NBN News

Wow this must be the billionth time this conversation has happened on here. Yawn.

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Yea I get it. Traditionally I think Regional in Australia means outside a cap or major city.

I would argue Gold Coast bucks that trend as would others.

What is interesting is “regional city” I think is a uniquely aussie thing. The idea a city can be regional - like wagga, Townsville or the like.

In the US I’ve never heard a city called regional. Even a small city is called just that. A small city. Regional in the us kinda means pertaining to an area. If your business operates in Los Angeles. Sam Diego and southern Nevada only - it would be a regional business - even though it’s in La. Meaning it operates only in a particular region - being SoCal and Nevada.

Ok here come the “we are not America” comments…. I know! :slight_smile:

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Correct, that thing is very much an attempt to get more people to settle outside of Sydney and Melbourne in particular.

I think the typical term would be more “regional centre”, if that makes a little more sense… I wouldn’t call, say, Wagga Wagga a “region” by itself for instance; it’s the centre of the NSW Riverina region, but it’s also the only city (designated as such at least) in about a 200 km radius, the next cities out would be Albury, Canberra and Griffith. (Other places are too small; the qualifications are much tighter than it is in most US states.)

It gets a little muddier for bigger places (especially the Gold Coast which is one huge city of several hundred thousand yet a region of its own), plus cases where cities and surrounding shires [which are on an equal level unlike a city vs. county relationship] were merged, but the confusion seems minimal here.

Certainly for the Broadcasting Services Act purposes, “metro” is defined as “the licence area where the general post office is in the five mainland states” (paraphrased), “remote” are the satellite services, and “regional” is basically everythng else - this includes markets like Gold Coast and Newcastle.

In NSW (at least) any population centre can be a city - it only needs to be proclaimed as one (the population requirements were loosely applied and subsequently removed). The term “Regional City” has come about to underscore that the city acts as a central service point for a much wider catchment area of smaller population centres or regional areas. It’s a marketing term more then anything

Places like Sydney are theoretically a collection of cities - a better term to describe it is an urban conurbation - but we treat it as a singular city with varying boundaries that are often vague (which leads to other issues like what defines the city)

A small city in the US is enormous though - I recall that the mean population of a city in the US is nearly 300,000 people and there are more than 300 cities in the US that are the same size or bigger than our top 10.

History has a significant impact on this - as a much younger country, Australia has developed very differently and how we consider cities and regions have formed on that basis

We are not America. At least they do local news better than we do. :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

But usually have bigger populations to support it.

There are literally hundreds of stations in the US that produce local news at 5am, 6pm, 11pm etc to market populations smaller than Adelaide.

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Many of those local stations also hold monopolies (or similar) over their city and show multiple networks.

Easier to fund news in a small city when there’s no competition.

I suspect the viability of those smaller markets also depends on the level of reverse compensation the network is asking for. I don’t know what it is like in the US but I can’t imagine it’d be anywhere near the 40-50% often asked for here, especially since it’s a relatively newer practice and the competition for affiliates (even in smaller markets) is much larger than it ever can be here.

Plus retransmission consent fees which, even if they would’ve existed here - got worked around (even considering limited satellite space) by the likes of Austar and later Foxtel putting free-to-air receivers in boxes instead.

The affiliates don’t give networks over there the revenue from local programming. The affiliates hand over the air time for the networks to make money from national advertising the in the blocks of time they program. It’s a very different structure over there.

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Yeah, affiliates here in the States only pay for, and hand over revenue for, certain blocks of programming, mainly primetime evening, late evening talk shows, the morning shows, and networked sports rights. The rest of the schedule is available for the local affiliate to program.

In large markets, like LA or NYC, local affiliates have their own early morning shows, morning chat shows, afternoon chats, afternoon and early evening news, and late night news. There’s so much local/state/national content they generate.

As markets get smaller, the amount of stuff an affiliate will produce decreases, and is mainly focussed around early evening and late night news. Thanks to legacy (think incumbency or favourable VHF frequency allocations) some smaller market stations still produce a good amount of local content.

I was staying in Amish country the other week (so it’s about 1-1.5 hours outside of Philadelphia, and it’s own TV market), and the local NBC affiliate had its own high school quiz show running in the morning. It was pretty slick and well supported by local sponsors, but also is due to the fact that it’s local institution, and the station had a high power transmitter and low VHF frequency so in the early days, it had a bigger than authorised market reach and dominated locally.

Stations with less favourable histories, channel assignments, market sizes, etc. tend to run a lot of paid programming blocks.

Also, it should noted that really large markets, like NYC, have a good selection of independent stations with big chunks of news, morning chat, local sports, and syndicated (or repeat) programming.

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I was wondering when this would happen. Finally!

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Also see discussion of the bulletin:

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According to Mediaweek, NBN’s Will Di Fulvio and Gracie Richter have both joined Nine News. Will is now a broadcast journalist at Nine News Adelaide, while Gracie is a Nine News Gold Coast reporter.

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Hopefully nbn news receives the updated title cards. Should find out in a few minutes.

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No difference so far.

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I wouldn’t expect it

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In time it will. Not even any other capitals have the updates yet.

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It’ll most likely happen when Brisbane updates there’s as nbn is controlled through them.

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