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“Matter of time” before regional news lost, GWN warns.

WA regional bulletins are under threat without urgent reform says Prime boss Ian Audsely.

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Prime Media boss Ian Audsley has warned that regional news bulletins in Western Australia could be axed without imminent media reform.

Writing for Fairfax Media he described existing broadcasting rules as “a slowly tightening noose around the neck of your local TV stations” while streaming services like Netflix go unregulated.

Prime-owned GWN celebrates its 50th birthday this month. Yet while Prime, WIN Corporation and Southern Cross Austereo have pushed for the scrapping of ownership regulations, Labor and the Greens are opposed to the Government’s bill in its current form.

“As regional TV markets decay at an increasing pace, the day will dawn when independent TV stations under financial pressure are forced to reduce their commitment to local programming,” Audsley wrote.

“We are on the cusp of public policy failure.

“The outcome of Parliament’s constipation will be market failure on a number of levels, but particularly for local content,” he writes.

“It is simply a matter of time before GWN will have to review its commitment to local news.”

Employing more than 40 people, GWN has offices in Bunbury, Kalgoorlie, Albany, Geraldton and Perth, as well as staff in Broome.

Last month Nine and Southern Cross began rolling out the first of 15 regional bulletins, produced from metropolitan studios, utilising regional crews.

5 Responses

  1. what if the wa government royalties for regions program was to buy the bunbury produced programs from prime and retransmit them on the wa government owned satellite tv channel westlink channel via the wa abc tv network ?.

  2. Prime Media Group needs to re-define its relationship with profit and update its business model!

    The Golden West Network was established as a group of stations precisely because rural television is a low-profit marketplace. None the less, Prime Media Group posted a profit in 2016 of $27.3 million. As a comparison Network Ten posted a loss of $157 million.

    Yes, terrestrial television profits are in decline the world over – but it’s time Prime dragged its business model out of 1989. Profit is moving away from advertising and toward content. Prime should be considering how it can produce content that can earn them money. There are entire countries with a viewer base lower than Prime’s (over 5 million) that produce a lot more saleable television content than does Prime.

    Prime should also consider how it can improve its web revenue. It has local journalists, why aren’t their…

    1. I couldn’t agree more. Prime broadcasts to over 5 million people. That is less people than One, TV2 and Three broadcast to in NZ – yet look at the amount of programming they all produce compared to Prime. They need to evolve their business model and not be 100% reliant on advertising for revenue. It’s not like these changes to TV have come overnight – it’s been a slow drip over 10-15 years. Where is the digital, the content, the branded content, the co-productions with Seven, the proud ion arm to make original content to air on Prime, sell to Seven, Foxtel, NZ,etc… Prime just [posted a bit profit while Ten and Nine and Seven all posted losses – hard to feel sorry for them

  3. its because 22 min local news costs alot of money for GWN and PRIME and WIN TV… and becoming increasingly difficult to schedule when the network is fitting so much in. Say what you want about the 9/SCA rollout of news.. good bad or in different, but financially it makes sense… 9 will have eyes and ears everywhere that they own for the relatively low cost of running these newsrooms. The others (PRIME and WIN) will watch closely, and they will say forever that they are committed to full half hour of news, but are they? the 9 and NBN models i think will be adopted by the others within 5 years. And really is there 22 mins of decent local news 5 days a week in regional towns?

  4. The government is not responsible for the failure of a business. This business is responsible for not doing what it should. The government has been far to lenient of these businesses for a vote grab in return .

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