Hackney Council is among the small throng of public bodies pinning great hopes on the long term futures of the Olympic Park press and broadcast centres. The two buildings presently stand emptily adjacent awaiting their finishing touches before swarms of sports journalists colonise them for a few weeks next summer before disappearing as rapidly as they arrived once the orgy of athleticism has been and gone.Then what? Like the rest of the park, the press and broadcast centres will become the responsibility of the Olympic Park Legacy Company (OPLC), whose job it is to re-fill them with bustling, cutting-edge media-type businesses and entrepreneurs.
No-one in the know has ever pretended this will be easy: hence the press tour of the press centre provided by the OPLC last week in the hope of, of course, generating helpful press coverage. They do say, don't they, that the media live in a closed, self-refential world? I wish the Council and the OPLC the best of luck in their quest. I wish even harder that any thriving media industry hub that eventually evolves supplies plenty of jobs for local people. Potential tenants should have no complaints about the view: that's the River Lea navigation canal and Gainsborough primary school in the foreground and the Shard, the Gherkin and rest of the Square Mile's mighty megaliths in the distance.
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