I Want My ITV!
It's a sad day at our house. NewsWorld International (NWI), the sattelite channel which brought us the ITV news from London every night at 6:30 pm, is no more.

Early this morning NWI was replaced by the zippy Current Channel. This is a network that "shows young adults what's going on in their world in their own voice with a substantial portion of content created by viewers like you."

Viewers like me? I'm 49. I like getting a different country's perspective on the news. I don't especially want programs hosted by pretty young twenty-somethings telling me all about hip industrial style housing, or the best way to ask for a raise, or updates on the latest technical gadetry.

The worst part is that this new network is the brainchild of Al Gore, who's got about as much street cred with the 18 to 34 year old demographic as I do. I've always figured young people are out there enjoying their lives, working exciting jobs, going to clubs and hanging out with their pretty young friends. They don't have time to watch this lame excuse for programming, even if they do have a chance to create "a substantial portion of content."

To me this sounds like a glorified cable access show. It's an excellent chance for all those techno-nerds out there to show off their shakey home-made documentaries, but who in their right mind would want to watch it?

Only "America's Funniest Home Videos" has had any success with the format of viewers providing a substantial portion of the content.

NWI ran for eleven years. Millions of people throughout the world depended on it for the non-American viewpoint on various world events. In fact, there were a number of world news stories we'd never have known about had it not been for NWI.

Current will crash and burn. But I expect we'll never know, as we'll be deleting this channel from our favorite channel setup. But when it does goes belly up, I hope I hear about it.