You call that news?

News shows are increasingly encroaching on the celebrities and the dramas on local TV these days. They start early in the morning with presenters scouring the newspapers and the Internet, and update throughout the day, winding up in the evening with some analysis.

But the only big shifts to news have come at Channel 3 and TITV (formerly iTV), the latter recently swinging back to its original 70-per-cent news ratio over entertainment.

And even so, critics tend to use the phrase "so-called news".

"Probably TITV and Channel 3 are the closest to being actual news channels," says Itthiphol Waranusupakul, a journalism lecturer at Sripatum University.

He's impressed with neither channel but, measuring the nature and duration of the news content, he regards those two as doing reasonably well in presenting news for their target audiences.

Sumran Chatpo, the deputy news manager at Channel 3, says company policy leans away from news analysis because "we're not experts at it".

Having nevertheless earned a reputation as a news channel over the past two years, Channel 3 now has 58 veteran news anchors to fill its designated schedule, recently extended to 12 hours. They spend most of that time reading aloud from newspapers and the Net.

Channel 3 used to follow the usual free-TV pattern of soaps, game shows and celebrity chatter. When other channels grabbed huge ratings with news-focused content, it looked for ways to make its soap-loving audience interested in current events.

"We decided to focus more on the presentation," says Sumran, with news-talk programmes that bridged the gap between presenters and viewers.

Things were a bit different for TITV, which has always enjoyed a reputation for solid news content.

Deputy news director Kitti Singhapat acknowledges that Thais prefer entertainment - they "want to go home and relax with something light", he admits, noting that the only times they've chosen news instead was during the tsunami and 9/11 tragedies.

"It has to be something really big that makes people stop watching what they usually watch every day."

The station was founded in 1995 with a news-to-entertainment ratio of 70:30. That evened out in 2004, but strenuous objections led to a Supreme Administrative Court ruling that forced it to put the news quotient back where it was.

Kitti says TITV has nevertheless always been a news station. Questions of quantity are pointless - only the quality matters. And TITV, he adds, showed its strength when the tsunami struck, with investigative, informative and updating reports from the scene.

"You don't need to broadcast news around the clock to be a news channel," Kitti says, and 24-hour news would be too tedious for most viewers anyway, as well as impractical for the station.

"It would only be talk, talk, talk all day long. People would just change the channel."

On the other hand, he says, viewers could count on a channel where they could always turn for updates. Kitti believes the current ratio is the best for the station to survive its competition. It's impossible to survive without entertainment, he says.

A news channel's point, says TITV news director and anchor Teerat Ratanasevi, is not to show off its presenters, but to investigate the stories behind the headlines.

"You need experience to investigate and analyse an issue," he says. "You can't just repeat what's been said in the papers."

Teerat agrees with Kitti that the term "news channel" is overused.

"We're getting confused between a news reporter and news presenter," he says. Viewers are tricked into considering the TV host as the source of the news rather than the reporter who uncovered the information.

ML Nattakorn Devakula, who hosts news shows on several channels, believes local news programming has improved over the past five years. Better technology makes them more interesting too, he notes, and there is variation in the way the reports are presented.

"It comes down to how management manages their budget," says Nattakorn. Some invest in the technology and reporters, others in the on-air presenters.

University lecturer Itthiphol understands that free TV stations have to balance news content with show biz. Channel 3 keeps its news presentations light, and TITV must have its 30-per-cent dose of entertainment to attract advertisers.

Either way, he says, at least people are getting the news.

Carat Media Services (Thailand) deputy managing director Parithas Moongprasittichai says a media buyer doesn't usually focus on programme content. "Our chief priority is the show's popularity," he says, and then they consider the onscreen presenter. How a channel juggles its schedule has little effect on which specific shows are purchased.

According to AC Nielsen, most Thai news shows did enjoy a ratings spurt last year, especially the evening news. TITV, which now has something like 2.6 million viewers, went from a 2.5 ratings share to 4.5 in prime time and 0.6 to 0.8 in the morning.

For comparison's sake, entertainment programmes routinely rate higher than 4.

Kitti suggests that it's entirely possible to make a distinction in TV news, just as readers know what to expect when they pick up a tabloid newspaper.

A "tabloid channel" - soft, cuddly and full of showbiz names - would easily claim a healthy share of the viewing public.