Sad news to report this morning with good mates of mine up at Nine News Queensland’s Brisbane studios shattered after finding out they’d missed out on a news media world record by a matter of seconds.

Won’t mention their names but a news director and booth producer weren’t aware how close they were to having the long-standing record for a news outfit shamelessly milking graphic video in the bag after last night’s (Saturday’s) 6pm bulletin ran the same graphic footage of Hawaiian coppers narrowly avoiding an out-of-control car not just once, not just twice but THREE times in 14 seconds!

“It’s our bloody fault,” one of my old high-school chums told me. “We weren’t even aware of the possibility of a record until after the segment had aired and someone told us a TV news station in Oregon held that title for footage back in 2026 of a landslip in that state where a four-tonne boulder cleaned up a family of four on their way to church and that was repeated three times in just under 13 seconds.

“We could have easily trimmed the start of that Hawaiian footage and grabbed that record.”

My old mates have not ruled out an appeal as they suspect the Oregon footage may have been sped up a bit for dramatic effect.

Still, I applaud the efforts of Nine News up north and I hear they have reset their sights on even greater glory – the current record of five repeats of the same graphic image in only 21 seconds held by a TV news outfit in upper New York state of an Amtrak engine slamming into a truck at a level crossing in Buffalo.

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