Ok, I’ll have a crack at it from a different angle, let’s park the news part for a second and look at sport.
For the duration of most of the ratings period, Australia is in football mode, with neither of the two major codes successfully claiming to be meaningfully national.
If it was a national bulletin 7 days a week, the sport section would be hugely problematic, for example 10 Melbourne’s average weekday sport segment, is AFL, first second and third story, every day.
The northern states wouldn’t tolerate this, and the southern states wouldn’t tolerate this level of NRL, so a national bulletin would basically serve none.
If 10 were to eventually go down a national bulletin path, I think the sport section would need to be pre recorded for a large chunk of autumn/winter with two streams, basically NRL stares and AFL states, otherwise it’d be essentially serving no one.
Also for example people in SA don’t want to listen to a report about a Brisbane rail upgrade (for example), and likewise Queenslanders don’t want to hear about similar stories about Adelaide. Plus if they had a national weather forecast, then they probably won’t go into detail about many regional centres.
Only thing I think that is stopping them from going back to doing a QLD only bulletin is that the current set-up apparently rates better than the local set-up, and that there is no other news competition at 5pm.
Adelaide had a massive ratings drop, with Nine at five, which is why they went back to local. Perth had competition from Nine, which is why they moved back. They changed them as soon as money was available, or they found room in the budget/operations structure.
if it was a national bulletin they probably wouldn’t even bother with very specific state-based stories and just focus on national or international stories. Or they could potentially do what the regionals do and just have windows to insert local stories at certain points.
Though regionals are not Ten’s main concern. They have affiliates to do local news/weather updates and forecasts. If you watch Ten’s national news on the weekend their forecast mostly just covers the capital cities.
From memory they did do this at one stage. I think it was on Sundays when they had AFL rights. Rob Waters would do a Melbourne/Adelaide sport, inserted into the national bulletin from Sydney. They probably figure it’s not worth the effort these days with few resources and no major sporting rights.
Suspect ratings would further plummet at 5pm if they went national on weekdays - Melbourne had around 40k more viewers than Sydney earlier this week, I suspect boosted by the Vic floods. Sydney and Brisbane seem to both be suffering from their current format.
I think that was only during the football season, and then only when a match was being played at the time the news would normally be on (sometimes they’d even do an insert at half time).
Indeed, from the Melbourne set for both markets and different from Adelaide’s normal set at the time. In that era we all thought some local weekend news was an achievement after axing local weekend bulletins entirely in the… early 90s, I think?
These days… just grateful anything local, or indeed national, is still on air at all.
Also, Doodie on a train interviewing Elvis impersonators at the start of the bulletin and at the desk by the end of it showing random ‘feel good’ videos from the internet. Suppose it’s possible to get from Central or wherever he was to Pyrmont (22 minutes) though might have been a bit of look-live pre recording going on.
Ange also on the desk doing entertainment per usual.
‘Midday’ today felt a bit like a mini news/studio 10 hybrid though I don’t mind it for a daytime format.
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