ABC “got messaging wrong” on dumping local bulletins

ABC reversed a plan to dump Sunday night local bulletins in favour of a national bulletin after feedback from viewers who expressed trust in the familiar state based presenters.

Managing Director David Anderson, speaking in Senate Estimates yesterday, acknowledged the broadcaster got its messaging to audiences wrong.

“We heard quite a bit of loud feedback that was a you know, we built in could we still have a local board and it should be made if there was an emergency, if there’s something big or you know, what would we do? We still have people turn up to news conferences, we would still still do that,” he said.

“But what we heard was that people put their faith in what was a local presenter….they wanted the ability that if there was something that happened that their local presenter would provide it to them. So that was too soon, so we just took that off the table.”

Anderson said ABC had still intended to be able to have local coverage in the case of emergencies.

“The other thing that we weren’t able to do was convince people that we would still remain local, if we needed to be. We hadn’t sold that story well enough. So that’s why we didn’t proceed with that proposal in any form,” he continues.

“We toyed with (having) a separate bulletin in WA to everybody else, and in the end, we just abandoned that proposal. That was not something that we sold well from the beginning. So we’ll go back on that one, and just proceed on everything else.”