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One hour news back on Seven’s agenda?

Seven isn't ruling a one-hour news service in or out once again, as numbers for Seven News continue to trail Nine News.

seven newsSeven isn’t ruling a one-hour news service in or out once again, as numbers for Seven News continue to trail Nine News.

This also follows negative press about Today Tonight this week in which Helen Kapalos was caught in a live studio breakdown.

On the question of one hour news, Seven spokesperson Susan Wood told the Herald Sun, “The network declines to comment.”

This may well be because the network is still undecided about the best path forward for its early evening headaches.

But there’s a downside to running a one hour news -evident in today’s ratings results.

Seven ran a one hour bulletin last night from Canberra which gave them 1.07m viewers, while Nine News had 1.39m for its 30 minute bulletin.

Nine News in Melbourne was a huge 514,000 over Seven’s 261,000 -a 253,000 difference so big that it has not been bettered in nine years.

But that’s because Seven News was averaged over one hour. If we were to draw an average between Nine News and ACA the number would be 1.24m. Still a solid win, but with better context.

With any one-hour news service, be prepared for many articles judging performance on the raw data, especially those penned by “staff writers.”

While Seven is analysing what went wrong this week, it should also ask itself why it had the one hour news 24 hours after the night that it really needed it. Stories on Muslims, with or without awkward introductions, should never have been on Wednesday’s running sheet. Period.

Meanwhile there has also been talk of new game show pilots to address Deal or No Deal numbers and we await Melissa Doyle’s move to a “national news initiative.”

While Seven fiddles it is sending out the wrong messages to the audience and allowing Nine to stay the course.

In other ratings news, adjusted figures for Wednesday night have now been published.

14 Responses

  1. @HeyHey_Variety – It all depends on the contra-deals they do. The Price is Right died because the prizes were so lame. Temptation used to run weekday afternoons (around 2pm). The one at night was Great Temptation.

  2. I wonder if the new game show is Sale of the century, because on the ad that Seven are calling for contestants who are good at general knowledge.

    Was Sale/Temptation expensive to make?

  3. Has anyone else noticed that a story being covered in a 4:30 news is only glossed with comments “I’ll have more at 6pm”? Even Ten’s one hour news now has internal early “leads” (my words) with a promise of more to come in 10/20 minutes or so.

    And, as has been pointed out by others, there is rarely more that 7-10 minutes of news in a 30 minute bulletin… the rest is sport/weather/fluff which is a lot easier to produce. How can 7 stretch this out to 60 minutes without just incorporating TT? Doesn’t make a bunch of sense to me.

  4. Considering Nine have something very similar to Password as a children’s gameshow in Pyramid I’d be very surprised if they went with a format like that.

  5. The problem for Seven’s “one hour news” when they’ve done it, is that much of the additional content is just crappy Today Tonight stories padding out the hour. What about a greater focus on international news? More finance/business news (and I don’t mean the latest iProduct release)? I’ve noticed that when they’re pressed for time the markets and dollar are the first thing to get dumped.

    I want to know what’s going on in the world. Dulwich Hill, not so much.

  6. Mot de Pass replacement for Deal or No Deal as a lead in is what you are talking about.

    I could never stand Deal or No Deal It is a variation of the 3 doors problem but you are stuck with the worst door if the odds change so therefore totally pointless and random.

    At least on Hot Seat you get to marvel at how little general knowledge the contestants they select have.

    Mot de Pass is based on Regis Philbin’s game show Million Dollar Password.

    And one of many around the world based on the original Password on CBS from 1961. A players has to give up to ten one word clues about the password, without any direct reference to any part of the word, and the other players have to guess it. The quicker they do, the more points.

  7. Standing on the far front lawn of Parliament House, reading from an autocue sent from Sydney, in freezing wet weather, does what in telling me what happened today?

  8. How do they expect to make a one hour ‘news’ show when there’s barely 7 or 8 minutes of actual news in the half-hour format? More sport? More celebrity trivia?

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