A full bulletin of Prime Local News Gold Coast from 1998
(credit goes to ‘For The Love of Broadcast’ on YouTube)
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I bet we’ll still get the 2 min updates for Newcastle, Wollongong, Canberra and Regional Victoria, but hoping they add afternoon updates instead of having just four updates during the evening. I hope we get to see an updated news set as well 
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I’m not so sure
7 does local news for markets much smalller than Canberra Newcastle and the gong, In Queensland
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I think they will launch local news Into:
Newcastle - it’s the 7th biggest city in the country and there is real opportunity to grow revenue and market share as NBN/9s local news is pretty average and has no competition at 6.
Canberra - smaller market, much much more competitive (9, win/10 and abc all have local news) but I think 7 will want in on the nations capital to influence politicians and be in good standing with them for media reform. It’s a small investment to make to make 7 look very good in the eyes of law makers. The down side is 7 Jews Sydney performs well already.
I never knew Paul Burt worked with what would’ve been the current Prime7 before joining Seven Brisbane. What form of reunion could happen should Seven’s takeover of Prime becomes successful?
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I’d love to think this will be true - Newcastle is the only regional area on the eastern seaboard that doesn’t have a dedicated local bulletin and it needs it to make NBN News work for its position
But I have a horrible feeling it won’t happen - start up costs and that there isn’t a lot of money in regional TV. And even if it does happen, it would almost certainly be produced in Sydney,
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If you look at the bigger picture…
7 will inherit Prime7 local bulletins in 5- markets - all much smaller than Newcastle. Those won’t be getting the chop - 7 will make sure not to do that after the merger. Regional NNSW has huge population base with Canberra, Newcastle and Wollongong all in the top 10 largest cities in the country. 7 runs 7 QLD very well, and they’ve seen that local news at 6 helps them keep a dominant market share. 7 QLD outperforms the rest of the 7 Network. 7 sees this.
So, my take is they will keep all the local Prime7 bulletins but centralize them in Sydney like Nine has. That will bring down costs quite a lot, and they will share resources with 7. From there, starting up one or 2 extra bulletins for Newcastle and Canberra actually does not come with huge overheads at all.
The Newcastle market has 815,000 people. That;'s not so much smaller than Adelaide. The economics are ether to make it work.
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From my observations, the coverage of Newcastle news on NBN seems adequate enough. But I definitely wouldn’t disagree with anyone who says that Newcastle & the Hunter deserves proper competition for local TV news.
While Seven probably won’t do this due to a need to protect the ratings of their Sydney news bulletin (especially since the battle between them and Nine has started to get pretty tight recently), I’d probably cite the NSW Central Coast as being a currently undertapped market for local news for a few reasons…
*There are approximately 340k residents on the Central Coast. Wollongong has a similarly sized (maybe slightly higher or lower than the CC, but there’s not that much in it) population, yet has not one but two local news services on TV.
*NBN News’ coverage of the Central Coast is to say the least, dissapointing. From what I’ve seen recently, the Central Coast will often only get a few local stories a night with the remainder of the windows being made up of stories from other sub-markets within the Northern NSW viewing area.
*Additionally, the Sydney stations only really cover local stories from the Central Coast if they’re of Sydney/statewide/national significance.
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Central Coast is slightly better than Geelong , no local news but not much can be done when most get their TV from Mount Dandenong
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Spot on.
It’s often only 1 local report with maybe 1 voiceover item as well.
They’ve obviously only got one local reporter rostered on on some days.
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Daniel Gibson making the list for the “Top News Bloopers of November 2019”. First clip in the compilation.
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Seems like the guys at Canberra had the whole bulletin recorded directly from master control, without any bottom right logo, then placed the said graphic inconsistently. I guess the playout still doesn’t have the logo used for Youtube to place with.
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Prime Local News set in 1998. Interesting that the NZ bulletin didn’t use the blue background that our Regional Australian counterparts used in this time.
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There were to NZ bulletins, do you mean Hamilton or Christchurch?
I can vaguely remember the Christchurch Bulletin and can only picture a blue background… but that could be a failing of the grey-matter!
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I remember the Hamilton bulletin in 2001. It definitely had a blue background.
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This was from the Hamilton edition of Prime Local News NZ
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I’d not heard of Prime having done local news in NZ, especially actual local news, rather than a national bulletin. Was it a combined local/national bulletin, or strictly local stories?
Indeed, I’ve not seen much of Prime before they took on the Nine inspired branding.
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The titles were different in Christchurch too… much more like the ones they used in Aussie. Do you have any more caps?
I can’t remember exactly, they may have done some national recaps, but generally the idea was a local (regional) news bulletin. In Christchurch and Hamilton only, with separate bulletins. They started from about launch in 1998 and lasted a couple of years (not sure exactly when, but the Hamilton one was axed before the Christchurch one, despite CHCH having two other local channels delivering news at the time (CTV and CHTV).
I put some pre-Nine branding stuff on YouTube a couple of weeks ago; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3UF3fTm7eY
No news though, unfortunately.
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