Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Music: The Others Way, a…, in reply to Nick Russell,
Did you get to see Miss June? Damn they were good.
I’d checked out a few bands I didn’t know well beforehand, and Miss June were absolutely one that got my attention. But they were a total clash with the Chickens …
Good to know my hunch about them was right though.
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Oh, and here’s a pic of Bene that didn’t go in the post.
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Mediawatch interviewed Melissa Lee about her bill and it was utterly perplexing.
Most notably, this part:
"As a TV producer I used to struggle to find out how many people were watching on a Sunday morning. The public have the right to know and it would help the producers as well,” she told Mediawatch.
“I know ratings are not everything and the way they do the ratings is probably antiquated and not the best gauge of viewership now especially as not everyone is watching linear television any more,” she said.
“There are programmes funded by New Zealand in Air that are purely digital and I don’t think they are being measured,” she said.
Firstly, I’ve never heard of a TV producer who didn’t have access to the ratings for their own programme – that’s nuts. My media show’s production company, Top Shelf, has a Nielsen subscription and I assume the majority of others do too. Otherwise, just ask the network. They know.
Secondly, online views are measured and the numbers are regularly quoted, including in NZ On Air’s annual reports. WTF?
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Up Front: R.O.A.R., in reply to Emma Hart,
Also, I feel like… I’ve been writing here for ten years. I’ve said everything. Either things have changed – the dominant voice of NZ feminism has hugely changed, for instance – or they’ve remained the same, and what more can I add?
And there is the exhaustion, there absolutely is. When you have skin in the game, it drains a lot more energy than if it’s all just intellectual. This Trumpian post-truth, lying has no consequences age has just completely sucked out my will to engage.
Tautoko.
My take on exhaustion is slightly different. I look back at this place when it was much, much busier and I can’t believe I had the bandwidth for it all. I don’t have the energy any more for shoulder-tapping new contributors or minding contentious discussions, and I’m genuinely happy for it to be quieter. (Although I’m always pleased and interested when you post.) It’s been 16 years of Public Address – and 11 years of Hard News as a radio/internet rant before that.
I tend to stick to the stuff I know most about, which is why I mostly post about media, music and drugs. The site still fills a role and I’d actually love to get it tidied up to reflect its quieter life, but I presently don’t have the money to do that. Press Patron certainly helps, but I’m obliged to treat that as a low-word-rate return on the stuff I do write.
It is interesting to look back a decade and marvel at how respectful the discussion usually was. I think Twitter changed things in a couple of ways – first by drawing off the real-time discussion and secondly by bringing a harsher edge to it. It got really difficult when people started falling out with each other, and hard not to feel I was responsible. Like I said, I just don’t have the mega bandwidth any more.
(Hmmm. This sounds a bit mopey, but it's actually not meant to.)
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Hard News: Music: Grey Lynn Taonga, in reply to Russell Brown,
So nice to see Delia Derbyshire getting the respect she didn’t while alive. She was an extreme perfectionist, which didn’t help, and she quit making music in 1974, not long after she left the BBC. It’s painfully sad she started making music again a few months before she died of renal failure due to chronic alcoholism in 2001.
Indeed. And it’s a shame the hundreds of tapes retrieved after her death have gone unheard because of “copyright complications”. But there is this 25-minute documentary about her:
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In keeping with this week's theme: an animated ad Chris Knox made for Real Groovy in 1984.
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That full-size The Others Way timetable. Click to embiggen.
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Hard News: NZ On Air and the bill that…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
But then I’m from a demographic that no one cares about so it doesn’t matter what I watch or when.
In commercial TV terms, this is certainly true. If you're not buying whiteware, they're not interested in you.
That was real shame of the closure of TVNZ 7 – it disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of viewers outside commercial TV's narrow target demographics.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Recalling the Rascals, in reply to Mark Wilson,
Im toying with the idea of playing at The British at the invitation of
Roz @ The Hellfire Club to commemorate playing to IGGY there 40 years ago !Perhaps an hour long set plus another band that would be fitting the vibe !
Sister ray includedOr you could just play 'Sister Ray' for an hour :-)
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Oh, this is timely: Duncan Greive has written a long and nerdy column on changing online metrics – basically, trusting Facebook was a mistake everyone made – and at the end offered some commentary on the fortunes of The Spinoff TV:
There’s another set of numbers which it would be remiss of me to ignore, even though explaining is losing and all that: The Spinoff TV debuted on Three in mid-June, to some extremely excellent numbers: the highest in the timeslot in ages. Then it basically halved over a couple of weeks. Knowing why is a fool’s game, but a combination of intuition and focus groups suggests that it might be because it was very much a work-in-progress in its first few episodes.
After four episodes it was moved an hour later, to 10.45pm, which is quite late. At which point, its ratings did what all shows do when they’re moved from 9.45pm to 10.45pm on a Friday – they tanked. This was extensively reported on by competing media, which is all in the game. (Four Mike’s Minutes is a lot though – maybe a record?)
Since then we have bounced around in low numbers, not disastrous, fairly normal for late on a Friday.
We know the show hasn’t been a smash on linear TV. Our forever antagonists The Taxpayer’s Union (to show just how excited they are about targeting a private organisation, check out exactly who they follow on Twitter) just put out yet another press release assailing the show, praising a National MP’s bill for greater accountability for NZ on Air under the admittedly pretty good headline “Spinoff TV Memorial Bill”. For what it’s worth, I would be heartily in favour of more metrics for publicly funded shows.
That is, so long as it’s all the relevant metrics: The Spinoff TV was pitched as an internet-first show, with a compile for TV on a Friday. That we would place the clips ad free online as soon as they were done, with more made than we could put on the TV.
The big idea was that we valued an online viewer as much as a TV viewer, and the proposal was adamant that a screen was a screen was a screen. The internet is the dominant media distribution channel for many under 40s, traditional media for most over 40s; yet the majority of government funding goes to shows that are first and foremost for linear television.
And it does appear that their online metrics aren't too bad.
