Nine Brisbane increased its audience by 9,000 while all other bulletins were down week-on-week. The bulletin is edging closer to the key 20 weekly wins milestone with its best result in 10 weeks. Seven’s bulletin suffered a 22,000 drop in SEQ to record its lowest average audience since week 10 in early March.
In Melbourne, Nine was down 26,000 as Seven won the 6.30pm half of the hour.
Overall Seven was down 51,000 nationally and Nine was down 24,000.
Nine News in the 5 cities was down 44,000 from last week due to large drops in Sydney (44,000) and Brisbane (25,000). Seven Sydney saw the next largest drop, losing 18,000 from the previous week’s average. Changes in other bulletins were all comparatively small.
That saw Seven win the week in Brisbane as Nine’s Friday bulletin recorded the lowest weekday audience since March and the second lowest of the 2020 survey. (Off topic - I found Nine’s bulletins in Brisbane this week even more tabloid than usual as well as showing an increasingly overt political bias against the government - a worrying development).
In Melbourne Seven won the second half hour (by 400) but Nine ended up winning across the hour.
For the second week in a row Nine News Perth was outrated by 10’s 5pm bulletin.
While Peter Overton might be the lead anchor of Sydney’s top-rating news service, it’s worth noting that he didn’t win a single ratings week in his first year, being up against Ian Ross (who was in his final year as a newsreader before his retirement) on Seven.
After Roscoe retired, Nine started to close the gap, yet Seven News still won in Sydney by a count of 21-1-18 (one week was drawn; the first week of the 2010 ratings year). Then in 2011, Nine finally overtook Seven and hasn’t looked back since.
With that in mind, one wonders how Seven News in Perth would transition out of the Rick and Sue era, when the pair are eventually broken up by retirement. I don’t think they’ll retire at the same time, though…
I’d assume Sue would retire first being seven years older than Rick. Though, I don’t think Rick could do the bulletin on his own. So what I think should happen is any of the following combinations:
Rick co-anchors with Angela Tsun, and Tim McMillan continues solo on weekends
Rick co-anchors with Natalie Barr (if she is willing to move west), and Angela and Tim continue on weekends
Angela and Tim are promoted to the weekday gig, with Rick reduced to doing weekends solo, to ease him into retirement, also because IMO I don’t think he’s of high enough standard as a presenter to do the bulletin solo on weekdays
It’s one thing for Nine to reduce (over time, probably pull out from) their commitment to regional news broadcasting, but do we seriously think they’ll go as far as abandoning Perth? Sure, STW has rated appallingly for a very long time - even during the 1990s and Early 2000s which were some of Nine’s best ever years on the East Coast.
But it’s always very important to keep in mind that there were dramatic changes to the Sydney TV news landscape during the early part of this century on all networks. Iconic newsreaders (who’s careers started in an almost completely unrecognisable media landscape to the one we have now) retired, pathing the way for the current generation of presenters who we’ll likely have on our screens for another 15-20 years.
One of these days, a similarly dramatic shift in the TV news landscape will happen in Perth as Rick & Sue retire while a new generation of newsreaders take over - some of whom might not be high on our radars at this particular point in time.
In Melbourne, Seven News was down 23,000 and Nine down 25,000. Nine won at 6pm and across the hour. Seven won at 6.30pm. For both bulletins it was their lowest audience for 10 weeks surprising considering the lockdown. Of note, ABC News Melbourne was also at a 10 week low. 10 News was up week-on-week.
In Brisbane, after rounding the result was a tie; but for the moment, given how close the numbers are in that market, I’ll leave it as a win for Seven, the result could change with the addition of a couple of thousand 7 day consolidated. Compared to the week before, Seven was up 8,000 and Nine was up 12,000.
