18 Doughty Street - politics for adults

Link: home: Press release for 18DoughtyStreet Talk TV.

This looks quite interesting. I found it via BuzzMachine. A new take on politics. We could certainly use that in this country.

10th October will see the launch of Britain’s first political Internet TV Channel.

18DoughtyStreet Talk TV will broadcast for four hours a night, Mondays to Thursdays, from studios in London’s Bloomsbury with a mix of live and pre-recorded programmes. It aims to break the mould of current affairs television with a mix of opinionated and controversial programming.

In a groundbreaking initiative the station is building a network of 100 nationwide and worldwide citizen journalist reporters, each equipped with their own camcorder, which they can use to film reports for 18DoughtyStreet to broadcast.

At the heart of the station will be a website of blogs and daily votes. Comments left on the blogs will shape the content of the programmes.  The daily votes will help determine which news stories headline every programme.  Programme presenters will have access to the blogs during live programming, with the viewer seeing the blog next to the live streaming screen on their computers.  All programmes will be available for download after livestreaming.

I hope that they plan to include mobile into the mix — particularly whilst a lot of their audience will be out and about and not necessarily able to tune into blogs and the web — but still want to participate. Text updates would be cool, plus doing some sort of Mobizine direct-to-handset version might be useful.

It would be rather interesting if they were able to integrate mobile to the point that people could participate in interviews via 3g camera phone, such as they do on Sky News.