Seven’s Weekend Sunrise has made its first major
content change since airing in its new light bright format almost two months
ago. On Sunday it presented the first of what it said will be a
regular spot called “Mark Riley’s Diaries”: with the Seven Network’s
political commentator, Mark Riley filling around five or six minutes with a bit
of comment, (hopefully) good solid gossip and some talk with the studio
presenters.

Nothing to deep and heavy like the chats Riley used to have
with the likes of Treasurer, Peter Costello. Now it was sending him up for the Treasurer’s
cack-handed attempts to go ‘Blue Collar” in Sydney last week. It is a sign Seven realises it has cut itself
completely out of the political and business loops, boring as they maybe to
those in charge at the Network.

It’s also a chance for Seven too keep Mark Riley happy and
give him the video equivalent of a weekly column (which the Sunday morning
interviews sort of were ) with the added bonus of maintaining his relevance in
the press gallery in Canberra: a point seemingly overlooked by Producer, Adam
Boland and News and Current Affairs boss, Peter Meakin, when changing the
format.

It’s called relevance deprivation syndrome and the Seven
Network, for all its work in overtaking Nine, is suffering from it badly.

Meanwhile over at rival Business Sunday the highlight
was the interview with Patrick’s Chris Corrigan, who also featured in an Inside Business story
on airlines. InsideBusiness also talked to CSR’s Alex Brennan and
Corrigan on Business Sunday was quizzed extensively and boringly about Paul
Stoddart, who was profiled by the program with his attempt to start a new
airline called Ozjet.

Corrigan neatly summed up Ozjet’s chances by pointing out
that it was using 30 year planes and that business fliers wanted destinations
and frequency and you had to have a number of planes to do that (modern planes
was the subtext).

Lots of pictures, softish items and not many viewers!

So what about the numbers? Well Business Sunday tumbled to
142,000, down around 30,000 and Weekend Sunrise also slumped, down 53,000 at
195,000. Inside Business on the ABC, rose to 102,000 (95,000 last Sunday). But
it beat Business Sunday in Melbourne and
came within 1,000 viewers of beating its rival in Sydney (Business Sunday got 47,000 people,
Inside Business, 46,000). Ten’s Meet The Press edged up to 62,000 (58,000)
and Insiders on the ABC rose to 162,000 (136,000).

Nine’s Sunday rose to an excellent 378,000 viewers.