Wendy Kingston to front Nine News Now
Wendy Kingston will front a one hour afternoon news service on Nine, aimed at women.
- Published by David Knox
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Wendy Kingston will return from maternity leave to front Nine News Now, a one hour afternoon news service aimed at women.
Set to screen at 3pm from this week, it will target mothers with young children and women over 55, and feature news, panel discussions and showbiz, and only limited coverage of sports.
The move is a first given that the timeslot has been home to US showbiz show Extra at 3pm and children’s content at 3:30pm. But children’s shows can now be screened on multichannels, despite them not fitting GEM or GO! brands according to Nine’s own responses to TV Tonight‘s recent multichannel survey.
Extra is bumped to 4pm with Nine Afternoon News remaining in place at 4:30pm and Nine News at 6pm.
Nine will now be airing 7.5 hours of news and current affairs each weekday. ABC News 24 will also step up the content with a 5:30pm bulletin this year,
Nine’s news director Darren Wick joked that the Nine was slowly “getting to 24-hour news by stealth.”
Nine’s previous attempts at arvo chat shows, The Catch-Up and THIS afternoon, were both short-lived.
The new-look show is scheduled for Tuesday but may screen as early as tomorrow subject to cricket programming.
Source: Sunday Telegraph
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- Tagged with Extra, Nine News, Nine News Now, The Catch-Up, This Afternoon
9 Responses
Never realised real news was gender specific.
Wendy is hot and a very good news reader, not hard too see why they chose her for the job.
Hopefully it will be like a one hour version of Kochie’s Angles !!!
This is far to much so called news by Channel 9.
3.00-4.00pm
4.30-5.30pm
6.00-6.30pm
6.30-7.00pm
Does not particularly interest me..and I am somewhere in the target group….
And why do I have this nagging feeling…that I read somewhere…ages ago…the Nine let Wendy go?!?
What were they on when they thought of that time slot the mothers will be picking up the kids from school and kindergarten and I would say a fair majority of the over 55’s will be doing the same with the grandkids
Won’t most mothers of young children be out picking them up from school/preschool/afternoon kindy at 3pm? Also, not sure how you can target (presumably) younger women and women over 55 at the same time.
Don’t think Wick will be able to completely annex Nine’s schedule for news. He’ll have a hard time digging The Big Spam Theory out of its bunker.
this would be better suited to the 10 am timeslot, but then as anyone would know, Mothers don’t have time to sit and watch the news. the Circle was so success full because it was a light entertainment program and was on in the morning,. when it moved to 9am it began to struggle.
9 would be better of having a new local talk show on after mornings. or move mornings to 12 and call it midday…
Nine’s research must have missed that 3pm – 4pm is school pick-up time. Why not just update the format of the 4:30pm news?
That is not news.