Content Survey Live: Yesterday's Hero: Grand Final: Game 1, Part 1

 You've made it to the final...

Welcome, to the 2025 Grand Final for Content Survey Live.

This year's grand final, is a best of five game series, where the first city to win three games will be crowned the Australian champion of this game for 2025, and will go on in 2026 to face the winner of Content Survey Live U.S.A. (happening next year) in the first ever world championship in content survey.

Now, let's go over the ground rules.

Our focus, in Content Survey Live will be monitoring Ten’s five capital city news services (a benefit of technological change, now allowing us to watch interstate bulletins on delay), using the same criteria we used in the “Great Local News Study” from Kuttsy's Pitch XI in August, 2019.

-Locally sourced stories: that is stories reported by local journos. Really big local market stories with national impacts, also fit here. Voiced over local stories are counted separately.

-Live crosses: stuff that is used to embellish a story.

-(NEW in 2025) Local overnight news: Handled via a system we call collectively, the “Ray Robinson Number”: 1pt for V/O’d overnight news, 2pts for a full story, the total is reported at each survey’s end.

-Weather is not counted.

-Sport is not counted if it’s done by obviously freelance journos, or voiced over pieces: you gotta have dedicated reporters there, with their mug on air reporting a sports story for it to count.

The Hometown Rule for the Grand Final, is as follows.

Brisbane: Game 1, Game 3, Game 5 (if required)
Melbourne: Game 2, Game 4 (if required)

And, now: a preview piece for Brisbane... as it enters the first night of the Grand Final...

July 1, 1995.

“So, with thirty down, we are aiming for thirty more, on this: our thirtieth birthday.”

Glenn Taylor, as part of the finale for TVQ’s 30th anniversary.

In 1995, 10 in Brisbane’s news service had only just turned 21 a mere two months before the thirtieth milestone for the station as a whole.

A news service that witnessed some highs, lows and significant technological advancement in news presentation all happening in a short frame of time compared to the life of the station as a whole.

A birthday for the station that happened just two weeks after Fatty Vautin’s Broncos-less Maroons completed a whitewash in the State of Origin series of 1995, and just months after Alan Border’s last big achievement as a cricketer: bringing the Sheffield Shield to Queensland for the first time.

July 1, 2025.

10 Brisbane, on it’s sixtieth birthday, no less: is walking high, to it’s own Paul Vautin moment, thanks to a return to local presentation in September last year, the arrival of Sharyn Ghidella back to the metro station she started out at, and a newsroom led by Josh Adsett: who, a year ago were both leading names at Seven (Ghidella, the lead anchor: Adsett, Seven’s most senior reporter on the Gold Coast), before it was seen by news executives at the network that they were both expendable.

Seven’s bad decisions… are only benefiting 10… shades of the past, when Melissa Downes and Peter Ford twenty five years ago, launching off the Sydney Olympics no less: attempted to go local for one hour between 5-6pm, a attempt that only lasted three months.

At this point it would also be remiss to mention that 10 now also has a O&O in regional Queensland (alongside other aggregated markets): the station where Ghidella’s career began, whose archive is not in a skip: but in the hands of Townsville City Council, who has begun a painstakingly long process of digitizing a archive of news that is a wide snapshot of North Queensland life for public access.

A dominant performance this year by a market long the loser of this game, holding the wooden spoon for five years straight, now just three wins off a championship, the maiden Content Survey Live title for the NRL markets, after years of AFL market dominance, and that prized spot as the Australian representative in next year’s Content Survey Live world championships.

We open tonight's news (the first night back as 10 News since September 2013), with a story on the weekend shark attack at Cabarita Beach (alongside a live cross from GCUH), followed by two other live crosses (a newsroom cross, concerning the collapse of a rescue deal for Star's Queens Wharf development, and a live cross from the Cultural Centre overpass, concerning MetBus changes.)

A very significant amount of voiced over stories tonight: a Southport weekend murder, a mystery death in Maroochydore is finally solved, we have a piece about Origin 3 Maroons squad callups, the funeral of Pheobe Bishop, upcoming escalation of midwife/nurse industrial action, divers at Lady Elliot Island experience with a whale, as well as police crackdown in far north Queensland.

We also get a live cross from Morwell (of a story expected to lead Melbourne's news tonight).

We also get stories about the increased risk of fireworks being smuggled into Queensland after NT cracker night, and Seaworld rescuing a trapped dolphin in Brunswick Heads.

Sport tonight, pretty much focusing on Origin squads, with drips/drops concerning Suns/Lions and the NRLW.

Overall, 10's news tonight in Brisbane is showing signs of increased momentum... at just the right time.

The scores:
Three local stories,
A unprecedented seven voiced over pieces.
Four live crosses (six if you count weather).
Sport very heavily skewed to SOO.
A Ray Robinson Number of 0.

The only number that matters in every fixture in this grand final series.

Brisbane scored: 7/10.

Melbourne, has a lot to live up to on opening night, as 10 News once more.

Well, that's it for the first Brisbane survey of the Grand Final. The results for each fixture, of the grand final will be seen in the second survey: which will be posted within reasonable time, on the same night.

See you shortly for the second half of tonight's game.

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