Another little piece of the Ten News puzzle for you. The final… (well, you know… take that with grain of salt) “Ten Morning News” at 10:30. Big round of job cuts at Ten in December 1990. It was not their best Christmas, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last of many such “dark days” at Ten. Their goof tape at the time depicted tumbleweed blowing through the empty Sydney newsroom and a general sense of doom.
Ron was on hand for the last broadcast. They shuttered the Melbourne production team - that usually pumped out the show with the likes of Brigitte Duclos, Jennifer Hansen and Tracey Curro - even before the program ended.
This was just a few days before “10 TV Australia” was put to rest. There was something about that crappy temporary-looking “10” logo in those summer promos that told me something was going on…
An age-old problem for news anchors is which person is going to be introduced by the VO guy on air first! TEN rotated the order for its Sydney intro in '91 - some nights, it was Katrina first, and some nights, it was John! Must have been part of the deal they negotiated to sign them up! (Tonight, as you can see, John gets top billing.)
By the way, Kate always got top story duty - which kind of made sense, as she was a total pro, old-school, commanding ‘authority’ kind of reader!
How many different newsreader combos did Ten have in Sydney back then? Every video I see on Youtube has different presenters/set/graphics in that late 80s/early 90s period.
Apologies if I’ve missed a presenting team or two but going from 1988 to the mid-90s before that decade or so of stability, I’m pretty sure that these were Ten Sydney’s main newsreaders:
*Steve Liebmann & Geraldine Doogue (1988-89)
*Ian Leslie (Early 1990)
*Eric Walters (1990-91)
*Katrina Lee & John Mangos (1991)
*Katrina Lee & Tim Webster (1992)
*Ron Wilson & Sandra Sully (1993)
*Ron Wilson & Juanita Phillips (1994-95)
One of our older Sydney viewers might know the timing with the Sport/Weather presenters on Ten’s Sydney news during this timeframe a bit better, but I think Mike Gibson presented Sport on Ten’s Sydney news (similar to what he did with Hendo at Nine, before defecting in 1988) for a few years? Presumably Tim Webster became Ten Sydney’s main Sports presenter in 1993 or around that time, whether this happened before the launch of Sports Tonight I’m not sure. Rob Mundle, Alex Wileman, Ray Wilkie and Brian Bury were at least some of Ten Sydney’s weather presenters in the pre-Tim Bailey era.
Seven also changed it’s Sydney newsreaders a few times during that 1988 to 1996 time period, while Nine was incredibly stable - probably the reason why they were the ratings leader in Sydney news for so long!
Longer version of the video I just uploaded. Enjoy.
Note that the areas included in the weather report represent the Ten Network’s reach in the pre-aggregation days - the Northern Rivers of NSW, Capital TV in Canberra, Launceston (not Hobart) and so on.
I was just wondering how everyone thought about Seven Nightly News back in the 1990s when it was losing badly to National Nine News. Had a look at some of the montages from the 1990s-early 2000s, and I felt that Seven News was just as good as Nine back in those days in terms of creativity, sets, production and content. Was it the presenters that made Nine better than Seven?
For a few years in the Late '90s and Early 2000s, National Nine News if anything actually had more dated On-Air Presentation standards than it’s Seven or Ten equivalents. It basically took increased competition for Nine to lift their game in the news department.
I don’t remember Seven being that awful, but then again I was a lot younger back then, and I only really paid attention when we had the ABC News on at dinner time …
Well, it was the era of the 2 Brians (in Syd / Melb) and they were pretty much untouchable.
I was living on the Gold Coast in the late 90s, and in some ways, I preferred Seven’s Frank Warrick and Kay McGrath to Nine’s Bruce Paige and Heather Foord.
I still watched ‘National Nine News’ there though, I guess that brand had more pulling power to me.
