Nine News Local

When all other Nine bulletins are professional and slick I think it is entirely fair to judge the quality of the bulletins after a week. Nine has been doing news since late 1956, they know how to do it and these regional news bulletins should have been up to scratch from the start.

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the first bulletin was ballarat not bendigo

Nine’s office in Springfield is nothing more than a studio flat with a camera parked in front of it, with an autocue. They have to drive a link vehicle out there and plug the camera into the truck to get the presenter back to the studio on Mt Coot-tha. There is no news room or studio at Nine in Springfield, it’s all a big PR spin.

Media students get to experience television (bullshit since it’s one camera and one autocue) once a week or whatever it is.

We’re not judging them too harshly. I (and others) expected better from 9News.
I realised there’d be some teething issues, I’m not & wasn’t expecting the same as 9News Sydney or Melbourne, but it should be better than it is.
Nine hasn’t improved much in the 6 weeks since 9News Canberra started; what have they done apart from changing the chair & introducing headlines? (They’re still missing per-story backgrounds, or did they appear when I wasn’t looking this week? I’m focusing on the broadcast rather than facebook, etc.)

The regional bulletins were announced when the SCA/Nine affiliation agreement was signed in April, so it’s not like Nine didn’t have any time to prepare.

I’m still hopeful they’ll continue to improve over time, and succeed in the ratings, but right now it’s still not up to the standard I’d expected on day 1.
It’s as if they’re reinventing the wheel, as opposed to I’d expected they’d transfer over some experienced hands to build this. The NBN news format isn’t easy so I do cut them slack, and that aspect hasn’t been awful, but the same boring background, nothing on their own website, the Sydney local news stories…still…really?

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Don’t forget the PR that it puts Nine closer to all the breaking news in the western suburbs :slight_smile:

Perhaps Nine needs an orthoepist on call :slight_smile: I’ve read that the BBC have an entire unit who guide their broadcasters with the many illogical English place name and surname pronunciations.

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Regarding the quality of Nine Regional so far, I think we can track that to the lack of ex-metro understanding from the man at the top:

Dalton explained: "Part of the agreement was that Nine would provide a local news service for Southern Cross. At the time, being in news, I didn’t get why we would do that. Operating in this space now, I get it. Nine News has a reputation for doing news properly and we can do that for Southern Cross.”

Regarding Qld: "The service for Queensland will be more scattered than is happening in NSW. This is because there are more bulletins to cover in the state. There is a lot more work involved in setting that up,” Dalton said. “We’ve got to put in two new studio control rooms at Nine in Brisbane to operate out of.”

Unfortunately it doesn’t make commercial sense for Nine to make bricks and mortar investment in SCA owned studios.

The ideal situation would be for Nine to buy SCA TV and move all regional production out of the metro cities, using the best of the remaining studios. That’s a tough and expensive undertaking, but live television is the safest way to attract viewers away from streaming. If they can get the content right, the truly local element would set them apart from WIN and Prime.

ie: honest, quality local television. It’s not cheap, but it’s actually easy to do! The acid test is simple: Would we expect viewers in Adelaide or Perth to watch a bulletin of this standard? Until the answer is yes, Nine will reap what it sows.

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I wonder if he thinks they are doing it properly.

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Important to remember that the team Producing these bulletins was built from the ground up of new hires

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While I’m sure there are some completely new people as part of the regional news teams, I thought most were either already at Nine or were brought over from other networks.

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No - 120 new people hired. Many articles and press releases confirmed this. I’m
Sure some existing staff touch both say the 9 Sydney and 9 SNSW bulletin, such as GFX designers. But by and large I’d imagine 9 News Sydney staff are 95% focused on that bulletin with minimal overlap

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They’re trying to overinflate the ‘local-ness’ of the bulletins and try and appeal to local viewers by using local landscape backgrounds instead of story-specific OTS. But yes, story-specific OTS would mean they wouldn’t have to worry about keying in local backdrops for every region.

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They should be doing a mix of both.

Local backdrops on certain stories

Big stories get specific backdrops

Easy

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certainly agree with this. Their is a huge local push but yet the local stories only make up a small portion of the news. In Victoria the local news is virtually finished within the first 10 minutes if you miss that you would be wondering what the fuss was about. Their news updates are very repetitive and nearly only contain local content, they should be producing 2 news updates one local and one national/international

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More recent figures, Prime7 still on top.

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So according to that SC has seen a 6% increase in Wollongong and 20% in Canberra from last year when it was showing Family Feud. Suspicious that there is no mention of the change in the 6.30-7.000 timeslot :wink:

" in Canberra our audience between 6pm-6.30pm has increased by more than 20 per cent compared with the same period last year and by six per cent in Wollongong."

Well that’s just spin from Nine/SCA

Up 20% and up 6% actually means down - as Nine/SCA as a network is up about 40% as a whole from this time last year as a Ten Affiliate.

Canberra is fine it’s a 3 way tie basically. Nine can close that gap over time. ABC dominates all 3 however.

Wollongong is a big issue for Nine/SCA - Prime7 is almost doubling them. They need to fix the backdrop (it looks
Like a small town marina) and market and promote the bulletin much better in Gong

Is Nine/SCA running topical promos for news In these markets?

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Nine/SCA roll out localised news to the 7th of 15 proposed regions tonight with “9 News Border North East” in Victoria an along the NSW border.

9 News Border North East Promo

The market serves 375,000 people with the largest cities being Albury-Wodonga (87,000) and Shepperton (63,000)

9 News Gippsland is the last VIC bulletin to get rolled out before the 7 Queensland bulletins

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Viewers can’t make it any clearer. They want a professional, good-quality state-wide bulletin at 6pm, not local news/or mixed national and local news.

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In Wollongong yes.
In Canberra no

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Shepparton’s (plus Mooroopna 5km to the west) population is actually 49,371 as at 2015. 63,000 would be the population of the council area.