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TECHNOLOGY FORETOLD
strengthen local communities, and improve the flow of communication
within them (Information Technology Advisory Panel (ITAP) Report,
1982). This conception of a new tier of local television stations, comparable
to the local newspapers, captured the imagination of politicians,
journalists and activists alike in the 1980s and 1990s. Thus, the
television journalist, Richard Gregory, wrote in 1990 that ‘new cable
operators have tremendous opportunities’ to create through community
channels ‘a television equivalent of the best of the weekly newspapers’,
achieving ‘a closeness with the community that not even local
radio can match’ (Guardian, 6 August, 1990). Some like Graham Allen,
Labour Opposition media minister, went further, hoping that local television
would regenerate a sense of local community, democratize
programme-making and ensure that a plurality of social experiences
‘found life on the screen’ (Times, 24 May, 1995).
This mixture of prediction and advocacy was repeatedly confounded.
The leaden growth of cable TV in the 1980s ‘delayed’ the anticipated
growth of local community television. It was not until the mid 1990s that
ambitious local television news channels were launched in major urban
centres like London, Birmingham, and Liverpool. Most of these failed
disastrously, dampening hopes that new technology would give rise to a
renaissance of local journalism.
A different strategy was then embraced, based on the issue of shortterm,
localized (RSL) licences for new local TV stations authorized by the
1996 Broadcasting Act. This gave rise to renewed expectations that
grassroots television journalism was about to take off (even though it
was actually employing ‘old’ technology). For example, the Sunday Times
(27 September, 1998) reported lyrically that ‘a quiet revolution is taking
place in British television’, based on the plans of ‘50 new local companies’
to launch new local community channels. The same, arresting image was
invoked by the Independent (14 February, 1998) when it reported that ‘in
a backroom in Oxford this week a small revolution was under way…’.
The Oxford Channel, was being launched with 30 professional staff,
numerous local volunteers and an appealing schedule of local programmes.
According to its joint managing director, the new channel aimed
to ‘get the community involved in programming’.
As it turned out, most of these newly licensed local channels did not
have a viable economic model to sustain them. They gained only small
audiences, and therefore limited advertising, and had no significant
public funding. Fatality among local TV channels was consequently
high. Out of 23 local TV channels licensed after 1996, only 13 were still
in operation in early 2006 (Ofcom, 2006a). Many of the survivors had
only a vestigial connection to the dream of grassroots, locally produced
programming that had so excited sympathetic journalists. Thus,
Oxford Channel’s employees were all sacked in 2000, and replaced with a
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