10 News+ hosts Amelia Brace and Denham Hitchcock. Credit: Wolter Peeters
If you read the comments under any story about free-to-air news and current affairs, you will find the same mix of complaints: Untrustworthy, too woke, too left, too right-wing and, inevitably, “bring back The Drum”.
So launching a new nightly news program, one that promises in-depth coverage and big-picture reporting, is a tough ask: How do you build trust with an audience that is already side-eyeing how news is delivered? It’s a question journalists Denham Hitchcock and Amelia Brace hope to answer as the hosts of Network 10’s new hour-long nightly news program, 10 News+.
“[Building trust] that’s difficult because that requires time,” says Hitchcock. “But what we’re saying from the start is that [trust] is at the core of this program, so you will see that in the reporting and the questioning and the topics that we choose, I think that will change people’s opinions because we won’t just be taking one side, we’ll be questioning both sides equally, and when people see that, I think it will change their opinion.”
Brace agrees: “It is just about treating our audience with respect. People are intelligent. They do have their own thoughts and they do have their own opinions. So it’s just about telling both sides of the story and then letting people decide what they think of that, not telling them what they think about it.”
Amelia Brace and Denham Hitchcock at the 10 News+ desk at Ten’s studios in Pyrmont.
10 News+ is at the heart of Ten’s bid to reshape its early evening viewing. The state-based local news is broadcast from 5pm, followed by 10 News+ at 6pm, and then game show Deal or No Deal at 7pm. Gone is The Project, which finished last week after a 16-year run.
In another bold move, 10 News+ will be broadcast on Spotify, as well as on YouTube and 10Play, in what Ten says is a “world first for commercial TV news”. It is an everything, everywhere all at once approach. And it’s also a sharp U-turn from The Project, which mixed news reporting with light entertainment and comedy.
“People just want their news straight up,” says Brace. “There’s been, I think, a drift in recent years towards opinion or sensationalism, and in some media even, I think bias. And people kind of leant into that for a while and enjoyed the change, but now people are fed up with it.
Denham Hitchcock and Amelia Brace bring a long history of news reporting to 10 News+. Credit: Wolter Peeters
“They don’t want to be told what to think or how to think. They just want their information and then they can make up their own minds. People are smart. They don’t need to be told what to think.”
So what does that mean in practice? On the basis of Monday night’s first episode, which pulled in a national average audience of 291,000, it was an exclusive interview with Debbie Voulgaris, the convicted drug smuggler and Melbourne mother who is serving a 15-year prison term in Taiwan, and another interview with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
Both stories were longer than most standard news segments and, apart from covering a shark attack on the far north coast of NSW, the show steered clear of the kind of local fracas that are grist to the daily news mill. It’s an approach, says Hitchcock, that melds the best of Australia’s big TV news hitters: 7.30 and Four Corners on the ABC, 60 Minutes on Nine and Spotlight on Seven.
“Our show is a hybrid of almost all of them,” says Hitchcock. “We’ll see a story in our first two days, I’m pretty sure it’ll be Monday [the Voulgaris story], that will be a story that 60 Minutes, Spotlight or Four Corners would kill for. So we’re hoping viewers will come to us because they’ll get the news of the day, they’ll get the things that matter, but they’ll also see something fresh.”
Brace, 37, and Hitchcock, 48, come to 10 News+ as familiar faces from Seven and Nine, respectively, where they built their reputations as foreign correspondents, with stints in the US, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. They both began their careers at Seven – Brace in regional Queensland and Hitchcock in Sydney.
Brace remembers her first day on the job at Seven, when she was a university student on a competitive internship, which involved covering a fatal bus crash. “I went out shadowing a reporter,” she says. “I kind of really got thrown in the thick of it.” It’s been a wild ride since then, with Brace covering everything from the drought in rural Queensland to being part of a world-record skydive live on air (“It was absolutely terrifying. I cried in my goggles”).
In 2020, she won a Walkley Award for her coverage of the protests outside the White House, where she was hit with a baton by police.
“You can’t cover these things from a bureau or even from a block back,” says Brace. “Because what is happening to these people is happening on the front line, and you have to be standing there, and you have to sit with your own eyes so you can actually stand up on camera or in Congress, as I had to, and say what happened wasn’t right. Sometimes it’s your job to say, ‘I saw that and that wasn’t OK.’”
Hitchcock, meanwhile, got his start in the office of the now defunct current affairs show Today Tonight when he was 18 years old. “I was answering the phones and filling the biscuit barrel,” he says. “But within six months, I was a researcher, and within another three months after that, I was a producer at 18. It was fast, but from there I’ve done almost every job – researcher, producer, editor, reporter, correspondent, all sorts.”
Like Brace, he’s has the kind of globe-trotting news career that makes great TV – reporting from the frontlines of Syria and Iraq, covering the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines – but it’s the quieter story of Sharn McNeill, who was only 30 when she was diagnosed with motor neuron disease, that he names as one of his favourites.
“It always makes me teary whenever I even describe it to anybody,” he says. “That’s one of those stories of human endurance and positivity that always stays with me.”
The team from 10 News+ (from left) 10 NEWS+ Samantha Butler, Brianna Parkins, Angela Bishop, Hugh Riminton, Amelia Brace, Denham Hitchcock, Ursula Heger, Ashleigh Raper, Bill Hogan and Carrie-Anne Greenbank.
With so long in business, do either of them see a difference in how news is reported or consumed today?
“I don’t see a change in the stories of people interested in, just in the way they consume it and the speed in which they consume it,” says Hitchcock. “Those big stories used to happen and [you] used to be able to chew on it for a whole week. Now it could be the most immense story that you’ve ever seen, and three days later, we’re on to something else.”
Brace, meanwhile, thinks people are more overwhelmed than ever before by the “sheer amount of information out there” and this is what leads to the rise in misinformation.
“It’s just selective reporting when you blatantly just tell one side of a story,” says Brace. “That side is not untrue, but it’s dangerous to do that, I think. I bump into people in real life regularly who say, ‘Did you hear this?’ And I’ll say, ‘But did you hear this?’ And it’s not that I’m on one side or the other. I just get really annoyed when they have no idea that that’s only half the story.”
Amelia Brace and Denham Hitchock interview Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on the first episode of 10 News+ on Monday night.
The US, famously, is home to Fox News, which proudly wears its bias on its sleeve. Do either of them think there is that type of biased reporting in Australia?
“We have more of it than we used to,” says Brace. “I genuinely think that perhaps 10 years ago, we had a really balanced media with very little tolerance for bias. I remember maybe around the Kevin Rudd kind of time – because I’m very politically focused – there started to be some headlines and some things said, and I’d be like, ‘Hm, that’s interesting reporting.’ I just feel like it’s grown over the years, where we now have certain outlets that you just know they’re one side or the other. And I really don’t like that.”
Of course, it’s not just bias or misinformation that modern broadcast news has to deal with. The fickle beast that is ratings will probably have more of an effect on 10 News+’s future than any story they choose to do. A dramatic drop in ratings was one of the reasons given for The Project’s axing, so what happens when, say, four weeks from now, 10 News+ isn’t clicking and it’s suggested they start chasing more sensational local stories?
“It’ll be a collective decision, the stories that we chase for the day,” says Hitchock. “So that’ll be Dan Sutton, who’s the executive producer, and Martin White, who’s the vice president [of news on Ten]. Those two will be keeping a keen eye on the show, and then Amelia and I, of course, will have heavy input as well.
“But I don’t think it’ll change the mission statement or the program. Will it change if the ratings are not as expected? I don’t know, but I don’t think so, because the show has been pitched as a certain way, and we’re filling a national show. It can’t be hyper local. The answer wouldn’t be to go back to hyper local stories, the answer would be just better stories.”
And what if it’s suggested a comedian would make a perfect addition to the desk?
“We are very funny,” says Brace, laughing. “No one’s realised that Denham and I are hilarious. So we should be fine.”
10 News+ airs weeknights on Ten and 10Play at 6pm.
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