40 Years and 10,000 Broadcasts In, They’re Still Live on Air

On a sunny recent afternoon, Rick Ardon was having trouble picking out the right tie.

His first choice was vetoed as “too bright” by his news co-anchor, Susannah Carr, who sat at the studio desk with her notes, waiting. When he returned from his dressing room minutes later with an even brighter option, Ms. Carr laughed. The meaning was clear: Try again.

The third tie was the charm.

For more than 40 years, Mr. Ardon, 66, and Ms. Carr, 73, have had this kind of easy camaraderie behind the scenes as they’ve picked out outfits and gone over their scripts, preparing for the cameras to start rolling on their newscasts for West Australians.

The pair, who helm the nightly hourlong TV news program for 7News Perth, are the longest-serving news anchor team in the world. The feat has been designated a Guinness World Record — one that, in a rapidly changing media landscape, they could well hold forever.

Local news anchors were once the titans of their networks, famous and trusted pillars of their communities. That era has slowly — and then very quickly — given way to a fragmented world in which people more often get their news from social media feeds or A.I. chatbots.

“I feel so fortunate that I’ve been through the golden era of television,” Ms. Carr said in an interview. “It rose and got to its maximum exposure, and now is coming down the other side and having to adapt to save its life.”

Ms. Carr and Mr. Ardon began presenting the 6 p.m. news show, or “news bulletin” as it is known in Australia, in 1985. Ms. Carr had started her career in the 1970s as a radio announcer for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, where she was the first female newsreader in Perth. Mr. Ardon had forgone a university degree to take a job as a newspaper reporter, before shifting to television, where he quickly started reading the news on camera.

“There I was at 19 years old, looking about 15,” he said.

At that time, Perth, the capital of the state of Western Australia, was a small but fast-growing regional city whose population had just surpassed one million because of a mining boom. It is one of the most isolated cities in the world — the better-known Australian hubs Sydney and Melbourne are on the other side of the continent. The closest city of over 100,000 people is more than 1,300 miles away.

But it felt even farther from the rest of the world when she started on the 7News desk, Ms. Carr said. It would take more than a day to get international news stories to air. Film had to be shot on location, edited and then flown in.

“There was no immediacy,” Ms. Carr said.

Ms. Carr and Mr. Ardon have been popular presenters, helping 7News Perth top the ratings for Western Australia for decades. Their demeanor on air is warm, though they take a traditional approach to reading the news. The pair said they tried to let their personalities shine through when they could. They compare their alliance to a marriage: two quite different people with complementary strengths. Mr. Ardon is outdoorsy; Ms. Carr prefers reading and the arts.

“You’re a couple of jigsaw pieces,” Ms. Carr said. “It sort of works because we appeal to different sections of the community, I think.”

During their time together, Mr. Ardon and Ms. Carr have witnessed TV broadcast’s rocky technological transitions from 16-millimeter film to videotape to digital, with the internet transforming their entire approach to news.

When Ms. Carr covered Princess Diana’s shocking death in 1997, trucks with satellites were lined up outside Buckingham Palace to beam the broadcasts. When she returned to England in 2018 for Prince Harry’s wedding, she said, “we’re using mobile phones and we’re standing in the middle of fields and getting a connection.”

Mr. Ardon’s reporting has also taken him around the world, including to Kuwait during the Persian Gulf conflict in the 1990s and to Bali, Indonesia, after the terrorist bombings of 2002. But he has become more known for his coverage of shark attacks, which happen with some frequency in Australia.

Mr. Ardon’s love of surfing — he’s at the beach most days before heading to the studio — means he has had his own sightings of great white sharks on occasion and has become involved with efforts by researchers to find the best ways to keep swimmers and surfers safe.

The anchors were awarded the Guinness World Record in January 2022 after 36 years and 361 days of presenting together, which meant more than 8,000 news shows together.

It’s a record they keep extending every day — now past 10,000 shows — though a succession is emerging. This January brought a change to the pair’s usual weeknight schedule: After four decades, 7News announced that Mr. Ardon and Ms. Carr would cut their anchoring to three days a week, while younger colleagues would pick up the other two days.

The pair has now handily beat a previous record, though not certified by Guinness, held by Chuck Scarborough and Sue Simmons of WNBC in New York, who anchored together for 32 years until Ms. Simmons was forced to retire in 2012. Mr. Scarborough continued to read the news until he retired in 2024 at the age of 81 — a run of more than half a century in broadcasting.

Don Alhart, who anchored the news in Rochester, N.Y., holds the Guinness World Record for the longest career as a news broadcaster. He retired from WHAM in 2024 after 58 years at the ABC affiliate.

Mr. Scarborough said he had corresponded with Mr. Ardon in recent years, but had not yet taken him up on an invitation to visit Australia.

“It just takes survival,” Mr. Scarborough said of the TV news industry. “It’s a very mercurial business, very ratings-oriented and success-oriented.” It takes years to build up “a reservoir of trust” with the audience, he added, “and then you have to work awfully hard to maintain it.”

Mr. Ardon and Ms. Carr credit their longevity to a population that is intensely interested in local news, as well as the credibility they have built up from beaming into living rooms night after night.

“You’re very much more invested in your community because you’re part of a smaller place a long way from everywhere else,” Ms. Carr said.

“The appetite for news is still amazing,” Mr. Ardon said.