Seven takes Ipswich
Posted March 4th, 2010 by debritz
Channel Seven Brisbane is declaring victory in the battle for Ipswich. A day after both Seven's Sunrise and Nine's Today broadcast from the southeast Queensland city, Seven has issued a media release declaring it had an average of 76,000 viewers on the day. The release continued: "For 6 consecutive years Sunrise, hosted by Melissa Doyle and David Koch has remained south east Queensland’s number one breakfast program and in that time has not lost one week of ratings. " The folks at Nine know they have a way to go and, according to information relayed at a briefing (i.e. long lunch) for journalists (me included) and other media folk at the Normanby Hotel on Tuesday, they are pumping more money into the Queensland market with a view to making Today No. 1. The good news for viewers should be that intense competition makes for better TV. Or, it should ...
Another case of talking up a decline by the execs who won't listen to Brisbane viewers (i.e using fiftieth to bring back LYB full time etc.) Brett, If Seven did get 76,000 yesterday, then they would have lost.
Today got 78,000 viewers.
Nine should not be redirecting valuable, but limited local resources to Today. They should be redirected to helping the Saturday night bulletin (always thrashed now, after the misguided axing of Extra/Weekend Extra) by developing a new weekend product, to take on Queensland Weekender, even redirect it to the Gold Coast News to upgrade their facilities to prepare for any Seven push into GC local news (even Karl would agree with me, as his first job at 9 was relief for Readings on the Gold Coast News.) , prior to investing heavily at breakfast, which would be useless six months of every year.