The nightly TV news for the network’s Gold Coast studio will sign off for the final time this evening after the shock move by station executives to pull the plug.

While the sudden finality stunned the media industry – Channel Seven’s Gold Coast staff were given only three days’ notice of the bulletin’s demise, the writing was on the wall and industry sources were not surprised.

Speaking exclusively to The Courier-Mail, insiders have told of a “domino effect” where a series of ripples eventually gave way to a flood which brought the whole thing crashing down.

Television, like most business, is a numbers game, and for Channel Seven Gold Coast, several key numbers were missing.

Chief among them were the ratings.

“If you win 5.30pm (Gold Coast News) you win 6pm”, was the battle cry of one former station exec who long viewed the Glitter Strip bulletin as an important stepping stone to lure viewers who would (in theory) stay with the station through to the all-important statewide bulletin.

However, over almost a decade of rivalry with Nine, Seven’s Gold Coast bulletin rarely came out on top.

It made the bulletin, with a slick production studio team and polished presenters, look like a luxury, particularly when compared to bulletins for regional centres such as the Sunshine Coast, Cairns and Townsville which often ran “on the smell of an oily rag”.

As well as having vastly cheaper operating budgets (Seven’s regional news bulletins are all delivered from a central hub on the Sunshine Coast), they also fall under different ratings categories meaning they are not subjected to the same rigorous scrutiny as the Gold Coast and Brisbane operations.

The regional bulletins also don’t serve as lead-in programming for the main state bulletin, often running as a 6pm service in their own right, followed by a streamlined state edition at 6.30pm.

However, despite only mild success over the years, Seven’s Gold Coast bulletin enjoyed fierce support at station HQ from a number of top level executives who argued that Australia’s sixth biggest city should have its own bulletin and abandoning the project would give rival Nine a free ride into the 6pm Brisbane news.

But with the curtain falling on the careers of several high-profile Seven executives – some of them passionate supporters of the Gold Coast news bulletin, there were no longer any influential figures to advocate for the GC in the corridors of power at network HQ.

“In the end there was no one left at head office to support the Gold Coast news,” said one insider familiar with Seven’s management.

“So when management started talking about cutting the Gold Coast news, there was no real voice arguing to keep it.”

The first major move came in July, when high-profile weather presenter Paul Burt was axed, along with several key production staffers.

It became increasingly difficult just to put out a product every weeknight and some speculated that the bulletin would be lucky to survive until Christmas.

In the end, it didn’t even last that long.

Staff were on Tuesday told that the nightly news would be gone by Thursday, with some employees to remain at a streamlined Gold Coast bureau, others to be reassigned to the Brisbane newsroom and several to be cut from the network.

One former staffer said those who had remained after the July job cuts felt betrayed.

“Management can say, ‘well, we made some changes and tried to keep it going’, but it just hasn’t worked,” they said.

“But these guys were busting their arses with next to no resources so what did management expect?”