The diversity of Canberra-based television news coverage will shrink from July this year and more TV news jobs will go in the ACT after Nine and WIN announced a new regional affiliation agreement on Friday.
The minimum seven-year agreement between Nine and WIN will likely have to force one of the networks to run the knife to its news-gathering resources in the ACT.
Nine has as many as nine journalists and production staff in Canberra, while WIN has a newsroom based at Fyshwick, but the bulletin is read in Wollongong.
The stations have gone head to head for the past four years after splitting in 2016 and starting separate bulletins in regional areas.
From July, WIN will move its local news bulletin to 5.30pm before taking the 6pm national bulletin out of Sydney.
The new deal throws uncertainty around where Southern Cross Austereo, which had previously taken Nine's metropolitan free-to-air content, will now source its local news and sport stories.
Southern Cross has been broadcasting into southern NSW and the ACT since 2016. In its statement to the Australian Stock Exchange on Friday, Southern Cross said it "looks forward to discussions in coming weeks with Network Ten to establish a new affiliation ... in southern NSW".
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Network Ten, owned by ViacomCBS, has a nightly news bulletin called 10 News First but its Canberra content is largely limited to material generated out of Parliament House.
Under the Broadcasting Services Act, local content is measured using a points system to ensure larger regional communities have access to local content and news.
There are minimum points quotas which apply to local broadcasters, and at least 50 per cent of the points must come from material which the authority ACMA states must "relate directly to the local area".
For many Canberra viewers, the WIN-Nine deal is a throwback to a previous news relationship. In its news-gathering heyday, WIN had a busy newsroom on Wentworth Avenue in Kingston, with a half-hour local bulletin read out of a Canberra studio and up to three news crews on the road during the day gathering local stories.
In a statement issued on Friday, Nine's chief executive officer High Marks said the new arrangement was the "right time for us to return to WIN".
"The opportunities presented by the WIN Network to both extend the reach of Nine's premium content into more regional markets under one agreement ... and work with them co-operatively on a national and local news operation," he said.
Out of the deal, WIN will gain popular Nine sports feeds such as the NRL and Wallabies rugby union games.
Bruce Gordon, who owns WIN and is Nine's largest shareholder through another company Birketu, described it as "great to have Nine's content back on WIN screens in these regional markets".
One of Gordon's largest regional rivals is Prime Media, which is 20 per cent owned by Thorney Investments, owners of Australian Community Media and The Canberra Times.
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