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‘Quirky’ items not about to dumb down SBS World News

SBS World News wants to stop viewers from switching off, but denies it will dumb down its content.

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SBS has responded to media reports suggesting it plans to dumb down SBS World News with more ‘quirky’ news items, to deter viewers from switching.

It follows The Guardian claiming executive producer Andrew Clark writing to staff to include colourful stories because stories about the Middle East, refugees, Indigenous Australians and Ebola were “a turn off.”

But an SBS statement on Fairfax stressed the news bulletin’s “primary focus” remained major international stories.

“The executive producer’s email to his team was about story placement and promotion – not story selection – and structure of the second half hour of the bulletin in order to grow audiences,” it read.

“The second half of the SBS World News bulletin has always contained a diverse mix of stories, many focussed on multicultural issues, such as Naomi Selvaratnam’s report on blackmail in Australia’s Indian community and Katrina Yu’s story on the challenge of young Chinese finding partners …”

SBS is trialling a news teaser at 6:55pm to prevent viewers from switching to ABC News at 7pm.

SBS recently made changes to Dateline to include lighter stories.

8 Responses

  1. SBS World News is already being dumbed down. Some of their reporters are dreadful, merely clones of those on the other commercial ‘news’ shows. Besides, World News is no longer compulsory viewing now that we have Micallef’s “News from Countries Other Than Australia” segment.

    1. How do you think it is being dumbed down? Tonight it ran stories on the Nigerian elections, deaths in Yemen, one-child policy in China, remittance problems for Somali-Australians, a war memorial for Indigenous Australian servicemen and women, and a story about grandmothers in a remote Philippines village training as solar power engineers. Bet you wouldn’t have seen any of those stories anywhere else today.

  2. We watch SBS news because they cover world news better than any other service.
    (We do switch off when the sport starts, about 40 minutes in.)
    Lately it has been very annoying to have items announced as “coming up” and then the newsreader goes on to another story!
    And I do mean very annoying!
    That’s the sort of stuff they do to try to keep the dummies from drifting off. Stop it. Now.

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