The Future Care Project
Angela Cochrane · Rural and remote early childhood education · Queensland
Nine days from first pitch to six television markets.
A forum in Blackall, then the survey close. Eleven outlets.
The Future Care Project came to Stitch in July with a two-day early childhood forum in Blackall — a town of under 1,500 people, more than a thousand kilometres from the nearest capital city newsroom. The task was to make a western Queensland gathering legible to newsrooms that had never covered it. The first story ran two days after the first approach; the television package landed across six markets inside a single thirty-six hour window. A fortnight later, the survey close went out on four ABC Queensland stations and back into the Leader. Seventeen placements across eleven outlets, six Seven Network television markets and a combined television audience of 104,040.
4–28 July 2026
Engagement and buildEngagement, media approach plan, and a story built for newsrooms outside the region
Thursday 30 July 2026
1 placement“Childcare demand overlooked” — the first story, two days after the first approach
Thursday 6 August 2026
1 placementSeven Local News, Toowoomba — the forum leads the regional bulletin
Friday 7 August 2026
10 placements“Childcare priorities” — the forum written up as news
Breakfast news read — the project named on the North West bulletin
Breakfast with Jay Carstens — Angela on the forum and the survey data
7.30 news — the workforce and qualification barriers, in Angela’s words
The same item, simulcast to Mount Isa
Seven Local News, Cairns — carried more than a thousand kilometres north
Seven News Mackay — the forum in the evening bulletin
Sunshine News — the largest audience of the six
Seven Local News, Bundaberg and the Wide Bay
Seven Local News, Rockhampton — the sixth and final market
Wednesday 19 August 2026
1 placement“Final call for families”: the survey close, two days out
Friday 21 August 2026
4 placementsABC Mornings: Angela on close day, the early findings and the 5pm deadline
The same interview, simulcast to Mount Isa
The same interview, simulcast to Townsville
The same interview, simulcast to Cairns
What ran
The Seven Network package
One news package, carried across six Seven Network markets from Toowoomba to Cairns. Angela is a named interviewee in every one of the six. The package closes on the project’s own survey address — an unusual thing for a commercial bulletin to carry, and the single most valuable second of the whole run.
Breakfast, the morning after
The ABC ran Angela at length on Breakfast, then carried a second item into the 7.30 news simulcast to Mount Isa on ABC North West Queensland. Regional ABC is where a policy story earns its standing before a commercial network will touch it — and this one was on air the same morning the television package went to broadcast.
“Childcare priorities”
The local paper of record ran the forum as a news item with Angela quoted three times and a supplied photograph. This is the placement that matters most to the people the project actually serves — the families in the survey catchment read the Leader, not a Sunshine Coast bulletin. It was the Leader’s second story on the project in nine days.
Carried across the ABC’s western network
A single 46-second interview item was simulcast to Longreach and Mount Isa — two placements from one recording — and a separate FM news read carried the project by name into the North West bulletin. Small items, but they are how a story reaches a listener five hundred kilometres from the room it happened in.
Close day, on ABC Mornings
On the morning the survey closed, Angela was on ABC Mornings for almost eight minutes, simulcast from Longreach to Mount Isa, Townsville and Cairns. The interview put the early findings on air and ended on where families could still take part before 5pm. Two of the four stations were new to the campaign.
“Final call for families”
The Leader’s third story on the project, and the one that asked its own readers to act: complete the survey before Friday. It carried the early findings, the Blackall action list and Angela’s next stop, the Western Queensland Alliance of Councils assembly in Brisbane.
Broadcast stills: Seven Local News, 7 August 2026.
What the coverage actually said
Placement counts are the easy part. The harder test is whether the client’s argument survived the trip into print — whether what she has been saying for two years came out the other end intact.
This was about bringing people into the room that had the power, the funding and the capacity to start breaking down some of these barriers.
We need to step away from that one-size-fits-all model which is purpose-built for urban areas.
If we can do better with how it’s funded and delivered, we could be creating new childcare places in a matter of months instead of a matter of years.
Why a Blackall forum led six bulletins
Built for the newsroom that wasn’t there
No metropolitan crew was travelling to Blackall. So the assets went to them instead — a media alert nine days out, a data infographic, a ten-barrier briefing document and a day-of release, all built so a producer in Cairns could run the story without sending anyone. Six of them did.
A regional story, not a client story
The package that ran features a mother, a school principal, a deputy mayor and a regional development chief executive alongside Angela. That is deliberate. A story about one organisation gets one outlet; a story about a region that happens to have a credible voice at the centre of it gets six.
What we are not claiming
The Future Care Project is a consulted stakeholder in a federal inquiry into rural and remote early childhood education. That standing is the client’s own, built over years of work in these communities, and Stitch claims no part in it. Media coverage and policy outcomes are different things, and a results page that blurs them is not worth reading.
Want a run like this for your organisation?
The Future Care Project was a PR Sprint: one concentrated campaign, built around the moments that mattered, taken to the outlets that would carry it furthest.
See how it worksNotes and sources
* Stitch calculation. Television airtime is the measured duration of the news package itself — 1 minute 38 seconds, timed from the broadcast recording — applied across the six markets that carried it. It deliberately excludes the surrounding bulletin content included in the monitoring report’s logged item durations, which in several markets span unrelated stories. Radio airtime is timed from the broadcast recordings where Stitch holds them: the ABC Western Queensland Breakfast interview of 7 August (5:44) and the ABC Mornings interview of 21 August (7:57, counted once for each of the four stations that carried it). The ABC Western Queensland 7.30 news item of 7 August sits inside the timed Breakfast interview and is not counted twice. The remaining radio items use Isentia-logged durations.
Television audience of 104,040 is the sum of the Isentia broadcast-audience field across the six Seven Network markets, 6–7 August 2026. It is a television figure only. The four ABC radio items and The Longreach Leader returned no audience or readership figure in the monitoring report, and none has been estimated — so this is not a total reach figure for the campaign and is not published as one.
Placement counts, print sizes, page numbers and word counts per Isentia monitoring, 6–21 August 2026. One story in one outlet counts as one placement. Where a single item was simulcast to more than one station it is counted once per station, and identified as a simulcast. The Longreach Leader’s survey-close story ran online on 19 August and in print on 21 August; one story in one masthead, it is counted once. Coverage means published or broadcast — a pitch, a booked interview or a journalist attending an event is not coverage.
Only coverage secured after Stitch’s engagement began on 4 July 2026 is counted on this page. The Longreach Leader story of 30 July 2026 falls outside the Isentia monitoring window — monitoring was briefed on 4 August — so it is counted as a placement on the published article, with no measured size, word count or readership attached to it.
Quotations are reproduced as published by the reporting outlet. Survey findings referenced in broadcast coverage are the work of the Remote Area Planning and Development Board and are not reproduced here.
The Seven Local News package and the broadcast stills taken from it are reproduced with permission. Copyright in the footage remains with the Seven Network.