There’s some people who want both the regional news and metro news as separate bulletins as they don’t want to see the metro news presenter leave their screens for good.
I was one of those people who were sad about Peter Hitchener leaving our screens when Nine launched the regional news bulletins with Jo Hall in place of the metro news in March 2017.
When Nine suspended their regional news because of covid in March 2020 I was very happy to have Peter Hitchener back on our screens for the first time in three years.
Who remembers in the analogue days when ABCTV Channel 3 Canberra used to break away around 6.55pm weeknights to do a local news roundup, and then rejoin the network for the 7pm News from ABN2 Sydney?
The technology exists around the whole nation for the ABC to get their Local ABC Radio office to package up a 5 minute local news roundup to upload onto a server at their local ABCTV transmitter and playout at 6.55pm by mpeg splicing into the incoming state/territory feed. If only the ABC could lobby the Fed Govt for the funds?
Regional bulletins, including Canberra which is classed as a regional market will never get the funding and resources to produce a metro quality bulletin. Those days are long gone.
The ABC appears to have a policy to serve all state and territories with their own 7pm bulletin which is only fair as they all have separate state/territory government news which is not relevant to an audience outside those areas.
It’s not all about funding, it’s about the people involved etc. Look at what 7 does on the GC, a regional bulletin but with metro production standards.
7 Gold Coast is a local bulletin true, but it’s broadcasting to a metro area on a metro station. A different paradigm to a station broadcasting to regional Australia.
Not to say that it can’t be done in Canberra though.
I believe from earlier discussion on this topic that there are technical limitations on satellite capacity on splitting up state-based feeds to regional-based feeds to enable a split-feed of regional news bulletins to be inserted.
In theory what you state is correct. The 7pm bulletin is incredibly important for covering local issues, local politics etc even more so in the age of a 24 hour news channel for everything else.
It’s just that ABC Canberra fail dismally at their basic remit.
Prime ran local news in CBR with reasonable success from 93 onwards. Sure it was scaled back to 30mins, but they had strong local competition from Ten.
Not sure if Canberra has a greater ‘transient’ population portion than Sydney or Melbourne these days. Growth statistics show that more people move to CBR from interstate than leave. But I do agree that national and international news was the strength of both Ten and Prime’s Canberra 60min bulletins. Both created by Ken Begg.
What’s always been stark in places like CBR is that the metro bulletins are dominated by local news from the respective capital city. Nothing wrong with that, but the strength of NBN, 9 Darwin, Prime 6.30 and 7 Tas is they can curate stories from across the network to suit their audience.
Sure, the quality of presentation has to be there too.
If 7 wanted to, I’m sure they could attract a strong audience in Canberra with a 6pm comp, as Tasmania does. But it would take investment. Would that investment yield strong enough returns to risk their current ratings from piping in Sydney news to CBR? Not sure on that front.
I was under the impression the metro broadcasts were hauled through the DVN, while the satellite muxes were used as backups and for regional transmitters. Not that it disputes what you’re saying.
Totally agree. The local revenue is not there anymore in regional markets like Canberra. Canberra will never have the funds invested by Seven to do an equivalent metro style bulletin as already produced by Seven Sydney. CTC7 being the former incumbent had the former monopoly so as to invest in the their then 1 hour bulletin, Canberra was spoilt to have that bulletin. And I admit it was a good bulletin, but it mostly duplicated what came out of Sydney anyway with local packages added in. Aggregation split that existing monopoly revenue pie up badly with CTC TEN Capital faring worst being stuck with 3rd rating TEN affiliation. When it came to upgrade News Production at Watson to digital, the new owners Southern Cross instead opted to axe the bulletin entirely instead being the economics of Aggregation. As such, the likes of that style of bulletin will never be seen in Canberra again.
As such, the ABC already does the dual job of serving both the Canberra audience plus the surrounding Yass and Queanbeyan audience. It has to cover both ACT and NSW state politics. Hence why I keep saying, Seven should continue with the current relay of Seven Sydney 6PM into Canberra to cover NSW state issues for Yass and Queanbeyan, but insert a 5 minute segment of local news just prior to Sport and do a local Canberra and surrounds weather at the end and not take the end Sydney 6pm weather segment. That would work.
Remember Seven did not buy Prime to invest in news services, rather, more to control revenue more than what it did before and add to its bottom line.
For the ABC, only the metro areas get a feed from the DVN, including Canberra, Hobart and Darwin, with satellite as a back up. All other regional areas only get their relevant ABC TV state/territory from their local DVBT TV transmitter via the incoming satellite feed only. So when there is a satellite failure or rain out, those areas lose program.
And ABC metro feeds have the ability to split program away (or used to) from the state/territory program anyway, with Canberra being an exception being it is self contained with only the one main transmitter to service.
My proposal is not for the existing ABC metro areas to split away for 5 minutes, but all the non-metro areas at local ABC TV transmitter level to split away. Same as how regional ABC local radio splits away from incoming satellite network feeds via their local ABC radio transmitter, albeit done at local station level to their local radio transmitter.
Totally doable then, and something I’d like to see. Makes me wonder why they don’t already take advantage of this and offer one of the regional Local Radio stations in place of the metro station on channel 25.
As a born and bred Regional QLDer who now lives in Canberra, I find it frankly quite crazy that it’s suggested on here that Canberra doesn’t have enough to support a local commercial bulletin.
I grew up in the a market in Regional QLD with a population of no more than 150,000 and we had two local commercial bulletins on both 7 and WIN. While yes, the WIN bulletin was axed eventually, both did well for a long time, and the 7 bulletin is still doing well to this day.
Things have changed a lot in the FTA space since then, sure, but surely if a small 150k market could support 2 commercial bulletins, a 500k market could easily manage 1 nowadays!
For me, local news is pretty much all I watch on FTA, and I know it’s the same for many of my colleagues. 7 News Sydney only rates here because there’s no local option at 6pm.
