Content Survey Live: The City With A Golden Anniversary: Night 1: May 13, 2024.

 50 years in the making: this is Content Survey Live: City with A Golden Anniversary.

Hey did you know, hey did you know: It’s TVQ’s 50th anniversary of news, you know…

Do you recall, the thrill of it all when commercial news in Brisbane became a game of three?

Ten years late, and with a Canberra decree?

It all started with a newsroom, based in the CBD, next to the colorful 4IP, with bulletin’s stories raced up the hill efficiently.

A bulletin ready to show it’s new face in black and white and finally joining the race,

The first five years saw TVQ’s news try to thrive: as Brian Cahill was poached from Seven and the Eyewitness News name arrived, all while technology was changing in the blink of a eye, with the arrival of news gathering on videotape, helicopters and live eyes, A young Jo Pearson cut her teeth here in the formative years… before moving onto Melbourne and much bigger things… Same day news from interstate became a expensive reality, But as the 70’s came to a screeching end: new owners for TVQ as Ansett’s broadcasting dream is also coming to a end… 

Welcome to a Content Survey Live special event: for the next five days, we’ll be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of of 10’s Brisbane news service: the last of the original four stations to establish a wider news operation.

Let’s have a look at the ground rules for this event: they are significantly different than what Season Mode has dealt so far.

The ground rules in “The City with A Golden Anniversary” event are as follows:

-Local packaged stories count as marks: Those produced in Brisbane with a national angle do not count.
-If it was sourced overnight in Brisbane (replacing the “Live Cross”) by either a news crew or a pool, it will be marked once if it is a voiced over piece, and marked twice if a full story has resulted from it. We call this specific number each night, the "Ray Robinson Number".
-Local sports stories count regardless of whether the sports reporter shows their face.
-And, a encouragement for 10 to return their bulletin home to Queensland. Weather will count in this Content Survey Live event.
In addition, all marks will be totalled, and local stories, sport and voiced over content will be compared with the Great Local News Study results of 2019 at the end of the week.
As well: For the first time ever for a Content Survey Live series entry: our paper surveys will also be available to peruse.

Let us begin Night 1, of a very special Content Survey Live event... a very significant night for a news service that has suffered so much pain in the last half decade.

We open the first Brisbane window, with a piece on the Emma Lovell murder verdict, followed by two live stories (as they used to call them) on another verdict: the Totai Kefu home invasion of August 2021 and a investigation into the speargunning of a wongari on K'gari (dingo on Fraser Island) last month. We also have another full piece on a biowaste project at Bunya, and two V/O'd pieces of pool vision from Queensland parliament (supermarket inquiry) and from the Sunshine Coast coastal rail announcement.

But we are here tonight for a significant piece that closes the 5pm Brisbane window and why we are here today, May 13, 2024: and why this piece is called "May 13, 2024").

50yrs of news: a look back to the glory days of TVQ's news... to remind a audience that has dropped dramatically since centralization (to the point that 10 is now rating half of what the Chase or Tipping Point is getting in SEQ)... that we were there, once.

The fact that 10 got together in this piece, several big returns, that weren't file footage: Kay McGrath (first time on the 10 frequency in Brisbane: departed TVQ in 1987, 10 months before the 0/10 switch at Expo) Bill McDonald (departed TVQ in 2012, as part of the first major wave of cutbacks in 10's news department since the 1990's) and Georgie Lewis (departed TVQ when centralization happened in 2020) is something to be applauded.

This is not just a piece celebrating how we got there: it's ending up sounding like a message to Paramount execs both in Pyrmont and in the US, that Brisbane needs to be split from Sydney, and their news investment in markets like Queensland needs to return to the glory days.

Erin Edwards wants to oversee a bulletin, in the studio McWilliam and O'Loan bought into in the seventies, Kay McGrath made her own in the eighties, Bill and Georgie tried to bring "Something Extra" into the package in the late '00's and has been sitting vacant for 3 years, 8 months and 2 days.

And, to sell us on the idea "Why are we in Brisbane stuck with Sandra, when we could be better standing alone like Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth?" : Erin thought like her old workmate at Seven, Peter Doherty, (now working at Brisbane Airport and will probably get a kick out of one of the Flood of Memories images tonight) and turned on the nostalgia. 

The time has come, 10. Bring our news home, to bring the viewers back from many different places and give Erin her dream: overseeing a news service entirely presented in Brisbane, not piped down to Sydney for reassembly with Sydney's news.

Meanwhile, we got two local sports stories: Broncos mauling of Parramatta on Friday night and last night's tie between the Crows and the Lions in Adelaide.

The score.

Five local packaged stories (two were live reports)

Two V/O'd pieces from footage pools, giving us a Ray Robinson Number of two.

Two local sports stories.

Weather: 5:26, and pre-6: (10 have likely listened to our complaints from April on both the Sydney and Brisbane Season Mode posts about jamming Sydney weather with Brisbane pre-6pm)

A nostalgia kick, that makes the viewers that are left begin to question whether Sydney-based Brisbane news on TV was a good idea at all: much like Nine did with 4BC from 2020 onward.

If this were a regular piece (not the special event that is running this week) this bulletin would rank as probably the best Brisbane's played in a long time.

A Flood of Memories: 1974 revisited:
(thanks to some Brisbane Telegraph and Sunday Sun microfiche over at SLQ)

Today, we pick up the Telegraph from the very first night of TVQ’s news: with a big front page story, concerning three arrests in a weekend crime in Lawnton: then, a suburb on the outskirts of Brisbane: today, pretty much part of the metropolitan area.

(Telegraph front cover 13/5/1974)

However: Seven seemed it had the most to lose with a third metropolitan TV news service in Brisbane. A full-page advertisement promoting their news complete with anchors Brian Cahill (fresh off his own personal tragedy: significant flood damage to his property in the Australia Day flood disaster) and Mike Higgins (who’d ultimately become Seven’s lead newsreader in Brisbane once Brian Cahill switched to TVQ, and helped lead BTQ’s news to the #1 ratings position, before going to TVQ himself in 1987)

(Seven's full page Brisbane Telegraph advert 13/5/1974)

We'll be seeing you again: for the second night of this special event, just hours before the Federal Budget, tomorrow night: which also marks a symbolic milestone for the Content Survey Live format.

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