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Report: Local 7:30 editions to be relegated to Sunday news

State-based 7:30 editions on Fridays may comprise a 10-minute portion within Sunday night ABC News.

2014-10-27_1750The latest speculation about the future of 7:30 local editions on Fridays is that reports will comprise part of the extended Sunday night news.

Guardian Australia reports state and territory current affairs, currently airing Friday nights on ABC, will be relegated to a 10-minute portion within its Sunday night bulletins.

ABC recently extended its news to 40 minutes on Sundays, balancing the 50 minute UK titles which begin at 7:40pm.

Guardian reports:

While the Friday local current affairs programs will also end, some of the staff from each city will be retained to work on feature stories and investigations for Sunday nights. The savings are expected to come from dismantling the infrastructure of the programs, including studios, editors and camera operators.

Hosts set to lose their presenting roles are 30-year ABC veteran Quentin Dempster in New South Wales; Chris Kimball in the Australian Capital Territory; Josie Taylor in Victoria; Matt Wordsworth in Queensland; Simon Royal in South Australia; Airlie Ward in Tasmania and Louisa Rebgetz in the Northern Territory.

Relegating local content to Sunday night news will bring to an end nearly three decades of Stateline / 7:30 and ironically mirror the Weekend Magazine stories which used to run Sunday nights in ABC News.

Fairfax reported on Friday development of a new-look 7:30 for Fridays with Leigh Sales, Annabel Crabb and Dan Ilic.

There is also speculation ABC is considering a revival of Australian Correspondent, a predecessor to Australian Story.

ABC is still awaiting final clarity on the size of its cuts under the Federal Government.

2 Responses

  1. Not having many ads does cause the ABC some problems because most one hour shows are 40-50m these days. Only some BBC One prime-time dramas are 57m long these days.

    They originally filled with stuff like Dream Homes before their 8:30pm show, but that resulted in viewers flicking over to commercial channels and a poor lead-in to the 8:30pm show.

    Now they have decided to stretch the News across the 7:30pm junction to stop people flicking over to other shows at 7:30pm (e.g. on docos on SBS) and run Doctor Who from 7:40 to 8:30pm (with news break in there).

    It just the same staggering that the commercial channels do all the time.

  2. I had wondered why the Sunday bulletin was extended that way-often during the rest of the week ABC shows stuff that on runs 45-50 minutes after the news, so doing it just for Sundays made no real sense-until now!

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