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Watch those media scramble for space, as Channel 4 launches an internet radio station and The Times, not content with spawning global editions of itself left, right and centre, decides that it has a future as a TV station.

Once your new media-addled head has stopped spinning with the news, try to digest some of the detail in these stories (it ain’t easy). The Times will aggregate content from partners – new content or are we looking at another UK Gold re-run channel?

The Sunday Times would translate very simply into a lifestyle TV station: it led, and still leads, the charge of UK Sundays looking less like newspapers and more like a compendia of catalogues and bite-size journalistic bits and pieces. I wonder what Times TV will look like?

Speaking about the new channel at the World Newspaper Congress, News International Chairman Les Hinton said that Cisco would sponsor the venture. OK, so maybe we’re looking at more of a current affairs / business bias for the channel – that would fit in more with what the Times brand is trying to play on as its strength in the US (and it is a first class business newspaper).

Whatever it looks like, you’ll increasingly see video content on the website, according to Mr Hinton., as "In the long term text-based newspapers online are not going to be the answer. There has to be a merging of both ."

By the way, I really do like Mr Hinton’s quote about the "too powerful to ignore" blogosphere: "You have noticed the phoney war between the blogosphere and mainstream media. There’s only good copy and bad copy."

Well said, sir.

I’ll talk about the Channel 4 internet radio in my next post.

Via Media Guardian and journalism.co.uk

Tags: thetimes, newspaper, channel4, TV, internet, radio, world_newspaper_congress