Regional newspaper publishers Archant and Tindle have teamed up in a bid to secure a local TV licence in London, it emerged today.
Detailed bid documents published today reveal that the London TV bid is being underwritten by Archant and Tindle and that a third regional publisher, Trinity Mirror, is a partner. Former Trinity senior executive Richard Horwood is chief exec of the new company.
In its application to Ofcom, the group said that in partnership with London’s local newspapers ‘LondonTV will provide a new voice for London”.
‘With our own dedicated team of multi-skilled professional video journalists, we will have the support of the many local newspaper newsrooms around the capital,’it added.
‘We’re not proposing to put the local papers on TV, but we will draw on their huge pool of genuinely local news stories, sometimes for coverage of breaking news, and sometimes for in-depth local features leveraging the reporting done by the hundreds of journalists employed by Archant’s, Tindle’s and Trinity Mirror’s scores of local newspapers, magazines and websites reaching right across London.’
It insisted that the ‘main focus’of the station would be on ‘hard’London news, aided by ‘hundreds of journalists already working in Archant, Tindle and Trinity Mirror newsrooms across the capital, many of whom will be multimedia-trained”.
‘We will create daily debates in and about one of the world’s great Capitals. We’ll also put London’s news into context as international and national events break and reverberate around the Capital,’the company said in its application.
‘But this will not be lazy local spins on national and international stories masquerading as local news.
‘Rather we’ll offer Londoners a uniquely comprehensive one-stop news service, starting and finishing on their doorsteps in a way no other broadcaster or media consortium will have the focused resources or the expertise to match.”
Archant and Tindle each own 37.5 per cent of the company. The directors are chairman Clive Jones (ex-chairman of GMTV), Horwood, William Hattam (Archant non-executive representative) and Wendy Craig (Tindle non-executive representative).
Former ITV News editor-in-chief David Mannion is head of news for the channel.
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