JP’s Ashley Highfield aims to launch ultra-local online TV

Ashley Highfield, the CEO of UK local newspaper group Johnston Press and a former head of new media at the BBC, has said he would like to launch a series of ultra-local web TV stations for some of the communities served by the group’s newspapers.

Highfield told BBC Radio Scotland that journalists could provide video content for the channels using the latest generation of smartphones and that he expected the amount of video content on the group’s websites to increase dramatically in the future.

Johnston Press was part of a group that won the recent digital-terrestrial local TV licence for the Southampton area.