Heat to bring rolling showbiz news to new music channel

Heat, which already runs a magazine, website and radio station, is to launch on television next month with a new celebrity news and music channel which will feature rolling showbiz news.

The channel, which will be available on Sky and Virgin from 3 July, is said to be targeting "the connected, multi-tasking generation" by providing both music video content and an overlay of editorial content.

News content will be provided to viewers via a rolling news strap and weekly roundup, as well as editorial VTs.

According to Heat's editor Lucie Cave the magazine currently has a readership of 1.4 million and its website Heatworld.com has around 850,000 monthly users.

But she said "TV was the one area we had yet to properly explore and felt a natural fit".

"We already have such a huge authority in the film/TV/music section of our magazine - it made perfect sense to add another platform to the brand".

She added: "Heat TV will be essentially a music based channel but the key differentiator will be the news content - rolling celeb news, breaking stories as they happen and celeb tweets on screen within a few minutes of them being tapped into their twitter feed."

The channel will have a team dedicated to working on that, but magazine staff will also be able to input their own ideas and "cross platform opportunities", she said.

"The TV news team will be working closely alongside magazine, online and on radio".

Dave Young, director of Programming at Box TV which is working with Heat on the new channel, told Journalism.co.uk that having been inspired several years ago by the way news stations in the US were broadcasting he "thought it would be really interesting if it was brought to music TV".

He added that collaborative editorial effort behind the channel will work to ensure "the story is consistent without just being duplicated entirely across platforms".

"There will be a conference on the news agenda daily, so in many ways the TV team will be the first up and before we publish the headlines they will be discussed in a conference environment, with the magazine and online, so we're all agreed the story is consistent."

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