Heather du Plessis-Allan: TV3's 6pm bulletin is saved - for now

So, the 6pm bulletin on TV3 is saved after all.

It's been announced this afternoon that that Stuff is going to make the bulletin for the owners of TV3, Warner Brothers Discovery.

If you’re a fan of Newshub and this news gives you hope, I would very much urge you to temper that expectation. Because this is not going to be what you are used to.

It sounds very much like it's going to be quick and dirty. It's gonna look very different.

They are promising us it’s not going to be cheap news - but I'll tell you what, I'll have to see that to believe it, because everything points to that. That's the whole point of this exercise, making it cheaper.

The news was too expensive for Warner Brothers to justify continuing to make it, so the only way this works is if Stuff can do it for less.

The Stuff boss today was talking about some of this news being filmed by reporters on their cell phones.

Now times have changed, and the idea of a Zoom video call or the odd bit of footage filmed on a phone is not that intolerable any more. But how much of it are you prepared to tolerate?

At the moment, you see the odd bit here and there, but how much of it needs to be filmed on reporters’ cell phones to make this news affordable?

And then, how much of that is the audience going to tolerate? Cause it’s ugly. Let's be completely honest, it's ugly watching stuff that was filmed on a cell phone expanded out to a big TV.

And that is very different to the TV news product that we’re used to in this country. We're used to very slick news bulletins, which is probably part of the problem with the 6pm news.

But what happens if we’re offered up a bulletin put together on the cheap, filmed by reporters who aren’t trained camera people - on their phones?

6pm news audiences are already declining, so won’t this just make the audience leave faster?

Now, there is an argument to be made that that’s actually not the most important thing here and this is really about digital innovation using that video content in other ways on other platforms.

But that's another debate altogether, and we should probably be having that some other day.

For the 6pm news bulletin on TV3, it feels like this deal can only delay the end, it can’t prevent it.

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