Snow: "No tremendous future" for news channels

Channel 4 news anchor Jon Snow has predicted that rolling TV news channels will become increasingly irrelevant in the years ahead.

The news veteran, recently named journalist of the year by the Royal Television Society, thinks that the likes of Sky News and BBC News 24 will lose out as viewers turn to the internet for on-demand news.

"I don't think there is a tremendous future for large numbers of news channels in Britain," Snow told The Independent. "It's moving so fast to the web, and their numbers - all the news channels - are so pitifully small. Increasingly, if there's a major news development you are going to the web first to find out what's happening there and then."

Snow also had criticism for News 24, which has recently benefitted from extra investment as part of a restructuring of the BBC's news operation.

"The BBC is such a huge organisation that I guess you can make more sense of having News 24 because you have so many outlets supplying into it," he said. "But I don't think there's any evidence of a huge hunger for News 24."