[comtv-l] 10 Questions for Dave Rushton

[CMA-L]

Dave Rushton is the director of the Institute of Local Television. He
has been director since its inception in 1989 and lives in Edinburgh.
He was previously a producer/director of trades union programmes and
commissions from Channel 4.

1. What exactly is the Institute of Local Television - a charity, a
commercial entity, an academic institution, the foundation arm of a
large media organisation?

Founded in 1989 and formally incorporated as an 'Institute' in 1998,
the ILT is an independent, not-for-profit organisation working largely
in the academic and public sectors on local TV engineering and
development of public service TV through research, training,
conferences, exhibitions, festivals and production.

2. How did you get involved with the Institute? Was it from a
broadcasting background? Or a political one?

Both: programme-making for non-commercial organisations and for trades
unions in the 1970s and ‘80s.

The Institute was launched partly as a reaction to a seeming rightward
shift of Channel 4's programming strands (lunchtime City programming
in place of the Union World series). However, the strongest and most
positive influence was the sketch of future local and digital
distribution platforms, as laid out in the 1988 White Paper,
'Broadcasting in the '90s'.

The White Paper provided the foundation for the Institute's work, that
mostly can be found in over a hundred books, reports, responses to
Government and regulator consultations, in advisory papers requested
by Government departments in the UK and abroad and in draft amendments
to broadcasting Bills for the House of Lords.

3. What is your ultimate ambition for the Institute?

For the Institute to quietly fade away after local public service TV
has become universal.

4. What is your ultimate ambition for TV in Scotland?

That local public service TV becomes universal throughout Scotland.

5. Local TV sounds like a 'good thing', but will people actually tune
in? Surely the broadcast standards will be too low - because of a lack
of resources - to attract a big enough audience to then attract a
sustainable amount of advertising revenue.

Local TV needn’t only include local content, the ‘local’ emphasis
includes local control and accountability. For example, a local TV
channel might run national or international dial-up music requests for
70 per cent of its airtime but the bits in between - including local
music, arts, advertising, graphics, announcements and news - and the
schedule itself, in determining the selection of the 70 per cent
outside content, can reflect and even represent local interests.

Channel Six Dundee - a music video and local arts channel, which is no
longer operating - was the most-watched TV channel in Dundee and it
achieved this because it served as a telescope for an identified area
to draw in the world around, to bring in locally-wanted programming
from further afield as well making some of it from very close-by.

The production values and broadcast standards of local TV are the same
as other public service TV channels. A difference in cost can be
maintained because the means of production and ownership of
manufacture are far more varied and able to tap into a far broader
base of local experience and expertise.

In partnership with other local news and public media services, local
and some national advertising revenues can be consolidated through a
shared newspaper/radio/TV approach.

TV is still strongly favoured for access to news and current affairs
programmes and local TV is an unrequited advertising proposition for
local advertisers. Local TV as a public service will enhance the
delivery of a broad range of public and council services that can be
offered in commercial airtime on TV, echoed and reinforced via
broadband.

Locally-funded film and programme-making will receive better grant
support if these have secured a broadcast outlet on not-for profit TV,
especially when both content and transmission are partly funded
locally. Arts and culture programmes in particular can be shared
between local channels under common titling and graphics, so
reflecting communities of interest between local areas. The Art in
Scotland, the Book Show and Art Show series established a pattern for
shared use between Edinburgh Television and Lanarkshire TV [both also
not operating] plus Channel Six Dundee. Programmes for these series
continue to be made and are shared amongst local TV in Ireland.

'Community of interest' programmes can be made for specific
communities across the UK and where those communities are too small in
a particular location to support their own programming new magazine
formats can provide for input matched to scale. There is a stimulus
here to a new type of independent producer who can work across local
areas as well as meet the specific requirements of their own local
area.

6. Unless, of course, you are looking for local TV to be bankrolled by
government.....

The question is, of course, prejudiced; do you mean bankrolled as in
the banks? The answer is that funding will require a variable a mix of
commercial, public and community sources and - not least - the
positive engagement of sweat capital in constructing an enterprise
that is locally 'owned' and largely locally regulated and accountable.

You need to dig deeper into the present funding of broadcasting and
ask ‘who subsidises TV transmission on STV?’ and whether or not the
large public service broadcasters have paid for the spectrum and
transmitters they use, or whether the license fee has ensured this
network has and is paid for?

The ITV regions that have the less dispersed larger populations
subsidise the rural regions of Channel 3 and no-one in particular
should pay – or be able to buy - common goods such as spectrum.

Central Government subsidy is necessary to 'level the playing field'
that they have tilted in favour of metropolitan and commercial
broadcasting and - as the recent Government proposal has suggested –
public support is necessary to ensure the democratic purpose served by
TV news is sustained with quality and diverse sources of news
available to all areas, nations, regions and locally.

I would suggest that a comprehensive and federal network of local TV
channels throughout the UK serving discrete but well-identified areas
will capture advertising from national TV channels - because
advertisers will be able to reach viewers with programming that serves
a better targeted demographic and can be offered in broadcast
time-slot best suited to viewing in each area.

As the Home Office advised me in a moment of indiscretion in 1995,
"It's not that we don't think local TV isn't wanted, nor that it
couldn't be successful - it's that if we give up TV to local areas we
could never take it back." So in that sense the answer to Question 2
above is that it is political. The question now is how soft is the new
localism being paraded by the Westminster parties ahead of the
election?

7. You have undertaken some consultancy for Dumfries and Galloway's
local authority - about TV provision there. Is it the worst-served
region for local news in Scotland?

As one of the borderlands, Dumfries & Galloway, together with Scottish
Borders, experience a heightened sense of loss.

The 1950's arrangement to establish Scottish Television in its central
Scotland territory played into the hands of its original proprietor,
first in sacrificing the north-south divide favoured by politicians to
construct two more economically balanced east-west Scottish regions
and, secondly, by carving out a commercially viable heartland at the
expense of the comparatively impoverished commercial TV prospects in
the north and the south of Scotland. It is no surprise that Glasgow
City Council regards STV as their local TV channel.

In one way or another, ever since the '50s, the two remoter areas of
commercial TV broadcasting in Scotland have been subsidised, latterly
within STV business plan but a whole in payment for the ITV
transmission plan.

The south of Scotland is the more exposed of the two remoter Scottish
regions, encompassing, in Border TV Cumbria, a left-over from
Granada-land. More recently, Border TV has been thrown together with
Tyne Tees to appease ITV's desire to remain a public service
broadcaster supporting fewer public. Scotland in particular is the
victim of the consummate failure of regulation to serve and instead to
cloak public interest.

The South of Scotland lacks plurality in the absence of a Scotland TV
news and is further disadvantaged compared with the rest of Scotland.

We should not overlook that Scottish Television has never been
Scottish (or Scotland-wide) nor can it be locally engineered. So the
alienation of the south of Scotland to Glasgow's dominance of news and
public service media is more extreme than the alienated experience
encountered throughout most of Scotland, where there is widespread
demand for Scotland's news and local news to be locally accountable
and relevant.

8. How excited are you by the proposed publicly-funded news pilot on
Channel 3, to operate in Scotland from next year?

I'm pleased Scotland has been identified by the Government for a pilot
and that it is 'Scotland' the Government are talking about, not just
the two STV regions.

Whatever the outcome for the Independently Funded News Consortium in
the coming months, the south of Scotland should at least become part
of the nation's news in future and, if the proposals we're party to do
materialise, then the south of Scotland will also be the first area to
have its a comprehensive local TV channel transmitting on Freeview, on
digital spectrum available for all sixteen local areas of Scotland
that is released with digital switchover.

9. What is the likelihood STV - the current Channel 3 licence holder
for most, if not all, of Scotland - will be part of the pilot?

I would be very surprised if STV decided to withdraw its bid. How or
if it will reconcile its territorial deficiencies remains to be seen.

STV faces in two directions - playing at being a nation's TV channel
while unable to include the south of Scotland (which is part of ITV's
patch) while tinkering with its micro opt-outs and broadband in the
struggle to achieve a localness its broadcasting cannot achieve.
Public serviced broadcasting addresses the universe of all viewers.
STV cannot do this.

The other problem that STV can't overcome, because of the engineering
of the spectrum it uses, is that its biggest micro-region - Glasgow -
includes the largest minority of the STV audience and those most
likely to watch and spend.

The Glasgow micro-region serves 45 per cent of STV's homes and is not
a sufficiently local service for many caught inside.

10. You want to be part of the pilot?

We are. The inclusion of localities in 'the nations, regions and
localities’ mantra of Government and [broadcasting regulators] Ofcom
suggests that a progress of sorts has been made in Scotland and across
the UK. But in spite of the UK regulatory embrace of 'the local' there
is still complacent confusion among broadcasters, regulators as well
as academics that 'local' means the same as 'regional' or - often with
the BBC - that 'local' is in fact 'Scottish'.

The wilfulness behind this sloppy semantics still marshals an
integrity of sorts for the commercial and big broadcaster and a
reluctance to go beyond devolution to subsidiarity and vest local
public media responsibilities ‘locally’ may still trip us up along the
road ahead.

And yet … if Denmark can allocate 200 digital channels for local TV
and Spain upwards of a 1000 then surely Scotland should be able to
respond to public demand and accommodate the sixteen local channels
identified in the Scottish Local TV Federation proposals.

Source: http://www.allmediascotland.com/ten-questions/23627/Dave-Rushton

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