I would love, love, love to see it happen but sadly I don’t think it would work in this country.
The networks would struggle to fill a half-hour national bulletin. You’d have a story out of Canberra, a couple of reports from the foreign bureaus and then what? You either load up on international news or start covering major state-based stories and in both cases most of your audience switches off because they’re just not interested. Australians are incredibly insular.
The existing format works because they can mix local, national and international stories to fill the whole hour while still keeping the audience engaged.
I think for Nine the resources would be better spent investing in local news after 9pm and at Seven on a new national news chat format at 7pm.
Australia has local TV markets are intensely parochial with often fierce state rivalries (even in sport we’re divided when it comes to which football code to support during the Winter!), so the composite format is probably the best way to go for evening TV news in the major metropolitan markets in this country.
Personally I was wondering if Nine News used their Wentworth By-Election Updates as an opportunity to test a possible update to the On-Air Presentation package for their Election coverage. With elections in Victoria, NSW and federally happening over the next six months or so, one can imagine Nine wanting to have a fresh look for their coverage of those three important polls.
Anyway, I agree that the supers were way too big - especially the Votes Counted/Nine Prediction poll graphics. For Election Graphics, smaller sizes are better (especially these days with HD becoming more common) and if done well, can even be utilised to fit more information in!
