It was around this time thirty years ago that Seven launched the last incarnation of the circle 7 logos. Can’t remember the exact date it launched but I do remember seeing full page ads in The Sunday Telegraph the day before it was launched on air. Lasted until 31 December 1999.
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1989 I think.
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IMHO, they should’ve kept the ‘Circle 7’ theme going past 1999.
Me either but strangely they were running Seven Nightly News ads (“Nobody knows news like 7”) from early January with the new logo, but the rest of the network presentation was still the “old” logo. It was very odd but at least hinted a change was coming.
My only guess is the new logo formally launched late in January but don’t know the date.
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The new ‘Split 7’ logo launched on January 23.
I was close!
That very same day, Roger Climpson would return to Seven Nightly News Sydney (which was still airing at 6.30pm then, before moving to 6pm on August 14 that year) after around seven years off.
Initially replacing Richard Zachariah as Ann Sanders’ co-presenter, Roger would become the solo anchor of the bulletin during the first half of the 1990s and was moderately successful against Nine at times until his Early 1995 retirement.
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This turned up on YouTube tonight. Highlights of WIN’s first ever bulletin in Canberra, March 1989. Very amateurish and sounds like it was broadcast from a warehouse.
Source: TasTV Archive (YouTube)
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Here’s an article from The Canberra Times dated 1st April 1989, relating to the first night of WIN News & Prime Local News in Canberra.
How long did Peter Russell last before Peter Leonard started reading and led the bulletin to success?
Peter Leonard joined WIN in December 1991 as weather presenter after the 1st incarnation of ABC News Canberra was axed in August, where he was on that same role. In March 1992, Peter Leonard took over as newsreader, where he remains on that role until July 2007.
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LOL at the dodgy cover-up of the WIN logo at the end of that promo which still had the “…on Nine” voiceover at the end. And “a member of the Nine Network” on the Ident - they certainly wouldn’t be saying that these days! 
As for the news broadcast itself, certainly a lot of first night gremlins in the system. Echoy sound, no theme music for the Opener, brief cutback to the studio in a packaged report, what appeared to be a switch to TCN midway through a Mark Burrows report on the Sydney 6pm news, a camera framing fail (or missing an OTS graphic?), that switch back to the studio during an ad break and the delayed telecast of Sydney’s news starting a few seconds late, but at least they made it in time for Brian Henderson’s headlines to be heard in full. I think that’s everything!
Of the things that did seem to work properly, the presentation of the weather seems to look a bit dated even by 1989 standards.
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That first night review in The Canberra Times was savage describing the lead launch party story on WIN as “rather masturbatory”. You also wouldn’t see such misogynistic language used these days in the description of a female newsreader.
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Very funny.
The first time I saw WIN was visiting Canberra in 1992 and they were using Nine promos with a rather crude rectangle and WIN logo slapped over the Nine logo, with the v/o cutting off just before the words “on Nine”. They didn’t even bother recording their own voice overs. It looked very dodgy, meanwhile over at Capital and Prime both were running fairly seamless adaptations of program promos from Ten and Seven.
I was half expecting Brian Henderson to give a charming “and a welcome to our new viewers in Canberra” at the beginning of the bulletin but it appears it was not to be. Maybe he did a cheerio at the end of the bulletin?
Had Nine news from Sydney ever been seen in Canberra before?
And I suppose WIN can take some consolation from that disastrous first night effort that hardly anybody was watching them with most viewers still tuning to Capital news for quite some time.
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I don’t think so. As I understand it, CTC/Capital 7 had their own composite news bulletin throughout at least most of their history. If they did carry a Sydney bulletin on relay, they would’ve most likely taken Seven’s prior to the mid-1980s, when that bulletin went from 30 minutes to 1 hour.
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I recall Prime doing that in the early days of aggregation- full Seven promos airing with the Seven v/o guy saying “on Prime” clumsily tacked onto the end.
I remember how polished and metro like the Capital news bulletin appeared to be when it first went to air in Wollongong. It certainly made the WIN bulletin appear amateurish.
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Did Wollongong just get the Canberra bulletin or did Capital do a separate one (or local inserts) for Wollongong?
Thanks, I know they relayed Seven News from Sydney in the 1970s but I wasn’t sure anything after that.
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There was a local insert. They had Christine Kinninmonth and Geoff Hiscock posing for photos at Wollongong Harbour promoting the “local” bureau in the Illawarra Mercury even though the bulletin heavily focused on ACT issues. I was struck by the amount of World news the bulletin contained when I first saw it. They even displayed weather temperatures for World cities during Mike Larkin’s weather report.
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It seems like Seven’s bulletin from Sydney may have aired on CTC-7 at some point. From Mark Wallace’s report in the bumper “Aggregation Launch Preview” edition of The Canberra Times Guide, 27/3/1989:
However, no such references were made to Brian Henderson making a return to Canberra TV in that same article. It seems likely that National Nine News Sydney and Brian Henderson was first seen in the market at aggregation, although I’d be happy to be corrected if I’m wrong on that! 
The Wollongong local news insert on Capital only lasted until December 1989. After it was axed, Capital in Wollongong, as well as in the Central West & Riverina when it was expanded to those regions on 30 December, continued to receive the Canberra bulletin until January 1992, from which point they switched to relaying Ten’s Sydney bulletin, coinciding with the move to the 5pm timeslot.
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