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Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Mother of Nation killed by ugliest man in television



$800,000 found in TVNZ budget

She has wanted to leave since Ralston sacked her long-time work colleague, Richard Long, and has only stayed on because of the money. Since she was only there because of that and they are trying to insinuate they are pulling in their belts and to deflect political pressure she was not offered enough. So now she's gone.

The person who insisted she front the show alone, even though she didn't want to, to suit a new formula is this man:



Ian Fraser is backing him. He sounds almost panicy about the news performance against 3. Ralston is the sort of person who likes to change all the furniture around when people are sitting on it and in the middle of their tea. New theory comes along - change everything. Get rid of all the old hands like Holmes, Kim Hill, Long and Bailey and the key Auckland market will warm to the younger fresher crew...? I don't trust him to pull it off quite frankly.

What Ralston, and by aquiesence Fraser, don't seem to grasp is this, and it's important, so I'll bold it:

When you change the status quo to attract people you simultaneously create a situation where you will attract people to the other option as the other option has more status quo continuity. What is going on is a brand change. If the brand is inherently one of status quo/reliable/continuity then the altering of that puts it on a par with the opposition by getting rid of that key point of difference. By destabalising the line-up (ie. changing the brand) they are shifting the competitive ground towards the oppostion assuming they will automatically hold those long-term people, but they actually risk losing them. Every time they move to change they destroy the brand credibility of status quo/reliability/continuity. They risk effectively growing the opposition's share.

TV companies are legendary for the latest gizmos and gimmicks, but that sits uneasily with the One News brand. Ralston did not particularly distinguish himself as Metro editor, and his gambles in news and current affairs at the state broadcaster seem rather wild. Fraser will give him six months to make a dent - after that it becomes Fraser's head on the block.

As someone who wanders backwards and forwards across channels at newstime I don't care that much, I'm more interested to see the current affairs programming for next year. Kim Hill is out, Foreign Correspondent is reportedly out. So what is in? Who is in? And what formats?

1 Comments:

At 5/10/05 4:14 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Which begs the question, do people watch the news or the presenter? Is the presenter that critical? Aren't you making a rod for your own back (if you were either Bill or Ian) by creating a cult of personality around who reads the words? Though i tend to watch TV3 news, it certainly wasn't initially due to Carol Hirshfeld's diction, or general credibility (at least lack of; she became endearingly crap by the end)I think it might have been as simple as the superior TV3 signal strength where i used to live. I like to observe the treatment given by both networks to big lead stories, as it is surprisingly different at times, depending on who has the best taped action. Surely the stories are the thing, not the talking head?

 

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