Yes, in 2001 - around the same time, give or take a few months, that Southern Cross axed the North Queensland news, and Prime axed bulletins in Newcastle, Wollongong and Canberra.
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Back in 2001, did Southern Cross had the News in Newcastle, South NSW, Regional Victoria?
No. Not in any of those areas. Pretty much a straight relay of TEN and ATV with local ads.
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Southern Cross axed its news in regional Victoria in 1994.
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Glenn was host of State Affair at BTQ which in April 1987 was axed in favour of TWT during the dreadful Fairfax era. Ironically, on that same night, State Affair was awarded most popular show in QLD st the logies which is also where Glenn presented his final show.
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Was that the successor to News Centre 6?
BTV put together a quality local news service for its time… and from what I can tell it fell victim to the effects of aggregation
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And Ten in Northern NSW axed their local news for Coffs to Lismore in 1995.
Ten axed North QLD local news in 2001 too I think.
Then Canberra, and then Prime a few months later.
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From my assessment it was the No 1 rating bulletin in Canberra at the time, why axe it? Stupid business decision at the time.
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By the time Ten Capital News was axed, it was #2 behind WIN News in its timeslot. Not to mention the fact that ABC has just relaunched their local bulletin at the time, which would’ve taken plenty of Ten Capital’s viewers away.
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News Centre 6 was BTV Ballarat - later VIC News and obviously WIN today.
Southern Cross originated at BCV Bendigo and also had a bulletin for Gippsland. Post aggregation it was a very confused time for SX, which didn’t cope well with competition from VIC. There were at least four format changes in two years, including a similar scenario to what Prime NSW has now - local news at 6 and a locally produced national news at 6.30. This was brought in twice. Yep, twice; before SX went for a relay of Ten News from Melbourne at 5 and then “News at Six” until May ‘94.
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News Centre 6 was produced as separate bulletins at BTV6 Ballarat and GMV6 Shepparton. It became VIC News when the Six Network name changed to VIC TV in 1989. Eventually production was centralised to Ballarat (although I think Mildura, which joined VIC TV in 1990, continued to produce local news there for some time afterwards)
The bulletins still exist as WIN News but are presented out of Wollongong now.
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I believe you’re correct about Mildura, I think it kept producing news locally until the mid-2000s(?) when WIN centralised it all to Ballarat like they had the other Victorian markets. Now obviously there’s no production at all in Victoria with it all being done out of Wollongong
Despite the centralised production, WIN News was generally a very professional product years ago. Although somewhat amusingly I remember instances of being in Gippsland and having the wrong news played out, you’d come back after a break to have Shepparton or Albury news playing instead, still with Denis Walter presenting it of course 
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IIRC, it was to do with upgrading to digital television and associated costs, including upgrading their studios. Put simply, they didn’t want to fork out and, again, IIRC, expected more federal assistance to do it.
Typical Southern Cross bullshit basically.
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Not sure if this promo has been posted before. Credit: Lachlan Patterson
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Haven’t seen the Melbourne version of that promo before!
I reckon I have that DVD somewhere, probably collecting dust.
There has never been much money in local news, the increase in ad revenue from higher ratings wasn’t enough to justify the cost involved in running it.
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Quite so… I don’t think it’s much of a secret that both Prime and WIN have been at least casually looking at creative ways to outsource local news production.
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I’m a TV history numpty, so forgive me for the question, but I was wondering why both BCV8 and GLV8 continued to exist after aggregation? I’m assuming they were both Ch. 10 affiliates, with BCV covering regional areas west of Melbourne, and GLV covering areas to the east.
Perhaps it was just a product of having four heritage stations but only three networks. In southern NSW RVN2 (Riverina) was made redundant, but I think this was absorbed into the CBN8 (Prime) network well before aggregation.
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@TelevisionAU would know for sure.
But I think it’s fair to say the individual licenses existed and in some cases continue to exist to this day what happened was that there were alignments amongst regional stations to suit aggregation. In some instances these alignments already existed.
In the case of RVN it was owned by Prime prior to aggregation and formed part of the southern aggregation market as dictated by legislation. But the other part of the Riverina equation AMV was split off and formed part of the Victorian aggregation area.
Some licenses did disappear; CWN Dubbo which had simply been a relay of CBN Orange for decades did lose its callsign and became CBN. But this was more administrative and didn’t have any sort of real or practical impact.
I’m not sure this helps.
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