Encore Score: The newsreaders
With the battle for early evening eyeballs increasingly important for commercial TV networks Amanda Meade looks at the numbers to see if the most popular newsreaders are the most watched.
Despite dramatic changes to the media landscape in the past ten years, the traditional 6pm commercial news bulletin on free-to-air television remains a key building block in a network’s schedule – get it right and you can carry big audiences over to your primetime shows. Some bulletins have even expanded from 30 minutes to an hour in the main markets of Sydney and Melbourne.
Mark Ferguson
I find it rather strange that ABC presenters are not included in the survey.
Hi Gavin,
ABC newsreaders are included in the survey if you click the link at the end of the article and search.
However, we decided to exclude them to focus on the core of commercial TV networks for the sake of this piece.
Cheers,
Alex – Mumbrella
But on the ABC and SBS they read actual news – on the commercials half of their supposed news time is taken up with infotainment, product placement and self-promotion.
opps, I thought Rick Ardon was on Seven, with Susannah in WA . Perhaps you know something we don’t?
Interesting but I wonder how relvant is it? I think Hitch is great. Grew up watching him but I don’t watch the tv news anymore. I really like Magda Szubanski but I wasn’t interested in watching The Spearman Experiment. Whether we like someone is only a partial reason as to why we watch something.