of local concern and interest never reach the public’s attention, and local campaigns – such as the current fight for the victims of the NUH maternity scandal – get lost in the shadows.”
Cooper said the NUJ plans to discuss the closure internally and with NTU. “We are concerned both by the significant shrinkage in local journalism that will be an inevitable consequence of their decision, and by the sharp drop off in the quality and quantity of training and work experience opportunities future NTU journalism students will have access to.
“We are also concerned about the consequences of the closure of Notts TV for the future of the LDR scheme. The strength of the LDR scheme is based on having a healthy plurality of local media outlets available to deliver this important democratic service.
“None of these things is good for Nottingham, nor for the future of journalism.”
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