RTE News - Ireland

There seems to be a bit of a correspondents reshuffle within RTE. Tony Connelly has now been promoted to Europe Editor and from tonight's Six-One Paul Cunningham is now the new Europe Correspondent, formerly Environment Correspondent. Though not sure if Paul former post has been filled.

And Charlie Bird seems to have gone to ground.

There were reports in the Irish edition of yesterday's Sunday Times that RTÉ's retool of RTÉ News on Two in the Newsnight mould is back on - it had been rumoured for September but never made it into the schedule. The new word is that it may begin in mid-February, be presented by Keelan Shanley and may be called "The Eleventh Hour". A daft name for a news programme if ever I heard one, but BBC News and Current Affairs did give us "The Midnight Hour" back in the 1990s which this programme may not be disimilar in format to.

...and not an original one either:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpgqKt4C858

I thought RTE2 largely had programmes aimed at a younger audience. Wouldn't a newsnight type programme be out of place?

In the right hands, a Newsnight-style bulletin on RTÉ Two would work. After all, it did IMO in the late 90s/early 2000s with Anthony Murnane at the helm.

Would it be a drain on RTÉ's finances though?

News 2 (which aired 1997-2003) wasn't really a Newsnight style bulettin, it was a conventional news bulettin wrapped with a number of presentation gimmicks (a virtual set, presenters on high stools, smart casual instead of suits, and some flashy graphics). It was a good initiative by RTÉ though, to make news accessible to younger people, if a little gimmicky. Quite why they eventually decided to revert back to the normal RTÉ News look I'm not sure, but it may have been for cost reasons. It also happened at a time RTÉ decided to push the RTÉ name a lot more than they had been for many years and fit quite well with N2 becoming RTÉ Two a few months later and this may have been in the back of their minds.

This new show would apparently be a hard news programme in similar vein to either Newsnight or Vincent Browne's show, depending on who you believe. Not confirmed whether it will actually air on RTÉ One or Two, though when it was mooted back last August RTÉ Two was mentioned. The problem is that there is already up to 1 1/2 hours news and current affairs three nights a week on RTÉ One with Frontline and Prime Time and another show wouldn't sit well in the schedule (particularly on Wednesday nights when the movie can run up to 11:30pm or later.

Is it really appropriate for RTE to launch yet another current affairs programme just because TV3 are having some success in the 11pm hour?

A better option, IMO, would be to move the News on Two to RTE One, extend it to an hour, and broadcast it at around 7.30am.

There's massive overkill on news and current affairs in primetime on RTE - yet the first full bulletin of the day still isn't until 1pm.

Whatever happened to the breakfast programme that was in the pipeline anyway?

Noticing Brian Dobson is becoming a bit of a Tim Wilcox of RTÉ news, you look through the RTÉ player archive over the past few days you'll see he's fronted nearly every news special since the whole debacle kicked off.

This is nothing new for Brian. Over the last few elections he has fronted nearly all of RTE's coverage. Along with Eileen Dunne he is the only newsreader RTE could really have for special broadcasts because the other presenters either deal with non scripted news terribly or cannot ask questions for their lives.

A combination of the unions and the success of Ireland AM killed it off. A hard news programme would canabalise Morning Ireland's (quite massive) audience and anything fluffy would be attacked by TV3 (who are currently in the middle of an anti-licence-fee-lobbying campaign) as going straight for Ireland AM's audience and using licence fee money to do it.

No, I doubt we'll see anything hard from RTÉ in this slot, although there are tenative plans for extended summaries to go out at 8am and 9am.




With Brian Farrell retired and Mark Little on a career break (and seemingly not coming back any time soon), I'd say we can look forward to Bryan Dobson taking a key role in the election, alongside John Bowman (in what I imagine will be his last election) and Miriam O'Callaghan.

Latest news is that from Monday, RTÉ News on Two will be cut to ten minutes and air 22:50-23:00 with the 11th Hour following from 23:00 - 23:30. Ironically this will give News on Two its first regular timeslot for years. At present it seems this will only be for election time.