Tuesday 10 October will be a big day for political reporting, traditional TV and the blog world as 18DoughtyStreet Talk TV – Britain’s first political Internet TV channel – is launched. Fronted by two of Britain’s most successful bloggers, Tim Montgomerie of ConservativeHome.com and the omnipresent Iain Dale, it will (as I see it) be to mainstream TV what blogs are to the print media. 18DoughtyStreet will broadcast four hours a night, Monday to Thursday.
"From our little house in London's Doughty Street we want to challenge the biases of big media, the tendency of some big businesses to act against the public interest, the consensual nature of too much contemporary politics and the unaccountability of institutions like the EU and UN," writes Tim Montgomerie.
Stuff will go wrong, and the mainstream media will make the best of it, but 18DoughtyStreet will rattle cages and I believe will change the face of political reporting and debate just as blogs have shifted the emphasis of printed comment. We wish them well.
There are two party conferences between now and the launch, which will give the guys a chance of promotion to an audience who ought to be paying a lot of attention, and will give them plenty to chew on in the early days (especially if my prediction comes true!).
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