There are traditions in your life that come and go – sometimes without you even realising.
Perhaps it’s a regular Saturday afternoon beer with mates at the pub. Maybe a monthly visit to a favourite restaurant.
You go through different chapters, different eras. Life takes its inevitable twists and turns and things you did without fail on a daily, weekly, monthly or annual basis suddenly disappear.
Traditions and habits around how we get our news are a bit like that too.
How many of us grew up with the 6pm news being the be all and end all in terms of information about the day that was?
I certainly did. Brian told me, as the advertising slogan went. And then Jim Waley told me, for a little while, before Peter Overton became the undisputed face of news in Sydney.
Along the way, other news broadcasters became iconic, playing a permanent role in our lives without even knowing them.
Ross Symonds, Ann Sanders, Sandra Sully, Ian Ross… the list goes on.
Like many of you, I used to watch the 6pm news like it was a religion. I even recorded it if I wasn’t going to be home.
But somewhere along the line, it stopped being appointment television.
In a 24-hour, non-stop news cycle, even the daily evening news can be outdated by the time it goes to air.
Many of us still turn on for big news days. I know I did on Sunday, when an assassination attempt on Donald Trump shocked the world.
But that everyday habit of tuning in for the 6pm news? It feels long forgotten.
Which is why Channel Seven is undergoing an enormous shift in its news programming at present.
It has essentially got a broom out and it’s putting it to work at a feverish pace.
And part of it is trying to attract a younger, more diverse audience.
Anthony De Ceglie is the man in charge over at Seven News these days, and he said this week that his team was “exploring new ideas and concepts”, admitting that these ideas and concepts were about bringing in new audiences.
What that may do to the old audiences could be a problem, however.
Two of the ideas implemented in Seven’s flagship 6pm news bulletin have sent shivers down the spine of any news traditionalist.
First up, it’s announced the addition of Natasha Weber, better known as AstroTash, to its bulletins, to deliver a horoscope segement as part of its evening news.
In other words, here’s everything happening in the world today and here’s what might happen tomorrow.
It screams morning television, which, as it happens, is where AstroTash has been plying her trade before being called in to the time-honoured 6pm news bulletin.
But astrological charts and suns, moons and planets aside, an even more bizarre move was the implementation of comedian Mark Humphries being handed three minutes of the bulletin on Friday nights to present a satirical mini-bulletin.
Only one problem with last Friday’s debut: it wasn’t very funny.
Humphries went for the low hanging fruit and based his entire three minutes on Joe Biden and his current health woes, which have been well talked about.
So, let’s be creative and exciting and introduce this brilliant new concept to attract new audiences… but let’s make sure we focus the whole thing on the same topic everybody has been talking and joking about for weeks on social media and other platforms.
It just fell flat and certainly felt out of place as part of the 6pm news.
I doubt any of this will work.
But in many ways we only have ourselves to blame for Seven feeling they need to try this.
After all, I admitted at the start of this column that even I – a passionate news follower – have fallen off the 6pm news routine.
And it’s not a good thing.
While we take the quick hit of a news story on social media or thumb through news sites and socials to consume news, the organisations out there employing journalists to tell those stories in the first instance and deliver important news are doing it tough.
The big publishers and broadcasters are often looked at with disrespect and disdain but they are the organisations with the resources that ultimately deliver the majority of the content we consume.
And while they get it wrong sometimes, the enormous work that goes on in newsrooms behind the scenes has to be seen to be believed.
But it’s all an unstoppable train. I can’t see a world where we suddenly turn back to the 6pm news being appointment television, nor our first port of call for news.
By the time the 6pm news bulletins aired on Sunday night, I reckon I’d seen Donald Trump getting shot at least 100 times.
Despite their incredible resources and efforts, there was very little new information to tell me some nine hours after the news first broke.
It wasn’t always this way, but it is now.
So perhaps we can’t blame Seven for telling us what’s new for Capricorns tomorrow or throwing in an attempt at humour on a Friday night.
You might be watching the 6pm news and hating what it’s become, but too many people aren’t tuning in in the first place.
Troy Dodds
Troy Dodds is the Weekender's Managing Editor and Breaking News Reporter. He has more than 20 years experience as a journalist, working with some of Australia's leading media organisations. In 2023, he was named Editor of the Year at the Mumbrella Publish Awards.