France 24: C'est Parti! It's the second international news channel to launch in as many months - so someone's really spoiling us news junkies this Christmas. As a big francophile, I was just as excited about France 24 - Chirac's 'CNN a la francaise' - as I was about Al Jazeera English.

The thing that makes this launch most interesting is that it's not really one channel - it's two - yet it's still one. A bit like the Fiat Brava/Fiat Bravo, which was technically the same car, but not. Lost me already? Yes, me too. But the gist is, France 24 has both an English and French feed (Arabic and Spanish will follow) which follow essentially the same running order, but are presented by separate teams.

More ambitious than it sounds - and I think they're doing a pretty good job so far. It does look a bit cheap, and the English service seems to be relying heavily on Global Radio News for its 'foreign correspondents'. But, with its concise, 10-minute bulletins and round-table debates aplenty, it certainly seems to be living up to its promise to do things in a French way.

But, for me, the really exciting stuff is to be found on France 24's website. Navigation is slightly eccentric, but live streams of both the English and French channels are available in decent quality (Al Jazeera English take note) - which is almost enough to win me over by itself.

It gets much better than this, though. It's Television 2.0, as the Brussels Journal puts it. In the word's of France 24's web boss Stanislas Leridon: "every article and every piece of video will be open for comments from readers and viewers." And just to prove the point, there's a tangle of top tags on the homepage that'll be familiar to bloggers, but quite an innovation to users of news channel websites.

Labels: France 24, TV, Web 2.0

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