[chinamug]

Well their news content is actually fairly big for a commercial channel - News at 12.30, News at 5.30 and News at 7 all add up to 1.5 hours of main news, along with summaries during Ireland AM and Tonight Show. Tonight Show also fulfils public service broadcasting.

In a typical weekday, VM1 provides around 6.5 hours of home produced content from their own studios, which is good going.

Well if the News didn't bring in the viewers they wouldn't be doing it. When UTV Ireland and TV3 newsrooms merged the standard of their News content went way up. It's very tabloid but it's a decent news service, unlike say 10 years ago when it was barely press releases read out.

News is easily the most watched home produced content on the Channel (outside of sports) I'm surprised they don't have more bulletins on. The only problem with the news service is that it tends to disappear around Christmas for 10 days and it's weak at the weekends.

They finally seemed to realise that News works in the Irish Market. There were several periods in the stations history were they were cutting back news to the bare minimum and what was broadcast wasn't great.