Tonight, the Northern Rivers said goodbye to an institution.

As weekend presenter Jane Goldsmith signed off NBN’s final local weekend news bulletin, she thanked viewers for “inviting us into your lounge rooms” and reflected on her 16 years presenting weekend news.

It was a simple, understated farewell — and an emotional one for loyal viewers.

Yet while tonight marked the end of more than three decades of Saturday and Sunday local television news in our region, the forces that led to this moment were set in motion decades ago.

Like many people across northern NSW, I’ll miss it.

I’m a local news junkie.  Weekend local news has long been part of my routine and, judging by the outpouring of emotion since the cuts were announced, I’m far from alone.

The anger directed at WIN Television is understandable. Local news matters. It helps bind communities together. It tells the stories that would otherwise go untold. Every reduction in local journalism should concern us all.

But there also needs to be a dose of reality.

The decisions that led to this week’s cuts were not made in Wollongong in 2026. In many ways, they were made in Canberra almost 40 years ago.

The Hawke Government sold the aggregation of regional television on the promise of “more competition” for regional advertisers and “more choice” for viewers.

The reforms, demanded by the powerful metropolitan television networks, also enjoyed bipartisan backing from Labor and the National Party.

At the same time, then Treasurer Paul Keating was pursuing tough cross-media ownership laws.

Keating famously declared that media proprietors could be “a prince of print, a prince of television or a prince of radio, but you could not be king of them all”.

At the time, it sounded sensible.

Regional television was profitable, newspapers were strong and radio was thriving. The internet did not exist. Nobody could have imagined a future where audiences would fragment across hundreds of channels and billions of advertising dollars would flow offshore to global technology giants.

But with the benefit of hindsight, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Canberra got it badly wrong.

Many regional broadcasters argued at the time that existing operators should instead be allowed to multi-channel, providing viewers with greater choice while preserving strong local ownership and strong local news services.

I know, because I was there.

In the late 1980s, I worked for CBN8/MidState Television, part of Country Television Services, in Orange. I was originally employed by radio station 2GZ, which operated from the same building, before moving across to television.

Back then, there was no shortage of opportunity in regional media.

When I joined the organisation, around 120 people worked in the building. Journalists, camera operators, editors, producers, technicians, sales staff, radio announcers and administrative staff all earned a living under one roof.

The radio and television operations shared resources, talent and ideas. The synergies made both businesses stronger.

CBN would eventually become Prime Television and today forms part of the Seven Network.

The old station where I worked, which first went to air in March 1962 — the same month that both NBN and WIN began broadcasting — has since been bulldozed.

Sadly, that story has been repeated across regional Australia.

An industry that once employed hundreds of people in individual regional centres, and thousands nationwide across journalism, production, engineering and support roles has been steadily hollowed out.

Rod Bruem (far right) with Prime Television Orange news team colleagues from the early 1990s, the late Peter Andren (who went on to become a Federal MP), Celina Edmonds and Jane Faure-Brac.

Main photo: NBN News presenter Jane Goldsmith reaches out to weather presenter Lauren Kempe on the final Sunday evening news bulletin, with sports presenter Adam Murray.

Of course, regional media would still be under enormous pressure today because of the technological revolution that nobody saw coming.

Google, Meta, streaming services and changing audience habits would have weakened the old business model regardless.

But I remain convinced regional media would be in far better shape had governments listened to regional broadcasters.

Rather than preventing regional media companies from operating across print, radio and television, governments should have encouraged those synergies and allowed strong local media organisations to evolve into the digital age.

The Northern Rivers is a case in point.

For decades, The Northern Star had interests spanning newspapers, radio and television. Today, the print and television operations have disappeared altogether, leaving only the radio arm surviving and taking on the shared challenges the local media industry faces.

It could have been so much better.

A strong, locally owned multimedia organisation spanning print, radio, television and digital would almost certainly have been better placed to withstand the challenges of the internet age than the fragmented model we inherited.

Back then the regional media moguls, including locally family-owned businesses like CBN 8,  were simply acting out of self interest, but with the benefit of hindsight, their preferred model was the right one for the future.  History is always easier to interpret through the rear-view mirror.

Tonight, as the final NBN weekend team bid farewell, those of us who’ve been around long enough, could not help but wonder what might have been.

That said, the Northern Rivers remains fortunate.

We still have NBN’s (or will it be WIN’s?) weeknight bulletin. A half hour of local news at 5.30pm may seem inferior to what we’re used to, but it is still a significant investment in today’s world. 

We will withhold judgement until we see what WIN actually delivers, although it’s disappointing to hear that one of the two locally-based journalists and one of the camera operator positions have been made redundant. Not a promising start.

We also have Seven News, the well-resourced ABC, community radio and independent digital publishers, including Ballina News Daily and our associate independent digital publications like the IndyNR producing original journalism.

The challenge now is ensuring those organisations remain viable.

Ballina News Daily now reaches more than 20,000 readers a week according to independently verified audience data — a larger audience than The Northern Star attracted in its final years as a print publication.

Yet, like many local media organisations across Australia, we often find local businesses prefer to direct their advertising budgets to Google and Meta, despite much of that money leaving the region, and indeed the country, altogether.

That is their choice, of course.

But communities should understand there is a direct connection between supporting local journalism and having local journalism to support.

The detailed reporting Ballina News Daily published this weekend examining serious questions surrounding local marine rescue operations took days of work, countless phone calls and significant resources.

Stories such as those do not emerge from an algorithm. They are not generated by Facebook clips or Google recommendations.

They come from journalists living and working in the communities they serve.

If regional Australia wants strong local journalism in the future, communities, businesses and governments alike will need to recognise that quality journalism has value — and that value extends far beyond clicks and likes.

Because once local news disappears, history shows it rarely comes back.

Tonight’s final NBN weekend bulletin should serve as a reminder not to take local journalism for granted.

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