It’s all good to deploy these units regionally, but the reality is that you’d only get live stories from places like Newcastle, Tamworth, Orange and the like where the networks have their news offices
Some of these areas these offices cover are huge and it’s not necessarily feasible to deploy staff to cover live stuff in many of those areas
I can’t imagine those units are cheap to run either, particularly data costs, coverage would be an issue too
Yes, that’s where I would expect NBN News to deploy the units - these ate the cities that NBN News broadcasts to and covers news from.
If a reporter is driving to the place of the story - they are already there to go live.
They can’t be that expensive to run. And stations with smaller budgets than NBN such as 9/7/Ten Adelaide and 9/7/Ten Perth have multiple live crosses per newscast.
For a regional station, like NBN, you also have to consider how many stories each reporter has to file in a day.
At a cap city station, if you’re a lead reporter, you can probably spend all day at a factory fire or at State Parliament covering one story, doing live crosses for every single edition of the news.
And also think of the “value add”. Do you really get much extra news from a reporter doing a live cross outside, say, a burnt out building hours after the fire has been extinguished?
I always think it makes better a better broadcast when the information is delivered live, rather than from tape hours ago. It feels more immediate, has a better pace on air and allows the newsreader to ask questions and interact. I think there is a lot of value in it
It would be nice if NBN News could do three or four live crosses a night like Nine News Sydney but realistically, that’s probably not going to happen for various reasons.
As it’s already been pointed out, the reporters at metropolitan TV news services generally focus on one story a day and many of them focus on a particular type of news. Regional TV news services have less reporters than metro bulletins and probably very few if any “specialist” reporters, so it’s not uncommon to see regional TV news reporters do multiple reports a day on a broad range of topics.
But surely the size of the market and the budget of the newsroom would determine how many reporters each station has, not simply if it is “metro” or “regional”
All these things considered - if NBN does have less
Reporters than 9 Perth or Adelaide then it is understaffed and under funded
I’d say they probably have a similar number of reporters, if not more even, but they are also geographically spread out over a large region filing reports that will often only be in the local window for one of those regions, meaning they have to produce significantly more content than their metro colleagues.
Also, due to the large geographic footprint of the regional stations, they have much higher broadcast costs than the metro stations, reducing what’s left over for things like news.
I’m surprised this discussion has gone on as long as it has.
(As is the case with the new 9News regional bulletins the local windows being pre-recorded is the ultimate limiter:
How can you do a live cross in a pre-recorded local window?
Yeah me too. Can’t we all agree that for better or worse, metropolitan news bulletins will always have better production standards and more resources put into them than regional news bulletins?
I suppose you could do a pre-recorded cross like Prime7 and WIN have done before, but personally I’d prefer a standard report rather than a cross especially during the Winter when you have pre-recorded crosses from outdoor locations in broad daylight airing when it’s pitch black at 6pm! 
The other thing is they don’t have any real newsworthy stories that have any need to go live.
They should really get the Adelaide set. It’s a bit more recent and clean looking.
NBN are moving soon, so will most likely get a smaller studio - probably in an office block.
I would imagine they would get a new set with the move, ideally the same set the metros are getting, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
I’d probably expect NBN to get something like one of the old metro Nine News sets once the studio move happens along with automation, full HD production and further matching Nine News’ current graphics.
Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be surprised if the “NBN News” name is kept despite being largely irrelevant now. And of course the current NBN News theme music, although that’s something I personally wouldn’t mind to see (or more to the point, hear) in continued use.
When has that ever stopped a tv station from doing a live cross?
Sadly, you’re probably right.
It would be so cheap and nasty.
But it would still be a quantum leap from what they have now, with all of that BLUE!
wrong.
NBN changed on March 1 - well before the SCA affiliation was announced. They changed to Nine because they are O&O
One thing that might give NBN News the illusion of being “better” is the use of higher quality Nine News material, as opposed to Prime and WIN who use their own content. I would say only about 25-30% of what is on NBN News is actually their own.
And there’s still a number of issues with it that we covered here before, including inconsistencies relating to branding.
no, it was 9. The NBN branding was never mentioned on air, it was always “On Nine”.
The Central Coast still has the bug
Could Nine cut NBN to the bone and sometime in the future have the news done out of Sydney?