I know there’s been a tonne of montages of Prime7 Local News posted to YouTube throughout 2017 but here’s a few more which I recorded during my North Coast trip in March for what they’re worth.
Of course since these bulletins were recorded further changes have taken place at the news service (reporter changes, additional slight graphics tweaks, etc.) but overall these clips should give you a fairly comprehensive look at what the On-Air Presentation of Prime7 News was like in 2017.
Probably a decent reason but given Prime made a big deal out of Guy’s appointment, to have him gone a few months later with no explanation suggests something happened behind the scenes.
There were issues with the 6.30 bulletin tonight. At the end of the local news this test pattern appeared for 1 and a half minutes, then they went into a report for a few seconds, then went to the first ad break, then came into segment again.
The ad break then played out again at the correct time. After it played the second time and they came back Daniel apologised for the technical problems and re-introduced the first story that was missed. Throughout the rest of the bulletin there were graphics issues - supers not playing at the right time / incorrect supers playing.
I haven’t seen much in the way of recent TV news ratings in regional markets but if Prime7 is #1 or #2 in the areas where they opt to run Seven News on relay from Sydney or Melbourne rather than producing local news, then they probably feel that’s good enough since it’s probably cheaper to relay the capital city news than producing local content.
Although it does have to be said that Prime7 is hardly the only network which runs with the “our audience is used to this and it works, so we’re keeping things the way they are” theory when it comes to their news service(s).
I have no doubt that WIN News has rated very well in Victoria in the past (particularly when WIN was affiliated with Nine), but I’d personally be very interested to know what the ratings of WIN News’ bulletins for regional Victoria were like in 2017 compared to the numbers for the more recently launched product on SCA Nine.
Yeah, I seem to recall Prime7 boasting about that in a press release - particularly because they were winning the ratings in the Northern part of the viewing area where NBN previously dominated.
My guess is that Prime decided it was too expensive to set up local news operations in markets like Ballarat and Bendigo for the return that they MIGHT get on it given that WIN and also in the case of Bendigo (in the early years of aggregation) where Southern Cross also had local news.
They may have also been deterred by the failure of local news expansions into Newcastle, Wollongong and Canberra.
And I don’t think that local news is quite the “goldmine” that you think it is, not only with set up costs, but ongoing costs to produce and staff the bulletins as well as maintenance costs would be quite high.
Worth noting that last nights GWN News was the last from their old Bunbury studio. They’ll broadcast from new facilities from Monday. Their Facebook page has a cool ‘tribute’ which was a nice touch.
