Interview: Mark Austin, ITV News (Evening Standard)
By David Rowan
It is, Mark Austin admits, "a time of great uncertainty" at 200 Gray's Inn Road. Since ITV closed its digital news channel a little over a month ago, unions have been battling with management over redundancies, four ITN staff have jumped to Al Jazeera, while questions remain about the future of Channel 4's ITN-supplied news service. Trevor McDonald, meanwhile, signed off for good as the face of the main late-evening bulletin, prompting Richard Tait, a former editor-in-chief, to suggest that this could be "the beginning of the end" for ITN as it became an inhouse unit of "a network that has given up on the future of broadcast journalism".
"It would have been nice if ITV felt able to invest in the news channel," reflects Austin, who this week completes his first month as McDonald's successor. "But they didn't. It's sad, but it's not the end of the world - a lot of this talk about rolling news being the only game in town is absolute crap."
Relatively few viewers actually watch rolling news, he points out - while 10 million people a night still watch the BBC or ITV1 late bulletins, and 11 million watch one or the other at 6pm or 6.30pm. "On Sky or BBC 24 or the ITV News channel, the audiences were tiny. All we can do as journalists is continue to produce the kind of journalism that has stood ITN in good stead over the decades. Our great strength has always been its appointment-to-view bulletins and a different kind of journalism."
Austin, meanwhile, faces his own challenges. McDonald, he says, is "an appallingly difficult act to follow". "There's the danger, people keep reminding me, that I'll forever be known as the guy who 'plays' Trevor," he says of his predecessor of 14 years. "It's going to take time to establish myself, but eventually, hopefully, they'll come to realise it's got to be a different programme. We're just going to do things my way."
A tall, authoritatively greying 47-year-old, Austin sees himself as "just the front guy selling the brilliant reporting and editing" in a bulletin that is "warmer" and more accessible than it was. A distinguished former foreign correspondent - his prominence enhanced by a critically mauled stint presenting the reality show Survivor - he plans to take the bulletin on location more, to build "a fairly relaxed relationship" with viewers, and to retain McDonald's "And finally..." signoff, "just maybe delivered standing up now".
But don't expect him to turn this into the Mark Austin show. "Look, there's a lot of tosh talked about personality-driven news," he says dismissively when asked if he now considers himself a celebrity. "A news programme is about the news."
Newsreaders have faced a bad press in recent months. After Andrew Marr questioned why they were quite so well paid simply for "reading an Autocue", John Humphrys weighed in to claim that his four-year-old son could do the job. "Reading the news isn't work," Humphrys exclaimed. "You get paid a lot of money and it requires no brain."
. . . ARTICLE CONTINUES HERE . . .
.. . . AND READ MORE MEDIA INTERVIEWS HERE . . .
It is, Mark Austin admits, "a time of great uncertainty" at 200 Gray's Inn Road. Since ITV closed its digital news channel a little over a month ago, unions have been battling with management over redundancies, four ITN staff have jumped to Al Jazeera, while questions remain about the future of Channel 4's ITN-supplied news service. Trevor McDonald, meanwhile, signed off for good as the face of the main late-evening bulletin, prompting Richard Tait, a former editor-in-chief, to suggest that this could be "the beginning of the end" for ITN as it became an inhouse unit of "a network that has given up on the future of broadcast journalism".
"It would have been nice if ITV felt able to invest in the news channel," reflects Austin, who this week completes his first month as McDonald's successor. "But they didn't. It's sad, but it's not the end of the world - a lot of this talk about rolling news being the only game in town is absolute crap."
Relatively few viewers actually watch rolling news, he points out - while 10 million people a night still watch the BBC or ITV1 late bulletins, and 11 million watch one or the other at 6pm or 6.30pm. "On Sky or BBC 24 or the ITV News channel, the audiences were tiny. All we can do as journalists is continue to produce the kind of journalism that has stood ITN in good stead over the decades. Our great strength has always been its appointment-to-view bulletins and a different kind of journalism."
Austin, meanwhile, faces his own challenges. McDonald, he says, is "an appallingly difficult act to follow". "There's the danger, people keep reminding me, that I'll forever be known as the guy who 'plays' Trevor," he says of his predecessor of 14 years. "It's going to take time to establish myself, but eventually, hopefully, they'll come to realise it's got to be a different programme. We're just going to do things my way."
A tall, authoritatively greying 47-year-old, Austin sees himself as "just the front guy selling the brilliant reporting and editing" in a bulletin that is "warmer" and more accessible than it was. A distinguished former foreign correspondent - his prominence enhanced by a critically mauled stint presenting the reality show Survivor - he plans to take the bulletin on location more, to build "a fairly relaxed relationship" with viewers, and to retain McDonald's "And finally..." signoff, "just maybe delivered standing up now".
But don't expect him to turn this into the Mark Austin show. "Look, there's a lot of tosh talked about personality-driven news," he says dismissively when asked if he now considers himself a celebrity. "A news programme is about the news."
Newsreaders have faced a bad press in recent months. After Andrew Marr questioned why they were quite so well paid simply for "reading an Autocue", John Humphrys weighed in to claim that his four-year-old son could do the job. "Reading the news isn't work," Humphrys exclaimed. "You get paid a lot of money and it requires no brain."
. . . ARTICLE CONTINUES HERE . . .
.. . . AND READ MORE MEDIA INTERVIEWS HERE . . .
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