ABC regional local radio had their morning schedules reorganised some years ago.
Local breakfast begins at 6:30am with the rural report following early AM after 6am.
Local news bulletins limited to bottom of the hour at 6:30 and 7:30 and if you’re lucky, midday. No recorded or updated afternoon bulletin at 5:30 PM, 8:30 bulletin gone too.
Morning program usually beginning at 8:30 or 9 cut in favour of an hour shift beginning at 10am.
The problem is that local programming at 10am has been cut from many stations.
NSW is the worst offender.
ABC Newcastle this year has been supplying a generic, often soft content hour to what seems to be all NSW stations save for ABC Bega.
When the schedules changed, there were local programs at 10am but these have now disappeared.
ABC Newcastle began a new presenter line up to rejuvenate the station yet are now compromised to provide this near statewide hour.
WA and SA seem to be retaining all of their local one hour shift teams, mostly so in Qld and Vic.
You’d think NSW would have more funding, what are they doing with their money instead?
ABC Illawarra is spared from that change, in which they still have their local morning program from 8:30 to 11am.
Interestingly, given that ABC Newcastle now has their near statewide hour at 10-11am weekdays, ABC Illawarra now has 1 more hour of local programming per weekday than ABC Newcastle!
I kept clear of the larger markets that do have more resources such as Illawarra, these are the truly regional ABC stations where commercial stations have largely dropped the ball and now so has the ABC.
ABC Local Radio should be exactly that - local! All the national programs should be migrated over to RN. Most are simulcast anyway, and RN is available around the country. Time to rejuvenate the ABC Local product.
With this morning’s announcement that Virginia Trioli will leave ABC News Breakfast on August 16 to join ABC Radio Melbourne’s mornings program, does it mean Jon Faine will also finish his stint on around the same date?
No it was announced months ago he’s going through until the end of the year, unless something has changed, expect Virginia to have some time off until early 2020.
As in Andrew Hansen from the Chaser? Why are Triple M/SCA allowing them to moonlight on the ABC? I know it’s in different markets, but that’s business idiocy right there. Do you see the CEO of Coles moonlighting on Woolworths ads?
Interesting hearing Andrew Hansen on Melbourne radio. He was clearly bluffing his way through road and suburb names when a caller called up with a traffic incident to share on Tuesday. Not sure how well he knows Melbourne.
