Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: The Next Act, in reply to Lilith __,
Good for charming teh ladiez .
Why did I not know this sooner?
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Hard News: The Next Act, in reply to Kristen Hill,
it seems they're censoring FB posts to their page and apparently removing a number. So while initial negative response was about the show, now people are miffed their opinions weren't even listened too, and deleted.
And there's a whole other group of people hating on them for not swiftly deleting apparently racist comments from . Poor buggers.
Also, it looks like they've changed and re-skinned their FB page from CloseUp, rather than develop a genuine and authentic audience. I appreciate wanting to maximise an existing audience, but being up front about the transfer and giving people the opportunity to opt in, might have been received better.
Yes. I don't regard it as a great crime, but what you say is exactly what they should have done.
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Hard News: The Next Act, in reply to Lilith __,
Busted!!! ;-)
Heh. I've actually just worked out why the account exists. For a short time ages ago we ran a paid blog for The Documentary Channel and I needed a separate account to write and comment from.
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Righto ... everyone else is having a crack, so here's my Seven Sharp review ...
It's fine that it's not current affairs as we know it. We tend to forget that 7pm only became a curent affairs battleground when Campbell Live turned up in 2005. Before that, The Simpsons rated very nicely indeed for TV3 in that slot. And, y'know, Close Up was the show that devoted a report (well, more an ad for Steve Crow's businesses) to the woman with the world's largest fake breasts. It could be very banal indeed.
The format is fine and the chemistry between the presenters will develop -- but the content really needs work.
I was surprised that they led with HDPA's puff-piece with the PM, but it turned out to be the most successful element of the opening night show.
The poll question was a disaster -- it fell between the stools of being silly and serious and it just hurt every time they went back to it. And an Ostapchuk joke? Really?
Quite a few people remarked that the responses on Twitter and Facebook were funnier than anything actually in the show. Well, duh. That will almost always be the case. There are a lot of monkeys on typewriters coming up with gags. The trick is to tap that rich vein.
So rather than pleading people to "tell us what you think via social media", just say it once and run a crawl on the screen with Facebook and Twitter addresses and, where relevant, the day's hashtag. Raid Pebbles Hooper's Twitter account -- or better, pay her to appear, or write some jokes.
Where's the viral video of the day, or the celebrity social media fail, or hashtag or meme? Surely a politician said something dumb on the internet? This stuff is low-hanging fruit and it's part of the experience of the target audience.
I really hope they confront the critics head-on and air the funniest of the mean-tweets on tonight's show. Don't be defensive -- take it on the chin and smile. (This is, I will grant you, far out of the bounds of established TV news culture, but it's the right thing to do.)
Jesse Mulligan seems to be the only one with real social media moxie, and he handled things pretty well after the broadcast last night. But why was the official Seven Sharp account not live-tweeting during the show?
If the banter isn't scripted, it sounds like it. The hosts are all smart people and hopefully they'll loosen up now the first one's out of the way. It's much better to flub or say something daft and collapse with laughter than to read something that sounds like it was written to fill 30 seconds. There's a sense that they're taking quite an old-fashioned approach to doing something new.
I think Jesse's graphically-illustrated backgrounders will come right. It's hard to find the voice for that sort of thing straight away. But there's no need to make it sound like a school project. Be more anarchic.
One thing I didn't fit into the post above is a consideration of Holmes' first show and the infamous Dennis Conner interview. I happened to be back in NZ running dance parties when it launched and I was quite impressed. The friend I watched it with -- another journalist -- was horrified. All this time down the line, I think it looks like an extremely able piece of work on Holmes' part. He is persistent but keeps his composure and, frankly, it wasn't his job to be "polite" to someone who'd been as much of an ass as Conner had been.
Perhaps they don't need to be mean like that at Seven Sharp, but they do need to do something unexpected.
Anyway, they pulled twice the number of viewers as an excellent ep of Campbell Live did last night, which is something.
Tonight's lead story seems to be a look at the way the gutrot liquor that occasionally maims and kills young backpackers in Thailand is made. That seems promising.
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Oops. That's me above. I'm moving around computers while mine is being fixed and I accidentally signed into an account with a different user name that I had completely forgotten existed. How odd.
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Hard News: The Next Act, in reply to Josie McNaught,
and his cringing mubblings about failed relationships and god - god?! were vile to watch.
Ease up, Josie. We all have to reach our own accord with mortality, and if Holmes in his final days found that in the idea of God, that's his business and his right. I fail to see how it's "vile".
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Hard News: Friday Music: Laneway 2013,…, in reply to Ana Simkiss,
It looked like this! And sounded like “wompwompwompwomp”
I think you mean "wompwompwomp-warble-CRUNCH".
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One more, then.
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So I went to Pretty Lights last night and I’m fairly sure I was the oldest person in the building. But it was great! I wish he’d played a few more of his remixes (only Pink Floyd’s ‘Time’, from memory) and there was a spell in the two-hour set where one filthy great break started to sound like another – but mostly, wow!
Ana, who was upstairs, has a good shot from there that she’ll hopefully share here.
The underlying pics here are rather large because I’m having to post straight from my, er, smartphone.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Laneway 2013,…, in reply to BenWilson,
It's beyond that now. As Thomas Beagle pointed out on Twitter, the more common response is feel sympathy for people who don't have a smartphone. We'd chuckle kindly last year when Media3's researcher would take out her battered Nokia ...
