I don’t mind the idea of Seven employing one or two crews for Newcastle and the Hunter and changing the mid coast bulletin to Hunter Mid Coast, screening at six and a truncated Seven News 6.30.
Would work for those who are still in their cars commuting at 5.30, like most of us are.
The current ‘Coast’ bulletin covers Forster to the border. Squeezing some Newcastle news in to that might be stretch, but if they could work something out they have the advantage of already producing the 6.30 bulletin to cover ‘non-local’ news..
Absolutely. I think doing a Newcastle to Port Mac bully would work ok, then a North Coast and New England - three bulletins.
Give Newcastle a 6pm choice.
Nine was attempting to structure a merger that complied with the media ownership and competition regulations in place at the time, which imposed a number of restrictions. Southern Cross Austereo owned NRN, which was later sold to WIN and subsequently became part of Paramount’s regional network arrangements. Meanwhile, Nine owned NBN, which is now operated by WIN.
For the merger to have proceeded, a series of asset swaps and divestments would likely have been required to satisfy regulatory requirements. As a result, NBN was considered one of the assets that could potentially have been sold or transferred as part of any deal.
Though it’s not a news hour anymore, it’s 90 minutes.
Party pooper! 
I think you’ve raised some interesting possibilities, but as you mention they are theories or ideas with no real evidence. We don’t know whether a shorter bulletin, different staffing model, greater centralisation or some other production approach could have delivered savings, we don’t know cost structures
Likewise, the fact Nine explored selling NBN years ago doesn’t necessarily tell us NBN wasn’t beneficial to the business. Companies sell assets for all sorts of reasons, including strategic shifts, capital allocation, debt reduction etc Nine has also been very vocal about wanting to become a more streamlined, digital and streaming-focused company.
As for the suggestion that Nine retained weekend news because it didn’t want its brand associated with cuts, What we do know is that Nine had nearly two decades of ratings data and chose to maintain the existing model for many years, and most businesses are focused on making revenue and margins optimal. It’s possible they saw financial downside in moving away from live and local at 6: of not only lost revenue at 6 but also the dollar cost of brand damage over the long term as you point out.
Your theories are reasonable, but there are also lots of other reasonable theories.
My position is WIN has made a big mistake here. But it’s just my take - and truth is as we don’t see ratings or revenue data we will never truly know.
I think with the way Television is going the news on NBN would be eventually be cut but not for a while. If it is true that it was rating well and generating a profit it doesn’t make sense to cut it now and they could come to some kind of arrangement to keep the bulletin going with existing arrangements until a new control room could be setup etc. They could very easily kept the news going as it is. They could even used it as a another base to present their news out of instead of just using Wollongong.
Maybe I’m dreaming, but I’m increasingly curious whether Seven does anything at 6pm.
For the first time in a very long time, Newcastle viewers are essentially being asked to choose between Sydney news on Nine and Sydney news on Seven. From a competitive perspective, that’s an unusual situation.
I’m not necessarily talking about a full 30-minute bulletin. It could be a few local inserts, a 5 minute mini bulletin or the Coast bulletin expanded into Newcastle , or something else entirely. I just find it hard to believe there isn’t some value in offering viewers a reason to choose your product over the near-identical alternative sitting one button away.
Yes, FTA is in decline, but Northern NSW remains a growing market, with population growth being driven in part by people relocating from Sydney. It’s not as though there’s no commercial opportunity there at all, particularly when your biggest competitor has effectively stepped away from the plum 6pm slot.
At 855k Newcastle is even bigger than the Gold Coast market.
Maybe Seven does nothing. But if I were them, I’d certainly be running the numbers and doing something beyond what they offer Newcastle now - even if not a full bulletin.
I doubt they will it costs too much to set up with limited return
Possibly, but also set up costs could be a relatively light lift in comparison to the circa $30m ad revenue up for grabs in the Newcastle market. If your business model is in a state of decline (FTA) you need to look for growth opportunities. You can’t just cut your way to profitability, it’s not sustainable.
I’m well aware I’m running around in circles, but pulling back from local news takes away another reason to turn the TV on at all - NBN/Northern NSW were by far the best Nine affiliate as the proportion of market revenue. This chart of “Regional commercial FTA TV market share based on audience numbers” from Nine’s own sale documentation tells a clear story (Ten in light blue. Nine in Gold, Seven in dark blue)
The power of the incumbent broadcaster, anchored by strong local news means huge amounts. Seven Queensland, NBN Northern NSW and Seven Tasmania all have in common their very strong local news offerings - but the same core Nine/Seven schedules - I really don’t know what else you could put the differences down to?
Indeed, the professional analysis says as much:
As noted above, Seven Network has the largest commercial FTA market share by audience numbers across each regional broadcast TV segment in Australia, with the exception of Northern and Southern NSW, which are Nine Network’s strongest markets. The Company’s market share in these regions is underpinned by strong local news and NRL viewership.
WIN doing 5% worse in SNSW than NBN with the same Nine product and same NRL boost shows their bad local news product hurts their potential. Seven’s dominance in Queensland despite the lack of NRL shows just how much a good news product can set you up.
Obviously the product the NBN staff will be able to put out initially will be better than what WIN serve up in SNSW right now, but the ad sales at 5:30 will be nothing like that for prime time, which will hurt the viability and start the spiral all the other WIN bulletins have faced.
There is really going to be no better time for them to strike with NBN (by way of WIN) vacating the 6pm slot for local news. If they could poach a familiar reporter or two to start with (maybe Tyson Cotrill who seems to mostly do court reporting these days, especially if reports are true WIN will be cutting back on that stuff with no internal legal department, Jane Goldsmith if she’s not going to Nine) they could leverage off the back of the Coast and New England bulletins to start slow and test the waters. Surely Newcastle viewers aren’t that in love with Mark Ferguson to give it a try. A few billboards and promotions on their radio stations and it could just be viable.
Not sure I agree - it’s all interconnected.
The reality is that WIN runs an incredibly lean operation, partly out of necessity from their days as the Ten affiliate, but it also reflects that they are attempting to live within their means in what is a rapidly shrinking revenue market alongside increasing costs.
Handing over >50% of your core revenue before you even cover those increasing costs makes it challenging too - a better news service would possibly bring in more viewers and more revenue (NNSW aside), but also at more cost. Even if they were able to negotiate a better arrangement for revenue sharing during local news, it realistically wouldn’t have much impact. There is also little doubt that a good local news offering gives a ratings bump.
But it’s been clear for some time that the NBN News offering doesn’t fit the WIN business model, despite its performance, they are so wildly different. For a company that has invested in homogeneity, it was hard to see them retaining NBN’s offerings.
WIN aren’t exactly walking into this blind either, because they’ve been doing NBN’s ad sales for quite some time now, they’ll be well aware of what is at stake. They’re clearly willing to risk ratings to do this, but at the same time, a lack of news competition in their biggest sub-market probably makes that easier to swallow.
As someone who lives in NBN’s area, its performance belies the product offering and some of the almost romanticism that the service is held to hides that it’s largely not evolved with the times. But don’t take that as some kind of support for the changes WIN is making, because they’re not great, but short of some kind of regulatory intervention, it’s better than the alternative (which is effectively noodle updates)
And as I’ve said before, I get the distinct impression that Nine is not interested in facilitating (eg providing access to their reports, live crosses etc) a composite 6pm bulletin run by WIN, which really leaves them with no choice but to go local news only at 5.30pm.
WIN have made it clear they only do their own product, they won’t mix and match, which is unfortunate as I think they would have excelled at it, 10-20 years ago.
They actually had such a product in Tasmania but alas it wasn’t worth the extra effort. As bacco says, they will stick to their existing model.
But it is a massive positive that they see fit to invest in a control room in Newcastle and the question will be what else will come from there in future. They have the whole regional market now except for Remote/Central and Broken Hill/Port Pirie so I would expect they will use both studios to divvy up their output.
I know it wont happen because it hasn’t happened yet, but if WIN emcored the local news at some point during the evening on 9Go or 9GEM, it would give an alternative slot for viewers to catch the local need they missed at 7pm. As an example, The Golden Girls or other US sitcom could air on 9GEM at 7pm whilst WIN News aired in regionals that received it. I wont do a schedule outline on how it could be done because thats more mock schedule territory. But there is always an option like that
Have to agree, a repeat in GO! or GEM would make sense in place of a 30 minute tenth repeat not sure about 7pm. I wouldn’t expect such a move to have a wild impact on the sales teams but it would be dependent on getting the model right there to provide the value for their potentially displaced clients as I would expect variance between the two.
I suggested 7pm as you dont want it on too late, but not too early as there would be no point of an encore. The other option would be in the 9:30-11pm window, but you risk getting it to air too late
