60 Years of QLD TV

Days elapsed since Local Edition's end.

Thursday, November 30, 2023

Wednesday, November 29, 2023

Lexicon News The Third: Night Three: Orca and Orchideous

Ancient journo proverb (especially if you watched 7's 4pm news in QLD this arvo): don't screw up a story intro live on air, especially this close to Christmas.


Tuesday, November 28, 2023

Lexicon News The Third: Night Two: Pitch and Pithy

 "We surveyed 100 people about the new set... and we got nothing?"


Welcome to the second night of the third edition of Lexicon News. Last night, Seven hit it out of the ballpark at 6, yet faltered at 6:30 in SEQ. Tonight is set to be interesting indeed.

Let's again go over the ground rules for Lexicon News:

The Ground Rules:

The ground rules, for the Lexicon News event, are taken from a promo, in 1987: that compared Seven's second attempt at 1hr news in Brisbane, with Nine's 1/2hr product that became dominant at the exact same time.
As it described:
"If you are watching a half-hour news, take out the weather, sport, opening music, hello's and goodbyes and the commercials, and you could only get about 12 minutes of real news each night."

Thus the ground rules for the Lexicon News challenge are for five nights:
-Time the length of the bulletin, from the moment the first story intro begins at 6, to the time the throw to sport begins, on both bulletins.
-Write down every story on the 1hr version, and compare with the half hour version to see how much content is removed.
-Subtract the BNE timing from the regional timing to get the amount of time lost to regional QLD viewers each night by simply trimming the BTQ news bulletin.
-Ultimately: add up all the figures, and come up with a final set of numbers at the end of the week.

In additionwe will be tracking how many coverups of live cross timings (usually seen as giant "LIVE" graphics superimposed) are made by Seven on the 10 minute edit during this period.

Tonight's tale...
What aired in regional QLD, will be bolded and in red.

We open tonights bulletin up with storms in SEQ (a weather cross was excised from the regional QLD cut), more from a notable defamation trial, then a break-in at Beerwah, maternity issues in QLD, the search continuing for a missing person off the Sunshine Coast, the ongoing saline solution recall, upcoming national disposable vape ban (if you do not know what a vape is, ask your kids), refugee detention issues, a inquiry into the recent Optus mass outage, Gaza hostage families visiting Australia, a update on the Toondah Harbour development, Schoolies car with a branch through it on K'gari (a story that at this point is four days old, with the incident occurring on Saturday, and reported locally in the Wide Bay area on Monday night), the redirected P&O cruise finally makes landfall, Inland freight route funding stoush heads to Canberra tomorrow, Mark Richardson thanking Lifeflight team that did a emergency evac from Bali a few months back, SEQ rental costs and the suburbs where it's cheaper to buy than rent that somehow crashed into a story about a freeway fire, Adrian Beck's new program to tackle dyslexia in our youth, a new mobile wildlife hospital, figures about dog attacks on postal workers, Shane Warne's family's new cause: more heart checks for Australians, royal secrets book due for a Aussie release and finally, a kid stealing a forklift in Michigan. 

The timing in Brisbane added up tonight to 27mins 33secs.
The regional cut added up to 9mins 18secs.
Seven lexiconed out of their news tonight for regional Queenslanders: 18mins 15secs.
The amount of lexiconed content this week so far by Seven: 36mins 24secs

Once again, a relatively big news story relevant to regional Queensland (inland freight route proposal) is being left on the cutting room floor at Lexicon Central.

Tomorrow night, is the halfway point of this week's campaign, and a update on last night's bulletin's plug for a Heartkids fundraiser: their total is now over $1000 raised.

And, finally another reminder: OneQueensland's "Big Q" is being launched wider: the link to the survey is available here.

A reminder, if you want to support us here at Kuttsywood's Couch, please visit our Patreon page: and become a paid supporter, and a reminder: to see you tomorrow night... but first, a teaser for Boxing Day.