That’s a good point mate - I don’t know for sure. I presumed they were pre-recorded because there’s no interaction between the presenters and the journalist. They have the journo standing, looking down the barrel for the split screen, then swoosh into the link from the journo in the one shot. I presumed the swoosh was to cover an edit.
It’s definitely possible it’s “live to tape” - but from the presentation it could equally be a pre-recorded piece sent to Canberra in advance. This would save the faff of an uplink in the field.
When you consider that with Syd, Melb, SNSW, NNSW (plus Bris and QLD when it’s not DST down south), that’s 4-6 Nine network news bulletins on the same timezone that want live crosses, it’s impractical /awkward to expect regional viewers to air 10-15 mins to get live crosses on a lead story… not to mention making the bulletin look disjointed.
And it’s not about that Sydney “does news better”, it’s about ensuring that viewers get a timely and quality coverage of major events.
I’ve said before - we did it 20 years ago. There are several work arounds:
Use a freelancer Aussie in London (nobody would know who the “Nine UK correspondent” is anyway)
Pre-record at 5.30
Wait your turn (the crosses are only about 1 minute each)
When I worked in TV, we didn’t see our viewers as “Regional”. We just had viewers. We delivered high-quality news. The fact that we weren’t in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane made NO difference.
And it was exactly like “Sydney does it better” - however as I understand there were no live crosses in the end because they didn’t.
In the US - network owned O&O’s would have a reporter do up to 12 live crosses for O&O stations, MSNBC and regional news networks.
(NBC network news would have its own reporter)
For example the Orlando shooting - a big national story - The NBC owned station group will send a reporter from their closet owned affiliate (Miami) and that reporter would do live crosses at 6 for Miami, NYC, LA, Chicago, Dallas, Philly, SF etc - all 10 NBC owned stations
They would be scheduled one after other.
No reason a Nine reporter in London cant do the same.
Your backdrop images should be slightly out of focus, this will give your set depth and make it look less 2D. It’s called depth of field.
Your local bulletin OTS after the opener shouldn’t be on an oblique angle. Pull it out of the chromakey and overlay it as a chyron. Again, will give you better depth.
NB: Think about some winter images if you haven’t already. 6.55pm in June won’t be this sunny! Better yet, get your camera crews to capture something for you and have a moving backdrop. A frozen river looks odd.
It’s interesting to note from the article that Nine News Border North East outrates WIN News in the Albury market, at least on its week on-air, and quite convincingly too. This is unlike in Canberra & Wollongong, where WIN News continues to outrate the local Nine News bulletins by quite a fair margin.
It’s not promoted as a live shot, but I assumed the footage of a random locale shown on the play out to the break after sports was live. Nope. Caught a bulletin last week that had a nice few seconds of a bright, sunny ANZAC Parade while it was bucketing rain outside.
The difference is WIN has been the only local news in Canberra and Wollongong for a very long time.
In Albury, Prime has always been the dominating force in local news with WIN trailing behind.
Interestingly, those figures indicate that viewers are still choosing to watch the metro news on Prime (Prime show a cut down version of 7 News Melbourne between 6:30 and 7) over Nine local news.
An important distinction; they’d expect less viewer loyalty in a historically more competitive market.
Back in the bad old days when WIN was the Nine affiliate , after 9News Sydney became an hour WIN had their local news at 19:00 so it had to compete head-to-head with ABC News, which the ABC won easily.
When WIN became the Ten affiliate they moved their local news back to 18:00 & IIRC that improved its viewership, and of course 9News Canberra had a rough start (very rough around the edges presentation-wise).
It’ll take time to change viewership but first if Nine can raise the standard of 9News Canberra, that’d help.
I have to agree with some of the other comments suggesting that Jo Hall presenting Victoria’s regional editions of 9News has been a good thing, compared to a relative unknown here.
PS: First impressions matter, and unfortunately 9News Canberra’s/Sthn NSW’s initial poor presentation will stick with the bulletin’s local reputation for a while, so even the improvements they’ve made since won’t be as good as if they’d got it right from the start, while the Victoria bulletins can only have benefitted from comparatively better presentation on day 1.
, after 9News Sydney became an hour WIN had their local news at 19:00 so it had to compete head-to-head with ABC News, which the ABC won easily.