I saw this coming, and surprised it didn’t happen sooner when they did the re-brand to hit, besides the poor people out of a job, it be interesting to see if this works for them as a lot of European radio networks do the same, where all the shows or a majority come form the main capital city station and the licences around the country are treated as almost no more then rebroadcast towers.
See Capital FM, Kiss UK, NRJ, Virgin Radio France and others.
I wonder how long it will take for Triple M to follow suit.
Yeah, I can’t see the idea to do networked regional breakfast shows across the entire state going down particularly well with listeners!
I also agree with AustralianAerial that the three largest (or GFK-surveyed) regional markets of the Gold Coast, Newcastle & Canberra are likely to be exempt from these changes. At least you’d hope this is the case anyway given the overlap with the Gold Coast/Brisbane and Newcastle/Central Coast + Canberra being our national capital and Hit 104.7 being a SCA/ARN joint venture station.
Radioinfo has confirmed no changes to Newcastle, the Gold Coast and Hobart.
The Hit Network stations in Western Australia have already successfully adopted this approach with a statewide breakfast show airing weekdays, and now, the rest of the regional network in NSW, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia will follow with the exception of Newcastle, the Gold Coast and Hobart stations.
It is a dark day in radio. Many people without a job, a lot if these with tremendous talent. A lot less quality coming through.Can’t see any winner out of this.
I know a few people including myself that were pursuing a career in radio, made the decision not to do so. I’m thinking we made the right choice.
lol in Tassie there is only two SCA stations anyways so not much networking avalble anyways unless it comes out of Melbourne which wouldn’t come across very well, what with mainlanders and all that.
I would imagine similar-formatted rival stations in Cairns (Star 102.7, owned by Grant Broadcasters), Townsville (Star 106.3, owned by Grant Broadcasters), Mackay (Star 101.9, owned by Grant Broadcasters) & the Central Coast (Star 104.5, owned by Nova Entertainment) would be able to market their breakfast shows as being ‘live & local’, marking a clear point-of-difference from the networked breakfast shows on Hit.
So networked Breakfast on the regional Hit stations, but the regional Triple M’s remains local. So what that tells me is that out of the two, the Triple M brand is more important & that the audience that listens to Hit, don’t care about local content, I don’t see this experiment lasting long.
As for 96.1 SAFM, not to sure how they will meet local content requirements, given mornings announcer Sean Craig Murphy is networked from Adelaide, so there will be no local content on the station whatsoever from Monday onwards.
Shocking if true. You’d think the national capital would be large enough to sustain a local breakfast show on their Hit station.
While it’s sad that the end of all these regional Hit network breakfast shows will reduce the career paths to metro stations, when it comes to…
…wanting to boost their media profiles, this clip comes to mind:
Not sure whether I’d say SCA regards either the Hit or Triple M brands as more important than the other, although I probably would have to agree with these points:
25% of the local content quota can be locally produced advertising, which would be 45 mins. Adding the 13 mins of local news a day, and playing some community service announcements would get it up to 1 hour. But that would still leave them 2 hours short.
The 3 hour a day local content can come from a VT shift that comes from any station from the network, all they have to do is mention something local on 1 VT an hour and its classed a local shift… they are doing now on Triple M do a VT for Coffs, Port, and other stations then generic on the other VTs, they do this for Hit Kingaroy no one is in the office at kingaroy its all dont out of toowoomba.
While probably not all that unexpected, this could very well be the beginning of the end for local content. Not so much from what is lost from these changes, but what will be lost from further future cuts that follow this lead.
Localism is very important to regional radio, but as devils advocate I’m not sure how much meaningful local content will actually be lost here. In a lot of these markets, the breakfast teams have tended to be young kids from out of town with their sights set on the next big gig. They’ve delivered shows that were trying to be metro with local content largely limited “insert local shopping centre was busy before Christmas”, “the pies at insert local bakery are great” and the quarterly Harvey Norman OB. There’s actually a real possibility that if SCA put a bit more time and guidance into their remaining shows the content will be more compelling and barely less local.
Triple M is a different matter - always been more focused on local matters with more mature presenters who weren’t trying to be the next Kyle Sandilands.
This does however reduce the talent pool. When any of these shows moves on, who replaces then?(but also, where do they move on too?).
Also in these markets, they’ve had a team for a while, then someone would leave, leaving the remaining host to run solo shift for anywhere from a few weeks to a few months while a replacement was found. Sometimes the replacement was a team and the remaining host also got shafted of shuffled around. The content wasn’t consistent and I’m guessing someone decided the effort to keep on managing this was too much.
The show will go to Albury, Shepparton, Bendigo and Mildura, with Albury being the largest market and more Victorian than NSW geographically it probably makes sense.
Probably would have worked better to do a show out of Bendigo for Bendigo, Shepparton and Mildura, and have Albury’s show also go to Wagga, Griffith and maybe Orange.
Probably. And some of the more rusted on local types may find a place at Triple M. It looks like some have already been moved on.
Fact. Research over a long period of time has shown that younger audiences are more keen to expand their horizons beyond their local area. In many places, the younger audience also has a higher percentage of out of towners on short term contracts that don’t give a stuff about local.
Probably local breaks - “dual broadcasting” as Nova once put it.
The music in between counts too. A 3 hour shift, with talking only a handful of times passes provided the talking is specifically produced for that area.
If it’s true that Canberra will be having breakfast networked in from the Central Coast, it will go down like a lead balloon. I noticed there was no mention of them in the article. My gut tells me that something is still not right in Canberra. They still have the old music format and logo. Perhaps the prediction that 104.7 will switch to Triple M (allowing for a local breakfast programme), will allow Mix 106.3 to align closer to the Hit network (albeit with a KIIS style logo). I think there may be some talent switches if that’s the case.
I think one reason for this change is that it means only one studio will be required at a time, and the same support staff such as the producer can be used for both.
So when Triple M brekky hosts finish, they jump out and the Hit host(s) jumps in.
Also that the Hit brekky crew will now probably just be a single morning announcer, being another saving.
