SABC3 schedule shakeup: Big news and actuality shifts and cuts

SABC3 this past week announced a new 'autumn schedule' (just anther name for a shakeup) which sees major changes for nearly all the channel's news and actuality programmes. here are the highlights:


The Prime Time News bulletin moves half an hour earlier
The channel's main English news bulletin, Prime Time News with Francis Herd and Peter Ndoro, moves thirty minutes earlier to 6pm. This now moves it out of direct competition with the only other prime-time English news bulletin, etv's eNews Direct.

Though this might disturb the gradual build in audience the bulletin has seen, it is not necessarily bad, in fact its good programming from the SABC: From 5:30pm daily, the SABC will now have at least one news bulletin available on its free to air broadcasts (and takes the English and Afrikaans bulletins out of direct competition with each other) at any given time until 7:30pm. That's two hours of nonstop free to air primetime news cascaded across their three free to air news channels.

One thing we don't know from this change is how it will affect the business news bulletin that currently airs in its slot on SABC News Channel. SABC3's bulletin is just a simulcast of SABC News Channel, which currently airs a business-centric bulletin at 6pm. Whether that simply shifts later or gets canceled all together is not yet known.

This is also not the first shift for the bulletin that used to air at 8pm way back in the day. After an extended period at 7pm, the bulletin was shifted to 6pm as it could no longer compete directly with what at the time was a very highly rated news bulletin on etv (those ratings have absolutely plummeted since being shifted to 6:30pm). The bulletin was then extended for an hour to 7pm, before losing its first 30 minutes again, resulting in it airing in its current 6:30pm slot.

Expresso loses half an hour
 SABC3's breakfast show, Expresso (which just last weekend won Best Variety Show at the SAFTA's), will be losing 30 minutes of air to return back to being a two and a half hour show. However, the half hour being cut is the 6am half hour (to make way for a kiddies block) and not the recently added 8:30am half hour.

This means that Expresso, which once was the first breakfast show on air daily back when it started, going live at 5:30am, will now be the last breakfast show on any South African channel to go on air in the morning. Though that may be considered a negative for a news-centric show, Expresso is not that, they are a laid back chat show and cutting their least profitable half hour is not a bad thing.

Deutsche Welle is back
After silently replacing the German news service's broadcast on SABC2 with SABC News, DW, which is an international news service based in Germany, is back on the air on the SABC, now airing between 11:30pm and 2am daily.

Though it is not bad to have a massive two and a half hours  of fresh news content every evening in a time when the channel is used to airing reruns, airing DW isin contravention of whatever policy the SABC has that allowed it to cancel The Big Debate, which has subsequently moved to etv: That of the SABC not airing news content that it does not have editorial control over.

SABC News reruns
After DW goes off the air, overnights continue with SABC News content. It is uncertain what will happen to the SABC News' overnight feed on SABC2 as it makes no sense for  both channels to be airing the same thing at the same time for over three hours.

Afternoon Express and Real Talk with Anele swap slots
Afternoon Express now gets a slot in the actual afternoon and not the early evening at 4pm while Real Talk with Anele, which does generate a massive amount of social media buzz, now gets the lucrative 5pm slot where it can be sampled by an even larger potential audience.

Trending SA moves earlier, loses Fridays, loses reruns
The channel's relatively late night show, Trending SA, moves half hour earlier to 9:30pm, a timeslot when more people are actually still watching tv, meaning it no longer goes off air at 11pm.
In addition, it loses its Friday night slot, a night when most tv shows have lower viewership in any case.
The show also now completely vacates the 12pm slot, where it has been airing as a rerun since being moved from airing original episodes then. In its place are other reruns and... Hollywood News (why not).

Current Affairs
Special Assignment now moves to Monday's at 9pm, where it can compete with eNCA's Justice Factor for social media buzz (let's be honest, social media buzz, which does not generate cash, is a major factor considered now when scheduling is compiled).
Interface gets canceled completely in favour of celebrity stuff.

Finally, Funatix, the tween day time show that airs when children arein school, is now completely cancelled.

The rest of the channel's changes is just a shuffling of daytime reruns.

Jessica Pitchford Joins eNCA's Check Point

Picture from TVSA

Award winning broadcast journalist, Jessica Pitchford has joined eNCA's investigative journalism program, Checkpoint, show presenter Nkepile Mabuse announced via Twitter earlier today.

Jessica graduated from Rhodes University in the 80's, then began her career in radio news in 1986 and then to television in the early 90's. She is a former CNN African Journalist of the Year for Political Reporting. Her CV also includes other investigative shows like Special Assignment, which she joined in 2000. At the SABC she not only contributed to Special Assignment but also other news and actuality programming as both a reporter and a producer.

 She later moved to MNet's long running investigative magazine show, Carte Blanche, where she was most recently a managing editor. At Carte Blanche, she also penned the show's highly publicised memoir, so to speak, Carte Blanche: The Stories Behind The Stories. (More on that book here).

Checkpoint, which is broadcast on both eNCA and free-to-air channel eTV, launched on the 8th of April this year as the broadcaster's replacement to longrunning investigative magazine show 3rd Degree, which ended when host Deborah Patta left eNCA to join CBS News as a correspondent. Pitchford's addition to Checkpoint will add a certain level of credibility to a show that still trying to gain prominence in a market with other investigative magazine shows like Carte Blanch and Special Assignment.