Will the Tories destroy the regional media's only lifeline?

The emerging battle to run the three regional TV news pilots in Scotland, Wales and the North-East is shaping up to be the big media story of the year, with several rival newspaper groups bidding for the franchises.

Meanwhile, shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt is threatening to render the whole exercise academic by pledging to scrap them if the Tories win the forthcoming election.

The Tories want to see a network of much smaller, more local TV stations, some owned and operated outright by local newspapers, although these plans are, to say the very least, somewhat less than fully-formed.

The growing political row provoked a strongly-worded piece by Press Gazette editor Dominic Ponsford this morning on his publication's blog, The Wire.

Says Dominic: "By scrapping the IFNC scheme in favour of a free-market pipe-dream, Hunt is removing the only chance we had of salvaging ITV’s existing network of regional broadcast journalists."

He also points out that combined TV and print franchises along the lines the Tories are suggesting do not exactly have a great track record to date - Manchester's loss-making Channel M being the obvious example.

Ex Cabinet ministers tell all to MEN

One of the most enduring frustrations during my time as a regional lobby journalist was the way in which the New Labour spin machine systematically cut the regional press out of the loop when it came to the dissemination of government information, doutbless aware that we tended to be rather less biddable than our national counterparts.

So nothing gives me greater pleasure than to see a regional political reporter scooping the nationals to the big political stories.

David Ottewell of the Manchester Evening News is one of the best young political hacks in the business and he has now beaten the nats two days on the trot, securing the first exclusive interviews with both James Purnell and Hazel Blears since their Cabinet resignations.

The MEN filmed the Blears interview for its sister TV station, Channel M, and then syndicated it to the BBC and Sky News where the story has been running for most of the day. All power to your elbow, David.