Robin Adams leaves Al Jazeera

Thanks everybody for watching.

Forgive the poor audio, but here's @RobinAdamsSport signing off for the last time on @AlJazeera. Farewell to TV's most enthusiastic man 😢 pic.twitter.com/LYJWVxqYVe

— Kamahl Santamaria (@KamahlAJE) November 24, 2016

Those were the words Cape Town born sports anchor, Robin Adams, used to sign off from Al Jazeera  English (DStv 406) for the last time after a six and a half year tenure at the Doha-based news network.

Prior to joining Al Jazeera, Adams was a sports anchor at what is known today as eNCA, anchoring and reporting mainly from Cape Town.

No word yet on what the talented anchor has planned next, but he is returning back home. But before that, he got to have another taste of home as Nandos Qatar sponsored his farewell party at Al Jazeera.

Since signing off for the last time, he has been endlessly retweeting farewells and congratulations on a career well done.

RATINGS: October DStv news channels

Courtesy once more of Patrick Conroy's Twitter account (even though he no longer works at eNCA), here are the audience shares for DStv's news channels:

The biggest observation from this is the three channels that pulled a 0% audience share. Having three channels have 0% pulls the credibility of the whole audience measurement poll into question. One has to wonder whether the sample size used for these polls are large enough and, more important, reflective enough of the demographics of DStv viewers. DStv has been growing rapidly in recent years, which has meant rapid changes in the demopgraphics of subscribers. Whether these changes are captured in this data is now highly questionable.

Ignoring the above, here are the highlights:

• eNCA is once again comfortably holding more than half of the audience share. 
• SABC News Channel is getting closer and closer to getting to that 20% mark. The channel's slight tweaks and highly simplified schedule is starting to payoff well.
• Thanks to the circus of the US elections inching close to its peak in October, along with multiple debates, CNN just shot up rapidly to third place, just below 10%, which I would think is near to an all time best for the channel since the 2013 expansion of the domestic news channel offering.
• ANN7's audience share for October worryingly declined. Why is it worrying? The channel's South African of the Year Awards show, which usually leads to a ratings bump did nothing. Personally, I think this is a result of the Awards being branded very poorly this year (Dropping the elegent and understandable 'I Am South African' brand in favour of the cheap sounding and appearing 'SATY Daily Show') and weakly scheduled.
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DStv pulls the plug on [ED]

Get ready to be dumbed down. DStv has announced that they are not renewing the contract of South Africa's only locally ran and owned documentary channel, [ED].

The channel, which is available on channel 190 (just one flip away from DStv's most popular channel overall, SABC1, believe it or not), will cease broadcasting on December 1st.

DStv has no plans to replace [ED], which is now the fifth channel in DStv's channel cuts, following the culling of CBS Action, CBS Drama, True Movies and AMC. The latter channels were cut as a result of DStv being so concerned about subscribers that they wanted to reduce the amount of repeats subscribers are exposed to (DStv seriously has among the country's best spin doctors on hand). The reason for [ED] being cut is simply that the channel's contract wont  be renewed. That's it.

[ED], which was run by Urban Brew studios, featured a large slate of original domestic programming, mainly providing a platform for independent documentaries and self-produced informative chat shows. In addition, it featured a decent amount of quality foreign documentaries at a time when DStv's "documentary channels" prefers giving swamp people a platform.

This marks the first time that DStv has cut a channel with such a large amount of local content and, given how they are cutting costs and channels left and right (Please ignore the lavish and expensive party they hosted last week for M-Net's birthday), one has to wonder exactly how close ANN7 was to being cancelled when those rumours arose a few months back.

Roberto Carletti, the channel's station manager, says, "Thanks to our loyal [ED] viewers and advertisers for their continued support over the years. Through our content, our viewers have remained curious and have been inspired."

While DStv continues to cut channels in South Africa, they continue to lower prices and add channels in the rest of the continent. Think about that.

[Personally,  thnk one thing the channel could have done better is marketing. Its programming was good but it was not marketed very well to average viewers]

The disappearing case of the CNN logo...

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Look at the pictures in this article. There are two things common in all of them: All of them are covering protests and all of them are CNN reporters.

When covering breaking news CNN reporters on the ground usually make it clear that they are from CNN: they wear the CNN jacket, their microphone bears CNN branding and  they usually wear CNN caps as well.

But notice that this is no longer the case. In the face of how the media got this election terribly wrong, and that trust in the media is at its all time lowest and sinking further, CNN seems to no longer be comfortable having their reporters be visibly identifiable by protestors.

By having their reporters go unmarked into protests as if they were local news reporters (In the US, local news has a trust level and is less controversially perceived compared to the big cable news networks like CNN and Fox News), CNN is acknowledging their own role in creating the situation as it is and are hedging against potential retaliation from the protestors.

In prior protests relating to issues the media had a smaller role in creating, when protestors identified someone from CNN, they would often start chanting 'F**k CNN' live on air or even try to intimidate the reporter.

RATNGS: October free to air hghlights

That time of the month again when we get to look back at the prior month's news and actuality ratings highlights:

• Once again the SABC's Xhosa news topped the list, pulling 4.15 million viewers at its peak.
• The Zulu news bulletin (SABC1) is on its tail as always, pulling 4.07 million viewers.
• The next most watched news bulletin, in a distant third, is SABC2's Afrikaans news bulletin with 1.3 million viewers.
• SABC2's 6:30pm multilingual news bulletin is next, with 1.15 million viewers. 
• SABC3's English news bulletin continues to build an audience, now pulling 922 000 viewers at peak. 
• The one minute eNews Direct Headlines on Sunday evenings continue to pull strong numbers for etv, attracting a bit more than 2.6 million viewers at its peak. 
• For the frst time in its history, the standard half-hour edition of eNews Direct, though the Sunday edition only, featured on etv's most watched programmes list. This is a direct result of being sandwiched between the SA Got Talent performance show and results show, both of which pull in excess of 3 million viewers. This eNews Direct bulletin pulled 2.087 million viewers, making it the third most watched news bulletin.
  

• Speak Out continues to be the country's most watched actuality attracting a peak of 2.346 million viewers.

Stray observations:

• DStv had an open weekend for their three main series channels, M-Net, M-Net Edge and Vuzu Amp. Not one channel saw a bump in viewership.
• An American music awards show disguised as an African one, the MTV Africa Music Awards, aired in October. However because it aired across three tv channel's (MTV, MTV Base and on tape delay on etv), it did not make the most watched list for DStv nor etv. News channel ANN7 s hosting their South African of the Year Awards this month. Lets see if they can make the list. 

e.tv launches own lunchtime news bulletin

e.tv this past week launched its own lunchtime news bulletin separate from the News Day bulletin that has been simulcasting with eNCA for the past eight years.


The bulletin, broadcast from Johannesburg, is anchored by Duduzile Ramela from the same studio used for eNews Direct, which she also anchors. This means that she goes on air for the first time at 1pm and signs off at 7pm, quite a long workday. With e.tv looking to cancel prime time news, this is probably where the eNews Direct team will move to permanently once they get cancelled (It must really suck producing a news bulletin you know the channel you on doesn't want).

For the last few months (and prior to that as well but with less consistency) breaking news coverage on eNCA meant that News Day could not start at the top of the 1pm hour, leading to e.tv having a separate traditional news bulletin, anchored by the usual News Day team with Cathy Mohlahlana having to work overtime on eNCA to cover the breaking news.


Having a separate bulletin also means that neither eNCA or e.tv has to end the bulletin with the line, "For our eNCA viewers, News Day continues after the break but for those of you watching on e.tv this is goodbye."

eNCA moves News Day to Johannesburg

Starting this week, eNCA moved its long-running Cape Town based news bulletin, News Day, to Johannesburg.

This comes as the news channel continues to scale back its Cape Town operations in order to control costs. Just last week the channel laid off long-time Cape Town based anchor, Amy McIver, who co-anchored the news bulletin for the last few months. Others based in the Cape Town bureau have been told to either relocate to Johannesburg or be retrenched.

News Day, which is older than even the channel it broadcasts on, started airing on 4 October 2007 as Lunchtime Live based in Cape Town at a time when e.tv was still expanding news hours on the free to air a channel. Being based in Cape Town meant that the anchors could simply drive, or even walk, to parliament to cover events happening there.

Moving the bulletin to Johannesburg also means that not one of the three South African news channels have news bulletins originating from anywhere outside that city. The move also means that the handover from Cathy Mohlahlana to News Day will be much more smoother as breaking news in her slot often overran into News Day's slot, which required a long ad break to get the Cape Town anchors up.

It is unclear how the change affects News Day's actual anchor, Michelle Craig, who is currently on maternity leave. Would she move to Johannesburg to coanchor the bulletin with Shahan Ramkissoon, who is anchoring it solo now, or would she simply go back to being a weekend anchor.