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Detail on ABC News channel nears

The ABC will reportedly advise staff of the details of its 24-hour news channel today.

The ABC will reportedly advise staff of the details of its 24-hour news channel today.

The channel, already criticised by Pay TV rival Sky News, will feature a new glass studio on the ground floor of its Ultimo headquarters as the broadcaster seeks to draw upon its significant resources.

Lateline Business will reportedly shift across the the new channel, to air at 8.30pm under a new name. Other shows are expected to be added, whilst some will get a replay from their ABC1 premiere.

A crucial question about screening live to all states is currently yet to be answered.

There are also questions about a review of its 12 foreign bureaus which has been going on for the past year. The Moscow bureau now has a video journalist for a trial period instead of a correspondent.

The Sydney Morning Herald notes the cameraman’s position there had been scrapped and the ABC’s new man in Moscow, Norman Hermant, had to document a story on train bombings with something the size of a small digital video camera. He was expected to file for radio, TV and online.

Yet the ABC is not alone in dwindling down some of its foreign correspondents. In the last two years Nine News returned James Talia home from his European base to Melbourne. It retains US correspondents in Robert Penfold and Peter Stefanovic.

ABC’s head of policy for ABC News and Current Affairs, Steven Alward, says, there is not going to be any change to the number of journalists, leaving some questions about quantity over quality still unanswered.

The ABC has determined it will launch the News Channel without any additional funding.

Source: smh.com.au

27 Responses

  1. The channel will be live to all states. For it not to be would be a lot more difficult. The question was probably supposed to be “will there be different feeds for different states,” to which the answer is probably “no”. The breakfast news program will start when Perth is sound asleep, and may finish while some of it is still eating it’s first meal of the day. The major news bulletins will probably be national.

    The ABC cannot afford to reduce it’s overseas reportage. If it gets the Asia Pacific contract it wants, things should improve in this area. But if it doesn’t get extra funding, or looses funding to Sky News Australia, then it still can’t afford to sack people. It’s foreign news coverage on the 6pm bulletins is imported enough as it is. The Midday Report is more dire, with huge chunks of it being imported from ABC America and the BBC. It’s possibly worse than SBS World News in this regard…

    In this world of ever increasing media options, the ABC’s position as the “broadcaster of the commercially unviable” is being more and more unviable. It’s reaction is to build on it’s strengths. News is certainly one of them. It can’t not have a 24 hour TV news channel, but it also can’t not provide excellent reporting. Perhaps the answer for some parts of the world is to let local broadcasters take the footage, but for Australians to edit the footage taken straight from the camera tapes and provide the voice over. Not ideal, but would provide better results than paying for someone to live in expensive parts of the world and not having time to research more deeply than someone in Bourke with broadband can.

  2. The only reason I watch the news is to see what is happening in my state. If this news channel shows national news only then it won’t be worth watching.

  3. Will we get all the Statelines back? So many people don’t loive in their original states, but are still interested in what is “home” to many. We were all robbed when ABC2 took the Statelines and local football coverage away from us, to replace them with “Station Close”.

  4. Just Reported on ABC Online
    abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/04/16/2875283.htm

    “The ABC has announced that senior journalist Chris Uhlmann is joining its continuous news channel, ABC News 24, as political editor.

    Uhlmann, currently political editor for The 7.30 Report, has worked in the Canberra press gallery since 2006 and won the Walkley Award for Broadcast Interviewing in 2008.

    Other presenters for ABC News 24, launching mid-year, include former Moscow correspondent Scott Bevan, Lateline Business presenter Ali Moore and former Europe correspondent Jane Hutcheon. Also joining the on-air team will be presenter of the 7:00pm news in New South Wales, Juanita Phillips.”

  5. It won’t be live to all states unless they remove it from the stat mux group, which would mean ABC2 and 3 directly fighting each other for bitrate (though the news channel will be able to use a lower one to relieve this issue somewhat).

    ABC would ideally be wanting to have their new playout system online before launching ABC News 24, which resolves this issue by having all channels on national feeds, but that would mean it won’t be here until late Q3 (and the election may well be called for before then).

    @chrissyboy I’d just like them to keep it going for another hour on the news channel, they are always way too short of time.

  6. It’s WA residents who will be disadvantaged the most if the ABC News Channel is delayed. In summer, ABC Breakfast doesn’t even begin here until they’ve finished the programme in the East!

    I get most of my news online now, because we’re the last to know about anything on TV.

  7. Ah, of course it’s already been criticised by Sky News. They know what the BBC has done to commercial online news and are kinda scared they might be shown up for the rather rubbish news source they actually are.

    If, of course, the ABC gets it right.

    Oh, by the way – “dwindling down”?? Tautology alert.

  8. Sounds good, the sooner the better. I think they will be able to buy shows from the BBC & America as well so it will soon fill up. They can move the ABC2 morning show accross to and in England they do a ‘morning show’ format in the afternoon, this would work also.

  9. It absolutely has to be screened live to all states. Qld is only one hour delayed in summer, and Adelaide is ½ delayed. As a Qlder, I really dislike getting my tv news on delay in summer.

    Guess we’ll wait for the announcement today.

  10. I’m pretty sure this channel will be live coast to coast. It has to be. I can’t think of a news channel in the world that is not aired live in all time zones. Especially for daytime braking news and live events. It makes no sense at all to delay it for Central and Western time zones.

    What will be interesting is if they channel is HD. HD cameras, HD stories, HD graphics. An all HD news channel like Fox News, CNN, Sky News UK, MSNBC or Canada’s CBC News Network would be awesome. Being on ABC’s HD bandwidth – I would say it will almost certainly be all HD.

    On the argument of reporters and journos churning out more content and ‘quantity over quality’, I think 2010 is a radically different news media environment to 1975 when then current ABC news gathering system was set up.

    People no longer just consume ABC news at 7pm nightly. They want it all day every day availiable on the air, online, mobile – and continuously. What is the point on spending a fortune to produce a “quality” news pieces that airs once at 7pm. It makes more sense to spread costs over more platforms and wider availibility.

    In 2010 we all most do more in our jobs with less. Why should the news gathering world be any different?

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