I think they should just cut the “Live from 50 Cavil Avenue, Surfers Paradise” line from the voiceover.
I mean, we don’t have “Live from Sir Samuel Griffith Drive, Mt Coot-tha” or “Live from Artarmon Road, Willoughby” type voiceovers for Nine News in other markets!
The latest in an ongoing series of absolutely ridiculous “Special Reports” from Nine News Queensland…
Surely the reporting team at Nine News Queensland could focus on content that’s of greater significance to their audience than the value of Ekka showbags? Stories like this wouldn’t convince me to be a regular viewer of the bulletin if I lived up there, that’s for sure!
Despite Nine’s “exclusive” and “first on” tags on the Ekka story - this virtually identical story was on Seven News tonight where their sponsorship of the RNA show allowed access to every show bag on offer. It was also important enough to rank as a headline story
I’m sure everyone on Media Spy is more than aware that here in Sydney, our local media is incredibly fascinated…no, extremely obsessive about our Royal Agricultural Show every year (often right to the point of national coverage, such is the Sydney-centricness of Australia’s national media), something that’s probably amplified by the fact that it’s held at Easter.
But from what I’ve seen, the Sydney stations have typically taken a fairly unserious and often light-hearted approach to coverage of the showbag launch (let alone the main event itself) with said reports usually buried deep in the bulletin…maybe shown just before the cross to sport at the earliest. That is probably how it should be done, instead of…
Clearly there has been a game of musical sets going on this year.
The timing works very nicely as well. Sydney launched its new set at the end of January and then there was a month in which they trucked the Sydney set up to Brisbane and got it set up in the temporary studio before its late-February launch (it appears that the only things moved across were the plasmas and the piece of glass on top of the desk).
The old Brisbane set was then carefully dismantled and trucked to Newcastle to be set up at NBN. Once the new Brisbane set launched a week ago they were able to truck the final pieces down to Newcastle (the desk top and the backdrop plasma) and launch the ‘new’ NBN set.
Mike Dalton is basically the successor to the late Peter Harvey (who did these sorts of reports for the last decade or so of his career) as the fluff/puff piece correspondent for Nine News Sydney. Before Harves passed away, Dalton did similar “quirky colour” pieces for Today.
I have no idea who Seven Sydney’s main fluff/puff piece correspondent is these days, but it was Damien Smith prior to his departure from the network after 20 years at the start of this year.
Oh yes, I seem to recall seeing a ridiculous “gold panner” report PTC from him on the former semi-national edition of the Afternoon News a while back.