Yes, I agree re branding… switching from NBN to Nine News branding will make little difference to ratings, and I think will make the bulletin a much more watchable product by having a consistent news brand throughout the news hour.
Local content is okay in Newcastle and along the North Coast, but is less than adequate on the Central Coast and in the North West. Tonight on the Central Coast for instance, there was just one local report in the six minute news window, the rest of it was news from Newcastle.
Maybe Nine doesn’t want a change to happen until they are finished with their main bulletin changes (with Queensland / regional QLD being the final aspect), then they will move the focus to new sets / name inline with the rest of the country for NBN
Don’t forget Darwin, of course. It’s also a Nine owned station. Still, the current NBN set isn’t upgraded for HD, and the supposed new space somewhere in the Newcastle CBD would be their trigger.
Would be pleasantly surprised, but not holding my breath.
The next best thing to the national set would be just a flat video wall like Studio 3 Sydney with a metro 6pm desk. More or less identical to the tighter shots of metro 6pm news just without the rest of the extravagant set.
As I’ve said before, personally I think the move to new studios would be the best time to fully transition to the Nine Network/Nine News brand for NBN.
Realistically, I think NBN News (or Nine News Northern NSW/Gold Coast) is more likely to get something like one of the old metro Nine News sets in their new studios rather than anything which resembles the newer capital city news sets for Nine News.
This should’ve been the step they took back in March 2016 when they started to retire the NBN brand, not after they’ve already reduced it mostly to “Nine”. It’s also about time they updated their website, so better late than never…
The branding is quite confusing to me, I thought I was now only seeing NBN branding on locally made stuff for the 6pm news, but that “Cash Grab” one obviously looks like it’s made by the network.
I reckon it’s (4) from your list, perhaps it’s “one last hurrah” to run a competition off the NBN brand before everything including news is switched over 100% to Nine branding, with news to be relaunched shortly, possibly even from its new studios?!
Both the old and new domains for the NBN website now have the 9|NBN logo, but neither redirects to the other… Two separate websites with the exact same content?
Nick I don’t think their web admin is the most switched on based on how the websites are built and how they are spread across so many domains. They should be doing a re-direct in the .htaccess file to preserve their SEO.
