Independent Television News
Independent Television News (ITN) is a major UK news provider with expanded operations in other English-speaking countries. ITN delivers reports and reports to the two largest commercial television networks Independent Television (ITV) and Channel 4 . The radio service IRN supplies radio stations with news and short reports.
Independent Television News was founded in 1955 as a consortium of concessionaires, with Labor MP Aidan Crawley serving as editor-in-chief. The studios were set up in the headquarters of Associated-Rediffusion TV , the operator of Independent Television at the time.
ITN supplies ITV with national and international news, while the regional reports are largely produced in-house by the ITV studios. For a long time ITN also supplied television stations in the USA, in particular the non-commercial television network Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which has been cooperating with the BBC since 2001 . ITN continues to deliver to the news channel CNN and numerous other stations around the world.
ITN also operated a 24-hour news channel; this was later taken over by the leading ITV companies Carlton and Granada and continued to operate under the umbrella of ITV. However, ITV News Channel could not prevail against the competition from Sky News and BBC News 24 and was discontinued in December 2005. ITN also long supplied the British commercial television channel Channel 5 (Five), which now works with Sky News .
During the 1990s, ITN was accused of placing too much emphasis on tabloid themes. As a result and because of several realignments in the program, the ITV news magazines, which are often more successful than the BBC, lost significant market shares.
John Hardie has been CEO of Independent Television News since June 2009.
ITN's shareholders are the current ITV operator ITV plc (40 percent), the news agency Thomson Reuters (20 percent), the information service provider UBM plc (20 percent) and the Daily Mail and General Trust with a further 20 percent.