Seven dumps Today Tonight in favour of one hour bulletin on east coast
Channel Seven has confirmed that it is dumping Today Tonight in favour a one hour bulletin in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
The announcement was made this morning to staff by Seven CEO Tim Worner.
The move has long been speculated and comes after the Nine Network gained a ratings bump earlier this year by moving to the one hour format. However, Today Tonight will continue to air in the Adelaide and Perth markets.
In his email announcing the changes Worner said that staff on the east coast would contribute to “news investigations and features” in the new hour long bulletin under the direction of former Today Tonight executive producer Max Uechtritz who will now report network director of news.
Splitting the network and having two different news/current affairs formats? Can’t see that lasting…
Deja vu all over again. Remember when 7 did the same thing in 1987? Resulted in 9’s dominance of news for years.
Absolutely ridiculous. After being a regular watcher of Ch.9 for many years, I jumped ship to Ch. 7 because of the stupidity of Ch.9 going to a 1 hours news.
Now Iam going to have to jump again, this time to ABC for either their 5.30 or 7.30 news. Where you only get the current news and not all the fill in news that the other 2 channels use for justify the hour they use, just to try and outdo one another.
It actually sounds sensible to me.
Today Tonight’s audience is hardly a big spending one, let’s be honest, and I think media buyers were realising their spend could be better utilised elsewhere.
Seven urgently needs to regain a better quality audience in that timeslot.
When is Channel 7 going to extend the live stream to finish at the end of the bulletin at 7pm Monday-Saturday and finish after 6:30pm on Sundays because the yahoo7 live stream is still scheduled to finish at 6:30pm Monday-Saturday and as a result only the first half-hour is streamed live online and also stream Today Tonight Adelaide/Perth as well? Channel 9 does it very well as they live stream the entire Brisbane/Sydney/Melbourne 6pm Weekday Bulletins online whereas Channel 7 is too slack to change the finishing times to their 6pm live streams.