HomeGEST what? Geelong to get weekly TV bulletin
MELBOURNE and Geelong community television station Channel 31 will begin airing a weekly Geelong bulletin next week.
Geelong Entertainment and Sports Television Media, trading as GEST Media, will produce the bulletin, which will be broadcast on Wednesdays at 6.30pm.
Owner and manager Noel Fanning, also a director of C31, said a half-hour news magazine program, Geelong Newsbeat, had been put on hold while the new half-hour bulletin was refined.
He said the anchor for News Geelong was newsreader Graham Rawlins, who has worked on GEST programs on C31 for five years. He would be joined by reporter and co-newsreader Meryl Friend and weather presenter Larni Salathiel.
Ebony Henry, Luke Wierzbowksi and Hannah Gleeson would serve as news reporters, and Tim Michell and Callen Lowther would cover sport.
Mr Fanning said the bulletin would increase to two nights a week, screening on Wednesdays and Fridays, in March to coincide with the football season start. GEST's long-term aim would be to produce five Geelong bulletins for C31 a week.
The station broadcasts only on the analog band, so digital TV viewers would need an analog tuner to watch. More than 56 per cent of households in the Melbourne metropolitan area have converted to digital TV.
C31 aims to begin a simulcast of its programs in digital TV on a standard-definition channel in the first half of next year, and with the community TV stations in Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney and Perth, will seek to join the Freeview consortium of free-to-air TV digital networks.
