absolutely. She’s a rising star. Read in Stellar magazine yesterday that they were even considering her for the plum 6pm role in Brisbane in previous years.
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Saw a video of Samantha presenting just then. I daresay they should put her on weekends in Brisbane because their current weekend presenters are…BAD.
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Definitely clunky tonight, enough to be disappointing & surprising.
9News know how to do better than this; the presentation of all the other bulletins out of TCN9 (even ignoring each evening’s 9News Sydney) is - generally - vastly superior.
It’ll be interesting to see how the rest of the week goes, given some of the recent issues with other bulletins (graphics, automation), hopefully some of the faults with tonight’s 1st 9News Canberra bulletin were similar in nature and will be quickly resolved.
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Samantha Heathwood has been around for years. She is a great reader and very easy on the eye. Best choice for the gig to be honest.
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I don’t get the hate for Darren and Alison.
I think because people consider her to have a lisp and Darren “bug-eyes” puts them off. I say focus on the experience, the bulletin, the reporting, you know, the things that actually matter. Darren Curtis was reporting on NBN 3 when I was a bloody uni student and I’m nearly 50.
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Hopefully all of these are just teething troubles and will be sorted before the Illawarra bulletin launches. With any new service, teething troubles are to be expected. But I do agree that Nine could have done a better job.
That’s one of the keys here. Nine’s other bulletins are mostly capital city based and as such they would pour countless hours and dollars into them to make them as polished and competitive as possible as that’s where the focus is, hence why these new regional bulletins are not as polished.
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I’m wondering if they approached Danielle Post, currently Chief of Staff in Nine’s Sydney newsroom, to read the regional NSW bulletins. She is well known and respected through her work at WIN anchoring the Canberra bulletin and reporting in the Illawarra. It just seems to me that she is the obvious choice for this.
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Their ‘regional’ standard is their excellent service in Darwin - the market or even ownership shouldn’t matter when it comes to establishing their brand.
Seven Local News looks extremely polished - just because WIN’s their competition in Canberra doesn’t mean they can be complacent - I’ll reserve judgement until I see the whole product, but Nine should have blown their competition out of the water here.
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I guess one difference here is that Nine are simply doing this to meet their side of the affiliation agreement - they are not going to be directly affected by ratings or ad revenue from this (they get 50% however, so it’s an indirect consequence).
So I think they have done this as cheaply as possible.
But I hope there is a decent opener in the works, not just a title card.
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Did the Canberra bulletin use cuts of the “Cool Hand Luke” theme before breaks?
Of course, that’s the 9 News theme. They just trailed off thought, they didn’t end on the sting.
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Sounds rather disappointing so far. Quite surprising result from Nine. Waiting to see the video, though.
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Darwin is one of the capital cities, is it not? Yes it’s technically in a regional market, but it’s a Nine O&O station and a place where they want to focus their revenue. Also don’t forget, Darwin (and NNSW for that matter) along with Seven Local News have had years to come to the standard that they are today, the SCA Nine services are only a few hours old!
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I was hoping they’d use the Southern Cross SA News theme. It’s almost as iconic as “Cool Hand Luke” and “The Mission”.
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That doesn’t make any sense?
All the imagery was 9 News right through, it’s all stuff we know, it was just put on in a slightly different way than we’d expect from the bulletins previously. No doubt that’s all do do with the inserting of the local aspects to a live program.
It needed to be consistent with the other 9 News branded bulletins that are already on the station, so I don’t think anything other than ‘Cool Hand Luke’ was EVER going to be used, particularly given that Nine are producing it.
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Darwin’s also a smaller market than every single other market they will be launching in - 50% of revenue from Canberra (also a capital city) is more than they’ll be making in Darwin.
Nine have huge resources and plenty of talent - their product, regardless of market - should reflect that. This isn’t “Southern Cross News” - this is Nine News, and the quality should reflect that.
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I believe that it was a joke
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That doesn’t look quite as bad as I was expecting from comments on here.
Add in a proper opener, some OTS graphics, and some wider shots of the set and it would look a lot better.
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