One looks at the metro bulletin and it’s a shiny, bold, well-produced product with all the bells and whistles.
I think that could be a big reason why lots of viewers went back to Ferguson on Prime7. Even compared to Ferguson, Nine’s regional product looks (on YT at least) quite downmarket. That’s fine for a strictly local bulletin, but not for an hour long local, national and international flagship bulletin, especially when viewers have become accustomed to Nine’s metro 6pm bulletin over decades.
That’s one reason why I think a strictly local bulletin works better… Its very hard to replicate the quality of a 1 hr metro bulletin across 4 x 1 hr regional bulletins, even though I know the “core” of it is the same bulletin.
Riverina is the Wagga bulletin mentioned above, which is scheduled for the 27th (which is the Monday).
And speaking of Riverina: unlike WIN’s Wagga bulletin, it won’t also go to Griffith presumably, seeing WIN control Nine there and not SCA - not that it means a lot, but it’d mean the MIA will be the only regional area in NSW to still get Nine Sydney news pumped in via MediaHub.
9 News Victoria hits the air March 6 with Ballarat the first city to get the state wide bulletin before an eventual rollout across 3 other areas. For Ballarat and surrounds it will be branded “9 News Western VIC”
People have really short attention spans. That’s a really long intro before even getting to the pre recorded story which would probably repeat the same facts anyway.
The real test for these bulletins will be in the Riverina and Central West. There are already Prime7 and WIN bulletins at 6pm and all four are very entrenched in these markets.
Both sub-markets are unique that Prime7 News is the clear ratings winner due to broadcasting on incumbent stations. WIN News also has a smaller but loyal audience but also broadcasts their Riverina bulletin across the adjoining Griffith/MIA sub-market.
However, SCA/Nine will be able to cross promote their news bulletins across the major commercial radio stations in Wagga Wagga and Orange.
With the regions population levels not huge (nowhere near the size of the Canberra and Illawarra sub-markets who don’t have any local competition from Prime7), I doubt any of them can survive on 5,000 viewers a night.
[quote=“Spi, post:1318, topic:2086”]
Riverina is the Wagga bulletin[/quote]
Geographically the Riverina is a huge area and it covers multiply tv regions in both NSW and Victoria. Bendigo, Shepparton, Albury, Griffith and Wagga can all claim to broadcast into the Riverina but for tv purposes you are correct Riverina is Wagga Wagga
When I last looked Wagga Wagga/Riverina is about 150,000 and Central West is about 260,000.
3 “local” bulletins isn’t sustainable on those figures. While it’s assumed Prime7 will remain on top, it’ll be a battle for WIN v SCA/Nine for second place while the 3rd placegetter will most likely close up their newsroom and produce news updates. The war continues in Albury and regional Queensland too when SCA/Nine launches there.
All 3 will be presented from “somewhere else” (Prime7 - Canberra, WIN - Wollongong and SCA/Nine - Sydney) too so there’s no local advantage either.
When you say an area with a population of 415,000 can’t “sustain” 3 local newscasts - remember - at least in the case of nine news - they are only producing one newscast for all of southern NSW - 1.4 million people.
The cost of the serving central west and riverina is essentially the staff for each area. 6 reporters, a cameraman in each and an editor and edit bay. I doubt there is much more. That’s 8 staff. Maybe 10. Not a terriblly large cost or overhead.
• Pre-recorded opening Headlines, local to each market.
• Show the desk more, rather than a zoomed in shot of the presenter 24/7
• Have Mike cross back to Vanessa after sport, opportunity for banter/discussion
• OTS graphics for stories intros.
Honestly I mean if he doesn’t know all of this stuff by now - a few emails from MediaSpy ain’t gonna help. This is a multi-million dollar effort. If they don’t have a clue, then it’s a lost cause.
As well as the issues already addressed with the new regional editions, personally I’m not particularly satisfied with the direction Nine News Sydney has been going in recent times. More about that later and in a more relevant topic.
You do realise that aside from the 6pm metro bulletins, all Nine News bulletins (Early, Morning, Now, Afternoon/Live) have Openers without the headlines right? Mind you, I do think there’s some sort of expectation to see Opening Headlines at the start of evening news bulletins.
You may or may not remember that in 2011 (the same time Peter Harvey VOs and the 2011-12 style titlecard which only Sydney used were introduced, which was around April or May from what I remember), Nine News Sydney temporarily dropped the Opening Headlines from it’s Openers. Of course with the Sydney market being one that’s very accustomed to the traditional methods of TV news presentation and this happening at a time when Nine was starting to become a serious ratings competitor against Seven again, viewers didn’t respond well to the new style of Opener and the headlines were reinstated after a few weeks at most.
Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s much more of the set (previously used for Nine News Now and as an alternative set for ACA) that can be shown on screen since the space is pretty small.
I definitely agree that Vanessa & Mike should be bantering.
