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Video: Since Today Tonight has returned on the East Coast there have been a few technical hiccups.

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Since Today Tonight has returned on the East Coast there have been a few technical hiccups: seeing title cards, cutting off the host before she has finished talking, and vision switching errors.

Last night in Brisbane, host Sharyn Ghidella introduced a story that never ran.

At least the ratings have shown a better improvement since Monday.

Check at 5:00 min.

Source: MediaSpy

14 Responses

  1. This was good, in Toowoomba last Monday night the news finished at 7pm, Nine’s 5am news came on for 2 minutes, then we went to ACA for a further 2 mins, then a blank screen, then the Block came on (7 mins into the episode), dizzy stuff!

  3. I really like the mix of 7 News and Today Tonight. I like how they’re on the same set as well. TT in NSW and VIC isn’t any different. But they should pick up their act.

  4. Thx David. I have no idea what the WA program is like, I was commenting on what I’d just seen on the embedded video above. However, having had a quick look at the TT site I can see that the jewellery store item does run beyond what was actually an intro.

    The embedded video just seems to be a clip of the story intros edited together. That would explain their brevity and why they seemed like intros. I withdraw my comment about viewer attention spans even tho’ they prob haven’t read this far down. 🙂

  5. Is that how TT “stories” are every night – just an introduction and then onto the next item? I thought the segment on jewellery store inspections was going to show some of the 40% of infractions but instead we had the reporter walking down the street delivering what sounded like an intro to the main story and the *Bam* it was over, all in 45 secs.

    Same with the collapsing wall, thought we were going to see the actual wall properly and hear about a history of problems and complaints to the council or whatever but 17 seconds later it was over.

    Perhaps the fleeting nature of the items is indicative of the attention span of the average viewer?

    And yeah, what everybody else says about the auto-bot. The hosts of these programs are not selected for their ability to think on their feet (or, just think) nor their journalism skills.

  7. I think that she’s quite confused, with nothing meaningful to ad-lib, because, no doubt, she’s got a producer in her ear who’s panicking, she’s trying to make sense of her computerised rundown on the screen built into the desk and (i’m not sure about this) the auto-cue is not called up directly by the presenter, but by an operator, probably waiting on instructions from the same producer, who’s also waiting on the server with the story on it to sort itself out!

    That’s all a guess – but it does happen. These days, when a server has a hiccup, it’s sometimes not as clear-cut wether the issue can be quickly corrected as the days when stories were tape-based.

    They’d probably lost time in the process and realised they didn’t have the time to run the story anyway if they had a network “out-time” to hit.

    I’m guessing that’s why they said goodnight and cut to the long closer “bed”, which is highlight vision edited to a special long “till-ready” version of the theme music, which then, while the last story of the night is running, is rolled from it’s start x minutes or xx seconds before the network out-time so the show can “back-time”, losing or gaining time for the presenters’ planned final words, with the aim to simply cut to, say, just the last 10 secs of the bed with the copyright logo etc and music play-out.

    In a perfect world, she’d have some stand-by script copy on hand to properly throw to the long closer rather than just crashing out. e.g.. “… we’ll leave you now with images from around the world of Valentines’ Day being celebrated …”, but I notice that there’s not much hard paper copy on her desk.

  10. She obviously paid no attention to what was going to air and just read the scripts. Back announcing a hastily aired promo with a supposedly off-the-cuff comment about Roy Morgan that had nothing to do with what we’d just seen. Then compoundng the error by promoting a story for the next night’s show. A promo that we’d just seen.

    Technical problems happen. Sharyn you need to pay attention to what’s actually happening. Professional presenters should not just be autocue robots. Anchorman indeed!

  11. Same stories that ran in NSW, except for the retaining wall item which ran in NSW last year. Those Opera House/Harbour Bridge backdrops a bit of a giveaway. Seems like a lot of resources/cost to triplicate the almost-identical program in 3 states. So much easier and cheaper to do a local “window” with same host, pre-recorded. NBN3 News has been doing it for decades.

  12. haha Sharyn still said “They’re tough markers at Roy Morgan” which would have been the back announced of the ‘Man Drought’ story. Instead this comment about Roy Morgan had no meaning given the promo for ‘tomorrow night” just ran.

    A somewhat Anchorman moment of reading whatever is on the autocue.

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