In the group photographs taken at the launch of Sky Television in February 1989, one face will leap out to the Irish news-watching public more than the rest.
It will not be Rupert Murdoch, who for years owned 39 per cent of Sky plc before selling it at the top of the market to US giant Comcast in 2018.
It will not even be a younger iteration of Andrew Neil, the news and current affairs stalwart brought in from the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times to oversee the launch of the satellite broadcaster.
It will be presenter Kay Burley, wearing a white pinstriped jacket very much of the era. In some of the launch photographs, she is the only woman in the line-up, but she is right there at the shoulder-padded birth of Sky News, making her presence felt.
The remarkably unchanged and almost always unfazed Burley went on to spend 36 years on air, often putting in what her colleague Beth Rigby called “Stakhanovite” shifts from the site of unfolding news stories.
Burley (64) retired from Sky News on Wednesday after “over a million minutes of live TV news”, many of which involved effective, concise and sometimes acidic interrogations of floundering government ministers.
Sky News, which pioneered the concept of a rolling news service in the UK, has long had high visibility in Ireland, where it defines the phenomenon of 24-hour TV news thanks to its early presence in a limited line-up of Cablelink channels.
The departure of Burley, the sole survivor of those early years, is set to be followed by more fundamental change at the channel under a strategy recently laid out by executive chairman David Rhodes.
As part of the Sky News 2030 plan, the big ambition is to attract new audiences willing to pay for news, helping to counter “largely stagnant” revenues from advertising and sponsorship.
The hope is that new revenue streams will spring from paid-for podcasts and newsletters, as well as events and live shows – or “premium content tiers” in media-speak.
It’s all a long way from the simplicity of a booming voice announcing that Sky News will bring viewers the news “on the hour, every hour”.
But then the channel didn’t have the entire internet for competition back in 1989. It does now.
