A little nit pick at the intro - the line “should we all start wearing masks as more southerners are allowed back into the Northern Territory” is obviously written by someone at QTQ.
The places they are opening up to have no community transmission or absolutely no COVID-19 cases.
Small nitpick here but I wish that Paul started off the bulletin with something like ‘Good evening I’m Paul Taylor and welcome to Nine News Darwin, great to be with you’. Would be a nice local touch instead of the cold open.
I agree that they should use the veteran Darwin voice over for the opener.
It would also be nice to see them experiment with the set a bit and have fullscreen story graphics and some angles.
Content wise, it’s quite good. I’d add some lives at the start. Maybe it’s a personal preference, but I also would not have so many stories crammed after weather (maybe it’s to stop a turn over to ABC).
Presentation:
A live shot needs to be added
V/O saying " Nine News Darwin with Paul Taylor" should be added. A “Good evening” in the intro wouldn’t go astray either.
Utilise the set for OTS graphics and different angles with the lightboxes. ABC manages to do it with just one plasma and Nine News Now used to in the replica Sydney set (as well as a slow zoom at the start). The set isn’t that basic.
I hope they use the location weather to advocate community events, not just stand in front of a skyline each night. Festivals, schools etc.
Paul Murphy needs to be added for sport (preferably on the same set). Maybe he’s on leave.
I’d also give 18.55 weather more time to include NT rainfalls and radars and maybe some more 7-day forecasts for other NT cities. I’d put ‘today’s temp’ as an OTS/super and not an overlay graphic. I’d also move the ‘Catch of the Day’ to the end of weather (again maybe it’s a QLD thing) to allow banter with Paul.
A great news bulletin! Just goes to show that Nine can produce a good “regional” bulletin if they put the effort in.
Instead of this “catch all” “local” bulletin that they are airing across Regional markets, they should have just picked a few key markets and put together a proper bulletin just like this one that they’ve got for Darwin.
Combine Cairns and Townsville and have a proper “North Queensland” bulletin, a dedicated Canberra bulletin. Pick some markets and do it properly instead of doing a poor job across more areas.
I don’t know how this would sound but couldn’t they potentially get Jono Uptin to do weekends and work out a way by pre-recording stories etc sort of like a 10 News First Brisbane/Sydney model?