I’d probably refer to the stations as “SCA Nine” and “SCA Seven” (also “SCA Ten” for the GTS/BKN viewing area) myself.
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ok … as you were…
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I’ve always found Wikipedia discussions to be a self-imposed dictator against many. 
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Gotta love the logic behind Wikipedia page names - an over reliance on call signs that have no relevance to anyone - like having the current Southern Cross Central page called ‘QQQ’ - or the gloriously concise ‘TNT (Australian TV station)’, and the Wikipedia exclusive creation of something called ‘Southern Cross Nine’ despite that never being used on air or in print.
They will be ‘Seven’ on air, and are owned by Southern Cross Austereo. Or - “Seven (SCA)”.
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Perfect. I was thinking “Seven (Southern Cross Austereo TV channel)” but SCA is shorter, to the point and I’m sure readers would figure out what SCA means in the first sentence or two of the article.
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Branding changes can happen fairly often. Call-signs not so much. So I can see the logic to name pages after their call-signs as the unique identifier with redirections from brand name pages.
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The idea would be to have the channel name on air followed by the regional affiliate, e.g Seven (Southern Cross) or vice versa if you really prefer.
That is the format I’d take. What do you think @Nick and others? @Televisionau, you could so similar for MS.
Unsure about merging different owners, they are separate owners with separate management.
They are the actual, legislative identifier to the specific licence under discussion.
That’s an example of poor style formatting.
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But are unfamiliar to pretty much all the people who would be going to read the articles. TDT is probably the only station in the country (I suppose aside from ABC/WIN/NBN in their markets where the callsign matches the branding) which would be well known by it’s callsign - but even then likely as that is just an acronym for when the station was ‘Ten Digital Tasmania’.
I’d add to be vaguely relevant to this topic - GTS/BKN dying as an on air brand is probably the biggest shame of this shift to Seven branding - it was nice that SC kept calling the station ‘Southern Cross GTS/BKN’.
I’d prefer the other way around - which appears to be the case for about half of the radio articles - it gives the article the name someone reading it would expect - ‘Smooth 91.5’ rather than ‘3PTV’.
I’d also argue that they should be more willing to cut off historical stations with little connection - the ‘Macquarie Sports Radio 1278’ page being the place to look at the history of 3XY is hardly obvious to readers.
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GTS/BKN?
Callsigns are about the one thing about a station that does not change. Branding can change between owners and affiliations, but callsigns are consistent. It’s also a standard on Wikipedia to use the callsigns for individual TV and radio stations regardless of country.
I admit, it wasn’t the best name, but at the time of the affiliation swap, there was no concrete name that was used for SCA’s Nine affiliates. Hence why I’m going to be proposing a name change soon but am asking for MS opinions.
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Last time I was in the region I think they still had “GTS/BKN” on the EPG. I’m guessing it will disappear with the change to Seven.
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Hence why ‘Kylie’s way’ with NBN News is the best brand transition used in Australian media for a long time.
Local news should not be 7 News, but the GTS/BKN regional news or whatever it is currently.
SCA are pushing the barrow too far for 7, branding in solus markets or next to solus markets where it’s not needed, makes not a scrap of difference to overall brand recognition in metro markets. Might as well retain the local news titles.
What of the US examples? Might be a CBS or NBC affiliate but still WANK Local News.
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Tasmanian Digital Television actually. It’s interesting people call channel 9 TDT here at times so the name/callsign has certainly stuck.
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I refer to TEN-10 as TEN, so the original name and callsign has stuck.
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“Our hard hitting news is a head of the rest”
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Yes, I have found that weird that people still call it TDT instead of Nine. Also weird that it will be 15 years old later this year. It means there was only really around a 10 year period of aggregation without the third station even though it felt like so much longer.
Here’s some caps of the current presentation on SC Tas with the mish-mash of Seven and SC now through every ad break.
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Same on Central South all night tonight. Even on SD the quality of the promos is shocking. Hopefully this will improve!
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Discussion on what to call a Wikipedia page to avoid confusion kind of proves a point about regional stations taking on the metro identity.
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Typical break on SC:
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Speaking of GTS/BKN, why does GDS/BDN not have its own page? I’ve never completely understood the legalities of additional channels in solus markets - I get that it’s a sister channel of GTS/BKN relaying Nine content, but how is this different (legally) from SGS/SCN that relays Ten content.
There’s little on Wikipedia to advise us how GDS/BDN is branded (I assume just as Nine) or whether this is a feed of Nine Sydney (with or without a broadcast delay) or Nine Adelaide. I understand Southern Cross news breaks could appear on any of the three channels?
Similarly with SES/RTS in Eastern SA - there are no specific pages for the supplementary channels and it’s not particularly obvious how they are branded or played out. Is there any local WIN Newsbreaks on any of these channels?
This is not meant as a criticism of the Wikipedia contributors, more an attempt to understand why the pages are treated differently, and offer suggestions on how and why they could be improved.
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