Posts by Russell Brown
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hi folks. Keep it nice!
I’ve just done an interviewl with Greenwald, which I’ll write up for tomorrow (it’s going to be a bitch to transcribe – the man speaks many words per minute).
One point of interest: he told me he didn’t veto Dotcom’s Warner email as such, but did express the view that there were “better ways to use the time” at the Moment of Truth event.
-
Hard News: Friday Music: Mo' Nina, in reply to Alan Perrott,
Yes, sadly. He died overnight in Auckland Hospital.
He'd been away in New York and LA and must only just have got back.
Grant McDougall is working on a tribute, which I'll post as soon as he's done.
-
Speaker: 1600 beneficiaries moving into…, in reply to Jim Brown,
The backlog of processing work is at one of the highest levels as well. The proposed amalgamation of Senior Services and Studylink will only add to the workflow problems, so in short, the Statistics are flawed, and the problems are going to get worse. The Job Placement service has actually gone backward in the last 2 years.
Can you point us to any numbers on all that, Jim?
-
Yep. Turns out, it's a churn number.
-
Just watched some of the Newstalk ZB leaders' breakfast stream. Key gave a long, lucid answer to Hosking's questions about how the votes will fall in the Maori electorates and elsewhere. He's really not stupid and he's very good at weighing the odds.
The contrast between that and the evasions and recitations he makes under pressure really is very striking.
-
Hard News: 2014: The Meth Election, in reply to andin,
Wrong again, Jack Sparrow. Your not too clever are you.
Give it a rest, please. Address each other's arguments rather than calling each other stupid.
-
Speaker: The End of Trust, in reply to Danielle,
ETA It occurs to me that the stated advertorials are “actual money to buy a page of advertising that looks like an article” and the mascara reviews are “using people employed by magazines to promote your product by giving them supplies of free stuff”, so there is obviously a difference. But to me it’s a bit of a whiffy one.
The lines are getting very blurred in the era of “native advertising”, where advertising is designed to look and feel like as much like editorial content as possible. I’ve been pitched “native advertising” which isn’t so much inappropriate as idiotic. Literally “when an airline has excess inventory in tickets to Fiji, we send you something to run about how awesome going to Fiji for a holiday is.”
One of the reasons that’s popular is that we’re all kind of switching off advertising now. It’s no accident that PR campaigns are commonly accounted to the client in terms of equivalent TV minutes – ie, that value of that time as paid advertising.
Otoh, I don’t have a problem with clearly-signalled sponsored posts from organisations looking for a conversation, as we’ve done for the Law Commission and NZTA. It’s not all one thing.
-
Speaker: The End of Trust, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
With all due respect, Russell, I think there’s everything wrong about it because it erodes the distinction between editorial and advertising. If you’re treating some consumer product as a news story, then I think “lay viewers” shouldn’t have to be media hep cats about where the story is coming from.
No, it doesn't, largely because there has to be a story in it and producers and editors can still say no, which they do 95% of the time. But if someone's made a world-beating widget, then maybe there's a story in it. And the product isn't necessarily an object -- it might be a concert that the promoter needs to sell tickets to, some other kind of event, or new research that the University of Auckland wants to brag about. They all end up on Seven Sharp or whatever because someone pitched them.
That said, there was, a few years ago, a rather dark period for Campbell Live where it wasn't unknown for all three stories in one show to be pretty much transparent (and often unresearched) PR plugs. That got depressing.
-
Hard News: 2014: The Meth Election, in reply to James Littlewood*,
Oh, and for the record, that’s why I don’t like him as PM.
That, and the DM I got from him yesterday
The what now?
-
Speaker: The End of Trust, in reply to simon g,
So, there’s a story on the TV news. People in the know will say “of course that must have started with a press release, and the reporter was simply invited along”. But people eating their dinner or shouting at the kids or otherwise in normal news-watching mode … well, we don’t know. And we aren’t told.
Consumer PR companies pretty much hammer the producers of the 7pm shows every day with pitches for stories on products, events, ideas. There's nothing in particular wrong with that -- apart from the fact that lay viewers don't know how the stories came to be there. When you're trying to tell the world about your thing, it makes sense to pay for someone with the skills to do the telling.
But even non-consumer "news" is quite frequently driven by press releases and I think there's more of a problem there.
Especially where there isn't a press release: see the non-story about Mojo Mathers using (gasp!) transport to get to a community radio station speaking directly to her constituency in the disability community.
Exhibit one: The March 2 Herald on Sunday story that opens with the magnificently passive-voiced words "Questions are being asked ..." and goes on to quote Jordan Williams of the Taxpayers' Union about what an outrage it all is.
The same morning, Whaleoil piles in.
When people note the whiff of Taxpayer's Union about it all, Jordan Williams writes a "who, me?" post and denies feeding the story.
In the end, no one can work out where the story came from or why the hell it's even a story.
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 403 404 405 406 407 … 2279 Older→ First