UR TV CAST

As chief executive of ITN, he has had to stomach the scrapping of his company’s most prestigious news bulletin, News at Ten, while publicly supporting ITV’s decision – to the newspapers, to the politicians and to his own staff.
And, away from the newspaper front pages, there has been a harder battle still. At ITN’s headquarters on Grays Inn Road, Purvis has been facing, daily, the misery, and on occasion the wrath, of a workforce brought low by the changes in working conditions that he has pushed through in order to produce a “24 seven” newsroom – pumping out news 24 hours a day seven days a week. In January journalists and producers came within a whisker of rare strike action over Purvis’s demands.Now, he hopes, the unveiling of ITN’s plans for the digital age is prompting a much needed turnaround in morale. If the sheer ambition of the new project is anything to go by, he may be successful. “I think this will be the world’s most converged news service,” he says, before going through some of the 10 means of delivery of ITN’s 24-hour news.Some are conventional. Julia Somerville and Daljit Dhaliwal will anchor a digital television channel – a straightforward concept, understandable to the average punter. Others, however, open up new vistas of confusion for anyone struggling to understand the implications of broadband, WAP, ASDL and any other acronym waiting in the wings.”We will be transmitting web-style pages over digital radio to mobile lap-tops,” says Purvis.

What? “And the next step will be digital radio and web-style pages over radio waves to a PDA” Right. That would be about palm pilots then.The fact is that all this out-our-current-universe stuff is, apparently, going to happen quite soon. And ITN, with its deals with NTL, Orange, Psion and the rest is leaping as far into the future as it can see. Or thinks it can see.It is clear from the way that Purvis explains it that he believes he is leapfrogging the opposition – Sky and BBC News 24 – by providing something far more forward-looking than simple television or internet-based news.”It’s a positioning issue,” he says. “There is not yet, in the UK, a service which is truly all news. There are channels called news channels, but for large sections of the day they are not carrying news.. Look at Sky.

They have phone-ins, sport, business and parliamentary questions on for an hour at a time. There is nowhere you can go for true 24-hour news, other than the internet.”ITN’s 24-hour news will have no debate, no discussion, no phone ins “Who wants to watch debate on a palm pilot?” says Purvis. And, in a reference to the BBC’s tendency to have a Fiona in the studio spending air time putting questions to a Fergus in the field, Purvis says: “We won’t have two to three minutes of questions being put to correspondents who don’t know the answer Our value is in correspondents’ reports. Not in stopping people preparing for those reports by endless questions and answers.”He is talking hard news, lots of headlines, constantly, all day and night. If you log in, watch, listen or whatever for more than an hour, there will be a lot of repetition But that is the nature of the beast. It’s part of the strategy.The conventional knee-jerk reaction to ITN 24-hour news has been that it is all rather risky.

That the service has been launched too late, that the market is already too crowded and, with BBC News 204 subsidised by the licence fee, that it is hard for competitors to make money. Purvis gives a good impression, however, of believing that he has trumped the opposition by being technologically ahead and efficient on the production side (the new service is being launched on less than half what the BBC spent setting up News 24).And, partly because he has a decent track record in making good, instinctive judgements, he inspires confidence. His career at ITN, for instance, took off after an editorial decision that has passed into company legend. He immediately knows what I am talking about when I say that I have heard that he earned his spurs as editor of News at Ten on a story about Princess Diana’s cleavage.”It was when she was Lady Diana Spencer,” he says. “It was a week after she got engaged and she went to a function wearing an extremely low-cut dress. In some newspapers a mark appeared on her chest and in some it didn’t. I thought it would be an amusing tail-piece to do a spot-the-difference.”At the time, the decision to let cameras linger on Diana’s bosom was considered radical, and earned him the respect of hacks who had suspected him of being too high-minded to spot and dress up a good, popular tabloid story.After that he rose through the ranks – and then made and implemented far tougher decisions in a management role.