It looks like
Ten is about to get serious about its news coverage, with plans to introduce a
new morning bulletin and make adjustments to its present schedule.

A
high-ranking source at Ten said the network will introduce a one-hour news
bulletin at 6am from February next year in an attempt to counter the dominance
of Seven’s Sunrise and Nine’s Today with morning audiences. “So
while places like Nine are offloading staff, we’re expanding our team,” says the
source.

The late night news bulletin will now be cemented in the 10.30pm
timeslot, while the network’s 11.30am bulletin will kick off at the new time of
11am.

And the shake-up will also see Ten’s enduring Sports
Tonight program amalgamated with the network’s late-night news bulletin and
halved to 15 minutes between Monday and Thursday. It will air in its current
half-hour format from Friday to Sunday.

That leaves SBS’s Toyota World
Sport as the only daily free-to-air sports offering, while pay TV still has
Sky News Australia’s Sportsline and the Fox Sports channel to service
Australia’s dedicated armchair sports followers.

Sandra Sully is expected
to present the news, with Ryan Phelan anchoring sport.

These planned
changes come following Jim Carroll’s appointment to the newly-created role of
head of news. Carroll has nearly 20 years journalistic experience, a dozen of
those in senior editorial management in television news. Before joining Ten, he
spent eight years at the Nine Network, first as executive producer of The
World Tonight then founding executive producer of
Nightline.

He began his media career at News Limited’s Daily
Mirror before moving into radio. During his time at Nine, Carroll was also
involved in the network’s broader coverage of major news stories, including the
Gulf War, the Bosnian and Middle East conflicts and the Thredbo landslide.