0/5

Prime adds new bulletin

Prime7 is starting a new 6.30 national / international news bulletin on Monday.

2014-02-23_0047Prime7 is starting a new 6.30 national / international news bulletin for all local markets on Monday, excluding Albury.

Daniel Gibson (pictured) will host out of Prime’s Canberra studios live at 6.30pm.

Natalie Forrest will be reading for Orange, Wagga and Albury from now on.

Fiona Ferguson will continue to do Tamworth and North Coast NSW.

18 Responses

  1. What Prime should have done is kept screening the hour long Seven News service in their incumbent areas, but insert a local news window of 10 minutes over the top of the features segment before the sport segment. NBN has been doing this on their aggregated hour long bulletin for a very long time and it works well. None of the regionals produce enough local content to fill a 30 minute bulletin anymore. Therefore Prime could run a separate 10 minute segment for Orange with Orange related content and a separate 10 minute segment for Dubbo with Dubbo related content, instead of packaging both Orange and Dubbo content in a 30 minute bulletin and squeezing in a half arsed 30 minute national bulletin so as to keep running the incumbent 30 minute bulletins. Prime would be better spending the money on resuming local news as 10 minute windows for Canberra, Wollongong, Newcastle, Gold Coast…

  2. We had Daniel Gibson reading our prime local weather for sometime,that is till now and I will watch his new venture with an open mind, but I always saw him as a self promoting smooth operator, and always thought his short weather items were close to my maximum viewing endurance.

    But I do wish him well, even if I do eventually change my national news sources, to another network simply because prime has now changed my access to the half hour of 7’s news bulletin that followed our local news, and do wonder how long it will be before our local news will be absorbed into a prime news hour read from the Canberra studio?

  3. Will this apply to Prime7 Canberra as well? One hour of Seven News being replaced by 30 minutes of a country station’s selection of news items? Can’t see the politicians taking too kindly to that.

  4. Case closed with Smacca’s comment below. Of course, some markets like Tasmania where they’ve seen their hybrid local/national WIN News & Southern Cross News bulletins simply extend for an hour was easy. However, most other regional markets have had to do some real juggling thanks to Nine & Seven’s one-upping.

  5. The only dumb thing happening here is 7 News/9 News going for a full hour – forcing Prime7 and WIN to either risk moving their local news to a shitty timeslot or making their own hour of local and national news. WIN News is getting hammered at 7pm by ABC News and Home and Away, so obviously Prime7 aren’t prepared to move local news to 7pm. They’re better off producing a half hour national bulletin, which I’m sure will just be 7 News stories anyway.

  6. At last! For the first time since Southern Cross Ten in Victoria put out their last version of Ten Eyewitness News from Bendigo, country Victoria finally has a locally-produced national news service – but remember, that’s because Seven have recently upped their own east coast 6pm news to an hour-length format and Prime needs to make 30 minutes of that airtime available for their existing local half-hour bulletins (the main reason why Southern Cross Ten did the same thing back in 1992 and again in 1993).

  7. Let me get this straight: From tomorrow we get Prime Local News with Nat Forrest at 6pm, then Prime National News with Dan Gibson at 6:30? And so Seven News with Mark Ferguson has been dropped? Can’t wait to see how that rates against WIN’s 9 News/WIN Local News combo.

    I seriously doubt that Dan Gibson has the necessary gravitas to carry this off.

  8. What about Newcastle and surrounding areas? Prime hasn’t done local news in this area for donkey’s years. NBN is the only choice. I’d be surprised if Prime went up against them…

  9. Wollongong/south coast NSW? Prime built a Taj Mahal broadcast centre at Wollongong but ironically, W’gong hasn’t had a Prime Local News bulletin for ages. Does south coast NSW continue with Seven Sydney’s hour?
    Prime should do what NBN3 Newcastle has been doing for the past 52 years, 7 days a week. Unlike at WIN and Prime, the world doesn’t stop for the weekend at 7pm Friday.

Leave a Reply