NBN News

I hope not! Would NNSW and Gold Coast viewers be happy to see a similar background and opener without headlines to 9 news SNSW / ACT bulletins? I don’t think so.

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I know I’m not alone in being unhappy with the presentation of 9News Canberra/Sthn NSW regional bulletins, but if TCN9 ever really move out of Willoughby to a suitable new set of studios, I hope they don’t do this but yes they could close down the NBN9 studios, transfer playout to Sydney and just leave a smaller sales office & news reporters base in Newcastle like SC9 are doing/providing for 9News in their broadcast areas.

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Producing seven local windows for the Regional Queensland edition of Nine News from Brisbane will probably be a stretch as it is, doing no less than ten (taking into consideration that NBN does windows for six regions, along with the four for SCA Nine in Southern NSW/ACT) local windows for regional markets from Sydney might be too much.

So yeah, I think Nine will continue to have a studio in Newcastle for the foreseeable future.

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I think the Newcastle studios closing are as likely as the Brisbane studios closing.

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nbn opener failed tonight, static nbn news image and theme underneath. no two shot into main story

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The other issue is staffing. I would imagine the Newcastle bureau would only have 4-5 camera people on each day. They’d likely also cut the stories they shot. Logistically it just would not be possible.

You have to think back 10 years ago when major cities like Sydney or Melbourne were lucky to even get 1 live cross. Now there are 4 or 5 each night likely driven by the networks competing against each other. NBN has no competition. Why would they bother paying staff more money to work more hours for a 30 second live cross that likely will have no real change to the bulletin for them.

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They have competiton everywhere except in NBNs home market, and the Gold Coast. And I think Prime is No. 1 for news in most of these by a comfortable margin.

And I don’t think NBN have ever done a live cross from any of those regions… I think I’ve only ever seen it done from as far as Williamtown (where Newcastle Airport and the RAAF Base is, for those not familiar with the area).

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Yes they have, Ag-Quip field days at Gunnedah, Tamworth Country Music Festival & Gavin has done his weather on top of Mt Borah Manilla when the paragliders have been in action.

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Historically, NBN News rates well in Newcastle/Hunter (without competition), Coffs Harbour and Lismore/Far North Coast. Prime7 News rates better in Tamworth/North West and Taree/Port Macquarie.

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After watching Prime7 during the 6pm hour last night, tonight it was time to catch NBN News Mid North Coast in full for the first time in about sixteen months so here are my observations!

*The On-Air Presentation is on the OK-ish side IMO, could better reflect the current network look for news in parts.
*I noticed two items which could be classed as fillers in the eyes of Mid North Coast viewers. One full report from Leah White about trialling drones to track sharks on the Far North Coast and an RVO from the very end of Sport about some country football thing that happened in the North West.
*A slightly amusing thing happened during the local sport window, a “Louise Rennie Reporting” super (for the next report) mistakenly popped up during a report voiced by Josh Cummings! They did put the right super up shortly afterwards though! :stuck_out_tongue:

*Personally, I’m not sure about Paul Lobb & Natasha Beyersdorf as main newsreaders. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure they’re nice people but both Paul & Tash sometimes don’t look/sound serious enough for some news stories IMO. Paul reminds me of someone you’d expect to present It’s Academic or some other kids game show, while Natasha kind of sounds like she has a permanaent cold with dubious fashion choices (like that Jane Jetson one and last night I saw her in this unusual flower-pattern top) at times.
*Mitchell Hughes is OK as a sports presenter, not a Mike Rabbitt or Ken Sutcliffe by any means but there are certainly far worse sports presenters on Australian TV.
*Gavin Morris as always, was a very solid weather presenter who seems to be more knowledgeable about the subject than some of Sydney’s TV forecasters.

Overall, I’d say that NBN News is a more watchable product than Prime7’s two bulletins but there’s still room for improvement. Of course I’ve still got the weekend version of NBN News to catch during my stay, so I’ll try and do a review of that before too long.

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Oh I so agree re Paul Lobb and Natasha Beyersdorf! Not authorative enough from him, and a nasally voice and questionable dress sense from her.

Gavin is very knowledgable but to me, he seem s to lack a bit of personality and comes across as a bit robotic in his delivery.

So you didn’t see any Newcastle news items whilst you were up there? That happens 1-2 times a night in my experience,

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I’m up North for another three weeks or so! :slight_smile:

As far as stories from Newcastle are concerned, the only one I saw on tonight’s bulletin was a reader-voiced piece about Knights star Jarred Mullen being in trouble at the top of the Sports segment which yes, was even shown ahead of two full NRL reports from Nine. Knowing the Sydney bulletin very well, my guess is that one of the NRL reports was shown as the feature Sports story while the other one probably aired later on Nine News Sydney as the 1st story after the cross back for the rest of the days Sport.

Of course, the inconsistency with the “First on…” supers in reports has to be mentioned. One report shown tonight was from Nine Brisbane, with a coverup which isn’t exactly what you’d call seamless…

Earlier in the same bulletin with a report from Nine Sydney…

If you ask me, the “First on NBN” coverup should’ve been used for either both or (preferably) none of those reports.

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I agree, NBN does have a major issue with inconsistencies just like the one you mentioned.

The other one is the use of reporter sign offs on reports sourced from Nine News, it is applied again somewhat haphazardly.

I can understand that the likely reason is mostly due to time constraints in that a report may not arrive early enough to allow that kind of editing to occur, but I agree it should be an “all or nothing” approach for the sake of consistency.

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Since I watched it again tonight, a few more observations of NBN News Mid North Coast from the perspective of a Sydneysider.

The Newcastle/Central Coast-centricness could again be seen tonight in some of the report choices for the Northern NSW/Gold Coast-wide windows including Sally Rafferty’s report on the Woy Woy shooting being the 2nd news item of the bulletin (although if Nine News Sydney also had a report on that story high up, fair enough). Later on, Georgina Smyth’s report on a large snake being found in a Merewether house also made the cut for a region-wide segment.

*More super errors, including a Reporter Twitter super (for the next scene) popping up during a byte used from a policeman’s interview and a Twitter icon used accidentally on a standard name super. As minor as they are in the grand scheme of things, I hope these errors aren’t too common.

*For the Breaking News on Catherine Cusak’s resignation, what I presume to be a slightly delayed or “recorded a short time ago” version of TCN’s live cross to Chris O’Keefe (obviously minus the very start when Chris probably said “Well, Pete…”) was used.

*Some rather obviously edited report signoffs to include “NBN News” instead of “Nine News” were probably to be expected, but it was strange to hear “Grant Hackett told Nine News…” followed shortly afterwards by “Laura Turner, NBN News” for the signoff. I can understand why the calls for NBN News to fully rebrand as Nine News are rather strong!

*Exactly how is the drama at Punchbowl Boys High School relevant to a wider Northern NSW audience? Yes, Damian Ryan’s full report on that (IMO, the story seems to be a little on the sensationalist side even from a Sydney perspective) was shown during the 2nd Northern NSW-wide segment of NBN News.

*Also is it just me or does NBN News seem to have a rather lengthy Sport segment these days? Both last night and tonight Sport lasted two full segments (with local content in the 2nd segment) and I question whether the amount of time for Sport could be reduced a bit to cover even just one or two more local news stories.

Tomorrow, I’ll probably watch Prime7’s two bulletins of news again before coming back to NBN sometime on the weekend.

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I saw that too. It doesn’t happen very often.

From what I can tell, Chris usually records a generic version of his “live” cross for NBN and SCA before doing a real live cross with TCN. I noticed this on a post in the Nine News Regional thread where the SCA and TCN bulletins were compared.

Yes. This happens all. the. time.

Yes, it does, and has been like that for years. I moved from WA to the Newcastle area about 7 years ago and sort of suffered culture-shock with the long sport segment that was predominantly NRL focussed (WA is an AFL state).

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The reasons to do live crosses are two fold:

  • It’s actually cheaper content to do a live cross rather than a packaged report - why do you think TV news around the world is absolutely filled with them. It’s cheaper to send a reporter out to the field and a cameraman for an hour or two - and send the content live back to the broadcast and run some overlay vision - rather than have a crew, a reporter, an editor, a sound engineer and a producer work all day on a compiled edited piece.

This is exactly why Today and Sunrise and hour long news at 3, 4 and 6 has morphed into people sitting endlessly at a desk talking and interviewing people - live live live. It’s less production costs.

  • second, up to the minute information and the opportunity for the host to interview and ask questions provides for a more immediate, faster paced more current style of reporting - rather than hours old information in an edited piece.

One of the things I want NBN News to improve on is to change their theme to ‘Cool Hand Luke’ ASAP. The NBN theme is nice but it’s got nothing on CHL. If Nine News Regional, Nine Gold Coast and Nine Darwin can pull it off, why can’t they?

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Getting Laurence Schuberth to do something like a version of the current NBN News theme with “the Cool Hand Luke signature” for Nine…that would sound pretty epic I think.

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Don’t think thinkGavin Morris is land at all. Chris White, Jane Goldsmith and Paddy Kilmurray wouldn’t be the best presenters there

Whoops. My mistake.