KykNET Details Plans of Scaled Back Actuality Programming

The good times are over guys

KykNET (DStv 144) has finally announced the programming information of their restructured, and heavily scaled back, actuality strand of programming.

At 9:30pm on Mondays  through Thursdays, viewers can look forward to Die Kyknet Verslag (The Kyknet Report), which will be a summary of the days main news stories. This seems to heavily resemble the current eNuus bulletin that is currently broadcast Monday to Friday at 22:30, which means even the actual news bulletin part of the broadcast has been scaled back.

Verslag will also be repeated in the morning at 6am in the timeslot of the now cancelled Dagbreek breakfast show. 

On Monday evenings, viewers can look forward to Insig (Insight) with Rapport editor Waldimar Pelser, which will continue to feature its current news magazine format. It will now air 30 minutes later from 10pm to 11pm.

On Tuesdays, Winslyn (Bottom Line) will continue to be the business-centric broadcast viewers are used to, though it is being cut to just 30 minutes starting at 10pm. It will be presented by young entrepreneur Divan Botha, with Santie Botha being cut as cohost.

Wednesday  evenings will see Prontuit (Bluntly) with Kabous Meiring airing at 10pm for 30 minutes (Mariëtta Kruger is cut as cohost). The current talk show format remains.

Arts, fashion and entertainment news is in the spotight on Thursday evenings when Flits (Flash) will be on the air from 10pm for 30 minutes. Huisgenoot's Gauteng editor, Yvonne Beyers will continue to co host along with Bouwer Bosch joining her (Fanie Cronje gets the axe here).

The Friday evening programme, Vrydag Nag Laat (Friday Evening Late?) gets cancelled completely, meaning that there will be absolutely no live actuality programming on KykNET on a Friday, other than the eNuus bulletin. 

In their press release released earlier today, the channel tried to spin these changes as being  "exciting" and to strengthen and streamline the content, stating that 'audience research' is what prompted the changes. But viewers saw past this and the comments on the changes have been largely negative. The 'audience research' referred to is also probably just viewership figures, which have been rather disappointing for the actuality strand.

The 7pm eNuus bulletin remains unaffected by these changes.

What is unkown, however, is how Dagbreek/KykNuus anchors like Riaan Cruywagen are affected by these cuts and cancellations.

These changes come into effect on April 6th.

[Writer reflection: As a news head, hearing things like this would usually make me very sad (because I take it that seriously) and yes losing 2 hours of daily live news and actuality content, 3 hours on a Friday, would usually sadden me, I think not this time. The whole actuality and news movement at KykNET was way too much way to quickly. When the 90 minute block of news programming starts at 9:30pm, KykNET's daily entertainment schedule comes to an end, which is way too early for a channel that is supposed to be a premium entertainment, not news channel. The way they have now restructured their prime time programming is more likely to succeed than the overload of news and actuality they launched 6 months ago. Yes, it is also sad that the country's only Afrikaans breakfast show is hitting the road, but then again good riddance, watching it in the morning put me back to sleep. The energy was never there. The whole purpose of even launching that breakfast show was not right in the first place: The sole goal that the show was launched with was to compete with SABC3's Expresso, which is only partially Afrikaans. That being said, with news scaled back at one MNet property I hope we will soon see news being rolled out on another property: Mzansi Magic. South Africa is, after all, under serving the African-language audience greatly at the  moment.