Birth and Early Beginnings
Doughty Media Limited was founded by Stephan Shakespeare and its core presenters at launch included Iain Dale, Tim Montgomerie, Rena Valeh, Zoe Phillips and Donal Blaney. Alex Story, a director of the company at the time of the launch, wrote the concept on which the station was based, built the studio, and initially organised the production of the channel.
Tim Montgomerie suddenly left 18 Doughty Street around March 2007 to work on other products and was replaced by Shane Greer, who became a full-time presenter at the station whilst also acting as Executive Director for Young Britons' Foundation. The station also hosted programmes produced and presented by Alan Mendoza, Peter Tatchell, Christian Wolmar, Christine Constable and Claire Fox.
The station used live video streaming technology in Windows Media Format to webcast from 19:00 until midnight from Monday to Friday, with all programmes being made available to stream again shortly after the programme had aired. Viewers could not download archived videos to their computer or portable device directly from the site, although a video podcast service of all archive videos was offered shortly before the station ceased broadcasting.
Although it called itself a "TV station", legally it was not, so did not operate under the Ofcom Broadcasting Code, which requires "due impartiality" and prevents politicians being newsreaders, interviewers or reporters in any news programme.
At the point of launch, there were four directors of the company, Alex Story, Iain Dale, Tim Montgomerie and Stephan Shakespeare, all Conservative Party members and self-described conservatives, but did not represent the Conservative Party in an official capacity on the station. In late 2006 Alex Story left as a Director of the company, followed by the resignations of Tim Montgomerie around March 2007 and of Donal Blaney in October 2007, followed by Iain Dale later in around December 2007. The latter three were said to be leaving to focus on other projects.
On 22 January 2007 a redesign of the website was launched to promote additional services that 18 Doughty Street wanted to produce: written news and opinion, news links, and what was billed as a series of controversial "attack" adverts that were to be released on a weekly basis. However, only four were ever produced and their cost rumoured to be disproportionate to success. The total makeover was also supposed to realise the citizen journalism element of 18 Doughty Street and allowed contributors to submit videos for inclusion in the website publications and live productions. However, this project had no success. Tim Montgomorie bought 100 Sanyo C5 digital camcorders, but only a handful of videos were received amongst reports of technical difficulties with the externally developed platform and a lack of editing skills.
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