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No plans for Today Tonight return

With Seven News at #1, there are no plans to fiddle with early evening schedules.

Quash any annual talk of rumours, Seven has no plans to resume Today Tonight on the East Coast.

Seven Head of Programming Angus Ross recently told TV Tonight, “We’re absolutely rapt with how Seven News is going. It’s the #1 news service in the country, with an hour news service in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane working really well. Obviously The Chase is on absolute fire, leading into it.

Seven News is #1 so we’re not going to do anything to tamper with that, other than pushing harder to extend our dominance and keep improving in Sydney & Melbourne.

Home and Away at 7:00 is an extremely important show for us, and funnels a very important audience into our primetime schedule. As we always say, they are our bricks in the wall. They’re not going anywhere,” he said.

“5:00 and 6:00 are both up in audience, year on year. It’s a good story to tell.”

Today Tonight still airs locally in Adelaide and Perth where it consistently wins its timeslot.

12 Responses

  1. You couldn’t pay me to watch the news on 7 and 9 let alone tt or aca. This news war between 7 and 9 is an archaic throwback to when tv remotes didn’t exist in the belief that people were too lazy to get up and change channels during the evenings. 7 and 9 are so pathetic that it’s beyond comprehension.

  2. If SA & WA bulletins were axed this year for the 1 hr news, then I’ll combine the ratings for 6pm with 6:30pm news together in one program for 7 & 9.

  3. The three markets where Ross extols the apparent virtue of fluffing out their “news” to an hour are the three markets where they are consistently beaten by Nine. They can thank Perth for shoring up their share with 18% of their national viewers.

    As Jason says, a lot of items are shown in the hour that would have previously been on TT.

  4. The TT stuff like supermarket surveys / petrol price wars / Myer’s latest / movie promos, etc etc are to be found in Seven News, and in Nine News too. Why separate them into another program?

  5. Yes – exactly – the first half of Seven News is constantly behind Nine in Syd, Bris and Melb although the second half sometimes rises above Nine. In Adelaide and Perth where Seven News is only half an hour, with TT after it, it whips Nine making Seven #1 for the hour nationally.

    Having spent a night in Adelaide recently I can see why Nine News loses to Seven – while it is the same format as Sydney, it is dreadful compared to Sydney’s Nine News and their half hour Seven News.

    I only watch the first half hour of Nine News and I dare say that if Seven did go to half hour news in Sydney it would rise further above Nine as the one hour news drags out too much, loaded with too many “not really news of the day” stories to fill the time.

    1. If you look at yesterday’s (Wed 15/2) ratings, your comment is incorrect. You could maybe make a case for Brisbane, but that’s about it. “90% of the population” don’t live there, do they?

      Melbourne was marginal and actually favoured 7 over the hour, while Sydney was also not a huge gulf.

    2. If Nine News win by a mile where 90% of the population lives’ then you’d see Network wins for nine. And they are not winning.
      It’s very competitive along the East Coast at the moment.

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