Content Survey Live, at this time pays tribute to the people who have worked their guts out concerning Cyclone Alfred, and it’s recovery over the last month. You are all the real heroes of this unprecedented event for SE Queensland, the Fraser Coast and Northern NSW, and deserve the praise.
Welcome, to the second half of the first week of survey for Content Survey Live in 2025. Tonight, Brisbane, steps up to the plate, for the first time this year.
Friday and Saturday, utilizing Friday's news went down to the wire for newly dehybrided Sydney and long dehybrided Melbourne.
Ultimately, Melbourne took home the points for the first fixture of the season... very important as next round, it has a bye, and also currently leads the standings for this week's Ray Robinson Number contest (outperforming Sydney significantly)
And now, the ground rules for the 2025 season.
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. A special prize will be given for the regular season’s Ray Robinson Number leader.
-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
-(NEW in 2025) The “Hometown Rule” now applies to both Monday and Thursday night in the regular season as well as in the three Four Quarter Blitz finals (where the highest ranked participant goes first) outside of the Grand Final.
- (NEW in 2025) No 2nd survey (i.e. Tuesday/Friday) can be posted until 12hrs have elapsed after the live survey (Monday/Thursday) in the main season and the three Four Quarter Blitz finals outside the Grand Final. It can be worked on however, and scheduled.
-(NEW in 2025) Ties on the table, at the end of the season, have their seeding for finals decided by countback of fixture scores excluding byes (out of 40)
TALE OF THE TAPE: BRISBANE.
To borrow from the late, great social doyen, Ken Lord: Sun City Ten’s news is finally back home in Sun City, “Sun City” of course being Brisbane.
But, not without a few hiccups along the way: Seven taking back the biggest force responsible for the return of a Brisbane-produced bulletin on 10, in Erin Edwards in September last year was one of them, Seven axing it’s Gold Coast news service in November, was another… and now the toughest challenge: with the TVQ newsroom now under the watch of Josh Adsett: who was Seven’s most senior reporter on the Gold Coast (who knew the Coast back to front), who ended up at 10 via the same sacking spree at Seven that ultimately led Sharyn Ghidella back to the station where she got her start in metropolitan television.
And, a baptism of fire for a newly crowned news director began with, a successful gamble concerning getting feet on the ground in Townsville/Ingham early on in the picture during their flood situation in mid-February 2025… followed by the event that finally reminded many that 10 was home: the approach of Cyclone Alfred in early March.
We know, Alfred’s power started taking effect on Friday night, March 7, when many started losing power in the SE corner. It’s fitting that we remember a night that was unthinkable this time last year (that some in SEQ may not have seen at all due to power outages): let alone in recent years: a competent TVQ news service when the big stories hit in their own backyard… with a far more even spread of their own limited resources (with a little help from the Josh Adsett GC knowledge bank) than the more highly budgeted competition.
And, they were rewarded for it: the highest figures in many years for a bulletin, many were writing off long ago.
All this… just a fortnight after the finalization of the purchase from Southern Cross Austereo of their three 10 affiliates: most notably, TNQ serving regional Queensland.
Surely the effort the Brisbane team put in with limited resources, is a emphatic message to 10 to invest in Queensland, to put down Sky News Regional like the dead puppy it is, and make it’s largest O&O asset in terms of land area in Australia a asset to be proud of, by simply adding more legs to the 10 News First Queensland machine, that for far too long has been seen as second place… to Sydney.
Tonight, for Sharyn Ghidella: she is not the sideshow to Content Survey Live (like Lexicon News in 2021 was)... nor the sideline in a test for what became Content Survey Live in 2019... but now, she is the main event: and everything rides on her back.
For the first time since August 20, 2020: a Brisbane-produced, Brisbane-presented, Brisbane news bulletin on 10, enters the Content Survey Live fray.
We open the first segment with what will likely also be the big lead story in Perth later tonight: a ASX market collapse in light of US tariffs, followed by a story on a delayed sentencing of a 18yr old, voiced over confirmation about some remains found in Surat concerning a missing person's case, a fisherman's rescue off Stradbroke Island, a full story on the aftermath of SW QLD's flood crisis (now receding in Thargomindah) and a live cross concerning the Bally's rescue bid for Star Entertainment while the second segment has a full story on Gold Coast sand renourishment post-Alfred, that segued into a live cross for weather: right outside the barge doing the work.
Third window, had a full piece on a recent RACQ survey concerning e-scooter and bicycle accidents.
Sport, surprisingly balanced: with a full locally-produced NRL wrap, as well as v/o'd pieces concerning both the Gold Coast Suns recent success and the upcoming Billie Jean King Cup tie at Tennyson this weekend.
Overall, the Brisbane news service tonight looked and felt a lot stronger than it's former hybrid partner: with one qualm: no overnight local news: especially as the Stradbroke rescue (the closest thing it had to overnight news) was supplied from elsewhere.
The scores:
Four local stories.
Three locally relevant sports stories, one fleshed out, two voiced over.
Three live crosses: two for the weather and a newsroom live cross.
Two non-sport VO'd pieces.
A Ray Robinson Number of 0 (due to the external supply of the Stradbroke rescue story).
Last year's score for Brisbane for the entire 2024 season of four surveys: 3.2/40.
Tonight's score for Brisbane is historic. 6.6/10.
This marks the highest survey score ever recorded for Brisbane (overtaking the 4.5/10 recorded in August 2020).
A very significant improvement for the Brisbane market on scores during the hybrid era, and a score that is set to put the entire competition on notice. Brisbane is no longer bad news, the easy win every season for rivals, that existed prior to the Sydney/Brisbane hybrid being split in September last year. The Ghidella/Adsett show is now the one to watch, and has the potential this season to go all the way... not just in the regular season... but is potentially grand final material.
It has the potential to swing harder... if they get their overnight news sorted out.
We also interrupt this scheduled content survey, for a special Week 1 offer concerning Kuttsywood's Couch One on Patreon: Use code "TVSPELLSMAGIC" to get 60% off your first month's subscription to our Veritas on KW: One and KW.360 tiers. Our first ever discount Patreon offer expires on April 15 at midday.
The 6:00 Sunday Night Sound.
We open up tonight, with a Skyhooks story or two with a Queensland twist.
The first is this alternate video for “This is My City” (a song designed to be a celebration of Melbourne), shot in Brisbane during a Skyhooks tour of QLD in mid-1976.
But, the real Skyhooks meat came for Queensland come 1979, once Shirley Strachan stepped away from the band (right as a new focus came for Shirl: a children’s television project: Shirl’s Neighbourhood), and a new lead singer was introduced: Tony Williams, whose first single, was… topical, tropical… and signalled the beginning of the end for Skyhooks… as a first run act: with the heyday lineup reforming on numerous occasions from 1983 onward until Shirl’s passing in August 2001.
That single: was inspired by the Right to March campaign in Queensland, and Sir Joh in general: the title: “Over the Border”
The biggest problem, was that it came out into the mainstream, at the same time the Brisbane punk sound of The Saints was booming into radios overseas, the same time The Go Betweens were itching to leave Brisbane, to follow The Saints’s lead, the same time 4ZZZ (then based at UQ) was becoming a music foundry and created ideas that ended up becoming our biggest radio staples: There’d be no Hottest 100 on Triple J in late January, without 4ZZZ’s Hot 100, a staple as old as the station itself (turning 50 in November), the same time a Brisbane mid-sixties high school guitar player, who became a Masters Apprentice, in Glenn Wheatley, ended up managing The Little River Band into significant US success.
It basically, tried to sound like Brisbane… but failed. The final first run Skyhooks studio album was released in 1980, before the heyday lineup got together once more in 1983 and produced three more albums: “Live in The Eighties” (a successful live album from the first reunion concerts in 1983), a mixed greatest hits/new material album, fittingly called “The Latest and Greatest” (released in the wake of a surprise 1990 hit: Jukebox in Siberia, the first new material recorded in a decade, this time by the heyday lineup) and another combination greatest hits/new material album in 1999, The Collection (the greatest hits)/The Lost Album (the remnants of a proposed studio album made in the wake of Jukebox in Siberia’s success), before that tragic day in August 2001: when Shirley Strauchan crashed a helicopter he was learning to fly onto a mountain in SE Queensland, and died instantly, that ended all hopes of a 21st century vision for Skyhooks.
Since that time, the surviving members of the heyday incarnation have popped up together every now and then… but having to bring in a guest lead singer to fill the void Shirl’s passing left.
But where a post Shirl Skyhooks failed with a mainstream QLD/Joh protest track, others rose, in the background in Brisbane no less (best explored through the 1987 ABC Rock Arena documentary Brisbane Bands), the most famous of these was popular locally, and coming up through the 4ZZZ foundry: The Parameters enigmatic track, Pig City: a track so iconic for it's frank description of the years where the QLD Police had politicians in one pocket, and the vice industry in the other (which became wider knowledge than the 4ZZZ set, thanks to revelations in early 1987 made to both print journalist Phil Dickie and 4 Corners reporter Chris Masters (who built off Dickie's work), the seeds for the Fitzgerald Inquiry), that it not only became the title for a successful book, by Andrew Stafford (charting the history of the Brisbane music industry from The Saints to Savage Garden), released in 2004 (and has had a 20th anniversary edition released in 2024), but was also spun off in 2007 to a one day music event in the former backyard of 4ZZZ, UQ (the station having left the campus in the late eighties) that was headlined by… The Saints.
Tomorrow night: we go on the prowl…
Well, tomorrow night is also a throwback to Perth for it’s first survey of 2025. We are literally working on it, as we post… See you tomorrow night.
A reminder of our socials:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kuttsywoods.couch
BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/veritasonkw.bsky.social
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