Content Survey Live: Yesterday's Hero: Round 3: Night 3: Crowing For Survival, Part 1

 A reminder, this post is not sponsored by Slovakia's premier lens manufacturer, Feckarse Industries…

Welcome to the third night, of Content Survey Live’s third round for 2025.

Brisbane on Monday night, got past Melbourne by the narrowest of margins, by just .15 of a point, and is now set for what was once, a impossible placing twelve months ago: Brisbane potentially winning the regular season... and a fast-track to the Grand Final.

Tonight, last year’s champion, Adelaide is hoping to assure Sydney, who is going into it’s bye in round 4, of a cellar finish. Much like Melbourne on Tuesday, it’s facing only it’s second survey of the season, where as Sydney has been surveyed three rounds straight since the start of the season.

Now, let’s look at 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. 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)

We open tonight's survey, with a story on a sentencing for a 2019 murder, Cathay Pacific making their longawaited return to the Adelaide market, a public school publicity campaign and a march on the CBD by naval shipyard workers asking for a payrise.

We only get one voiced over story tonight: a breaking one at that: a motorbike into a truck at Blackwood.

Meanwhile, the first running of the Tottenham Europa Cup final victory mislabeled a Tottenham player as 10's Andy Harper...

Which was ultimately fixed in sport.

Four live crosses tonight: a noshow in court for a peeping tom, weather at Morphettville that somehow became a story on the Sports SA Awards, issues with Ferretti Whyalla going into recievership and a decent run of AFL weekend lineup news during sport done live (inc. Max Burford doing his own reporting, get that man a Rolex) alongside a V/O'd piece on Adelaide A-League departures.

The big story in NSW's mid-North Coast ran as the last story before sport.

Overall, a fairly strong night for Adelaide. But will it be the push that sends Sydney into the cellar?

The scores:
Four local stories.
 Four live crosses.
One V/O'd story.
Sport done well.
A Ray Robinson Number of 0.

Last round, Adelaide scored 6.8/10.
Tonight: Adelaide scored a 6/10, purely due to the placement of the Mid North Coast flooding story, as the lead-in to sport: when it could have easily been third or fourth on the rundown for the first window of tonight's news.

It's a guaranteed fact, Sydney will lead with the Mid North Coast flooding. But how it uses this story, will be the difference between a chance at fourth after next round's bye... and a cellar door opening.

THE 6:00 SUNDAY NIGHT SOUND.

At this time 40 years ago two AFL giants were trying to stake a claim on the music charts. These same two greats also deserve to be paraded around the SCG in a open topped car with their hits blazing out of the PA when Geelong come down to face the Swans on August 17.

Tonight, we talk about the giant that got his success musically… naturally.

When people asked in the 1980’s, about “Wacko Jacko”… they weren’t talking about the singer Michael Jackson… they were talking about Mark “Jacko” Jackson, VFL footballer, at this time in 1985 almost finishing a run with Geelong (and not that far off a near season-ending suspension, in a infamous game at Princes Park against Hawthorn in early June).

But, Jacko had one thing behind him… a musical success: that ultimately led to some big doors being opened.

The big doors opened for Jacko, not long after the release of Crocodile Dundee… with Jacko becoming the spokesperson for Energizer batteries, both in Australia and the US, before being ultimately replaced by… the Energizer bunny in the early 1990’s.

But not before this interesting adaptation of the song... to stop people taking up smoking, which was used as a public service announcement...

Tomorrow night, caps this off.

Well, that’s it for Adelaide’s survey tonight. Tomorrow night, Sydney has it’s season on the line. See you then.

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