Shonky awards, stolen piglets and one hour news bulletins.
Nine is experimenting with audience numbers for one hour bulletins in Sydney this week -but what about the content?
- Published by David Knox
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- Filed under News
Last night’s Nine News in Sydney had stories on the Shonky Awards for bad products, a couple of piglets being stolen and a Live cross to hear all about the city’s windy weather.
Is this what we will face if one-hour news becomes part of the furniture for Nine?
All this week Nine is screening one hour bulletins in the Sydney market, but not anywhere else. As previously tipped by TV Tonight, moving A Current Affair back to 7pm is part of a news experiment to see whether viewers take to the idea and whether it can lift the network’s evening share overall.
Nine and Seven have both recently extended Saturday bulletins to one hour (and isn’t that just the busiest news day of the week….?), as well as for bushfire coverage. But in addition to an hour last Friday, this week it is trialling an hour every night.
On Monday it split its numbers across two half hours. At 365,000 and 330,000 it outranked Seven News / Today Tonight in Sydney 258,000 / 254,000 which would suggest the strategy is paying off. But it’s early days. Nine has won the year in News and tinkering with a successful format may be short term gain for long term pain -who knows?
It also means Tracy Grimshaw is currently presenting 3 separate editions of A Current Affair for Melbourne / Sydney / Brisbane at 6:30pm / 7:00pm / 7:30pm AEDT respectively.
Tonight it looks like viewers in Melbourne will see who is evicted from Big Brother before Sydney and Brisbane, which will send the results through Twitter before plenty have seen it. There’s no way Nine can risk that next week for the finale. Expect half hour bulletins to resume or another Big Bang Theory in Melbourne as filler.
A recent TVT reader poll indicated most did not mind extended bulletins for news events, such as bushfires, but were opposed to it as regular broadcasting -despite TEN and SBS having had one hour bulletins for years.
If the intent is to make one-hour bulletins permanent (and perhaps help address programming problems at 8:30pm) then Nine isn’t saying just yet.
“(There are) no plans to change permanently,” a Nine spokesperson said.
Yet….
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- Tagged with A Current Affair, Big Bang Theory, Nine News, Seven News, Today Tonight
17 Responses
The Project is the victim in this move, now slipping under 100k viewers in Sydney and under 500k overall. If this move is permanent, it provides further reasons to put the project back to 1/2 hr at 7pm
Tracy Grimshaw is presenting three separate editions of ‘A Current Affair’ for Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane? Gee, why not present another three versions for Adelaide, Darwin and Perth?
@Pertinax we do have a 24 hour FTA news channel – ABC News 24 and it is just as good or even better than the ones on cable.
I gave up on the news on commercial networks years ago because it is more tabloid news. If the ABC can fill a good 20 minutes with real news story surely the commercial networks can do so too.
@Jason, Thanks for the clarification. Agreed that most live crosses are useless. I’m still amused by those drugs in football reports where the journalist was standing outside an empty football ground making his report.
Commercial FTA news is virtually just entertainment news anyway, royals, something viral from the internet and usually one major story de jour. The rest is filled with constant ‘live’ crosses to reporters who rarely have anything to add to the story but it’s more to prove they’re out there, somewhere. Nine is the worst. Oh and they always seem to have a ‘breaking news’ story, which of course it’s not. If you want genuine news you go to ABC or SBS 1.
@Darcey09 – It was a cross to Sarah(?) someone standing in front of a fountain (Hyde Park, I think). No storm damage to be seen there, and by 6pm, no wind. A report adding nothing to what’s already been said, as are so many of these live crosses.
Shonky would be the TV Guide on ‘Jump In’ and ‘Zeebox’ still saying that ACA was on at 6.30 and Big Bro at 7pm.
Shonky Awards nomination for next year, FTA late start times.
Ten News is an easier hour to watch than Nine’s hour the past 2 nights.
Sunrise keeps getting bigger. Today is very hard to tolerate at the moment.
Good to see nine can spell properly, it’s permanently not permantly.
Thanks, I’ve amended spelling.
The one thing Nine is not going to do is to create expensive longer higher quality more boring segments.
Extra news offers them more local content that people will watch live at a small marginal cost. And because of the public interest exemption from G and PG restrictions they can show more titillating content than non-news.
Because we don’t have basic cable we haven’t had the continuous news here like in the US. Sky News is limited to 2.5m homes. So FTA news still rates very well here.
If people want 1 hour bulletins they will rate and stay, if they get bored and flick over to something else they won’t.
Why does ACA have to be live in all 3 states? Surely there’s no difference. And surely Sydney can survive a delayed BB for just one week when its delayed into all other non AEDT areas all the time, including “the home of BB”.
I’m not sure why you were critical of the cross about the windy weather?The weather resulted in extensive damage overnight & was newsworthy.
The quality of the news hour (actually about 34 mins “news”, 7 mins sport, 3 mins weather, 16 mins comms) on Nine Sydney is somewhat a poor second to TEN’s news hour. Then WIN local news follows at 7, with ACA on GEM, and more news on 7Two, ABC1, ABC24 and SBS1.
I watch Seven News in Sydney, and in last night’s regular 30 minute bulletin they covered both the Shonky products story and the stolen piglet story. Be it an hour or 30 mins, that’s commercial news for you!
I watched Seven News here in Adelaide on Saturday which was an extended bulletin. After 20 mins they went over to the sports guy to tell us what is coming up later in sports. But by then all the news was done for me, I didn’t want to hang around for more, the main stories were covered and they had already reached the puff pieces and ‘is this really news’ segements.
With ACA at 7pm they are putting it up against the news on GEM which is odd. Perhaps the GEM news will go if they go ahead with a permanent change to Nine.
Related to Big Bang coming back for 700 filler think nine should maybe stick with the hour news … But utilise the extra time for good … More time for extended reports .. Maybe a nightly Laurie Oakes interview.
I don’t think I’d mind hour long news bulletins, so long as it doesn’t turn into an hour of the same thing repeated over and over. Surely you can fill an hour long bulletin (probably 45 minutes after ads) with things that have gone on around the world without having to resort to reporting blindly off media releases or play the same stories again and again.