Stanger believes that all the changes in the marketplace will have very little effect on viewers and they will find all their favourite programs within a week or two. He says the real battleground in the market this fall is going to be for the local news audience.

The new CTV British Columbia is already planning an aggressive attack for news supremacy. News veteran Robert Hurst, senior VP of CTV British Columbia and general manager of the station, says the building of the CTV news presence has already begun. New reporters and camera operators have been hired and the station now has five microwave trucks for live on-scene reporting.

Hurst says, "This is the first time that CTV in British Columbia has offered a local province-wide television news service. The challenges are great because two other stations have been entrenched here for decades - CKVU and BCTV. BCTV, as the CTV

affiliate, dominates and has dominated for years.

"We really began our CTV news build at the beginning of April. Building television news in 2001 involves huge investments in technology and people. This is the way to win viewers, if they know you are at the scene with live capabilities and the other guys don't have that capability."

The revamped VTV-CTV dinner-time news programming will consist of two back-to-back local newscasts running for a total of one-and-a-half or two hours, starting at 5 or 5:30 p.m. (The length will be determined by mid-June.) One news team will anchor the first segment and Bill Good has been stolen from BCTV to anchor the 6 p.m. hour. Good, a radio and television news anchor in the community for the past 25 years, was anchor on the segment leading into BCTV's 6 p.m. news with Tony Parsons, the number-one news program, for several years.