19-02-2024, 11:46 PM
In hindsight, Channel M - and particularly, the news operation - actually had a fairly traditional TV production model for the most part.
The news service was pretty much its own thing to begin with - one half-hour bulletin a day, pre-recorded, with a core team of reporters and camera ops (based out of some newspaper offices at Stockport, IIRC, before they moved to Urbis) - not forgetting the small fleet of news jeeps, parked up across the road in the Printworks multi-storey.
The MEN only began to be utilised more once they had expanded to about 3-4 hours a day of live bulletins - i.e. the lunchtime news came live from the Spinningfields newsroom and occasionally, there would be a contribution from one of the paper's journos, but most of the newsgathering was still being done by Channel M's own teams (no self-shooting involved)
Those links began to drift apart towards the end, even though they still retained common ownership - think I remember being told they were expecting to break even by 2009 (three years after launching on Sky).
Of course, that never happened and even when it launched, it was only a matter of time before Channel M Today (the last remaining in-house production) was axed.
The news service was pretty much its own thing to begin with - one half-hour bulletin a day, pre-recorded, with a core team of reporters and camera ops (based out of some newspaper offices at Stockport, IIRC, before they moved to Urbis) - not forgetting the small fleet of news jeeps, parked up across the road in the Printworks multi-storey.
The MEN only began to be utilised more once they had expanded to about 3-4 hours a day of live bulletins - i.e. the lunchtime news came live from the Spinningfields newsroom and occasionally, there would be a contribution from one of the paper's journos, but most of the newsgathering was still being done by Channel M's own teams (no self-shooting involved)
Those links began to drift apart towards the end, even though they still retained common ownership - think I remember being told they were expecting to break even by 2009 (three years after launching on Sky).
Of course, that never happened and even when it launched, it was only a matter of time before Channel M Today (the last remaining in-house production) was axed.