News & Current Affairs FAQs

14 February 2011

What are your commissioning priorities?

We want ideas which set the agenda and ideas which no other broadcaster would dare to touch. We want ideas which overturn your assumptions and ideas which finally prove what everyone has always suspected.

For Dispatches half hour programmes, we are looking for revelatory popular journalism like our recent investigation into Aldi, our undercover investigations into benefit cuts and the examination of the lives of some of Britain’s better-off pensions in Rich and On Benefits. For Dispatches and for our one-hour specials, we are looking for in-depth investigations in Britain and abroad which can be about anything from Secrets of Sports Direct to Escape from ISIS. If you have a great story idea but you have not yet made a current affairs programme or an undercover programme, we will provide you with the help and support you need to make it happen. We work with about 50 production companies a year in our department and it is really important to us that we introduce new companies and new talent to television current affairs.

We are also very keen on big events and would like more ideas for those, including for innovative studio programmes.

We love consumer journalism and have two new consumer series underway, one being Supershoppers.

Channel Four News also commissions films from independent companies. They worked with fifteen companies this year. If you have a good idea, which might be an investigation, a short film or an exclusive interview, contact louise.turner@itn.co.uk directly at the news.

 

 

 

 

What are you not interested in?

Comfy thinking

What are the tariff prices for programmes you currently commission?

£120,000K - £180,000K for hours / £70,000 - £100,000 for half hours

What is the biggest creative challenge your team or genre faces?

Re-inventing the form of current affairs programmes.

What advice would you give to new talent companies keen to connect with your team?

Fire off ideas to us as soon as you have thought them through. Current affairs must be current.