I measured the front page of the NZ Herald this morning. Excluding the top and bottom margins, 25cm was taken up with advertising and glaring promos. Only 29cm was news content, and if you exclude the photos and headlines, there was precious little of that –  a mere 47.5 column centimetres of copy.

The front page of the Herald has become a travesty of journalism.  Today the headline screamed:  KIWI UMPIRES CAUGHT UP IN CRICKET SCANDAL.  The implication is clear: our umpires were in the thick of the match-fixing.

Squinting at the front page while I made the first cup of tea I wailed, “Oh no, not Billy Bowden!”  I’ve always been a fan of the outrageous Bowden and the concept of him being involved in match-fixing damn near curdled the milk.

So it was both a relief and an anticlimax to discover that Bowden’s  involvement in the “cricket scandal” amounted to umpiring the fourth test between England and Pakistan, and calling the staged no-balls  for what they were. Read the rest of this entry »

When you’re freezing your butt off doing vox pops in the street, this is the woman you want to meet!

Shock! Horror! A disastrous earthquake!  

North Island? South Island? The big one’s finally hit Wellington? 

No.  It’s in VANUATU, for god’s sake!!  There apparently wasn’t much damage and no-one was hurt. 

So what does the Herald do? Puts a great, blazing, misleading headline up to sell a few papers on the street. 

This was once a serious newspaper. Now it’s just a tabloid rag. 

I’ve met many brave men and women in my life. People who have battled with pain with courage, handled crises with strength, face death with dignity. The bravest were those who were afraid, because that brings its own special battle.

In our work we deal almost daily with people who fight fear of quite a different kind – fear of the microphone, fear of the camera, fear of the studio.  We watch them go pale or mottled, struggle for breath, try to perform with hearts pounding so loudly they can barely hear. That fear is just as real – and sometimes so intense it’s paralysing.

Most people are nervous in front of the camera. In fact, most broadcasters will admit to occasional ‘nerves’. The difference is that broadcasters welcome them; that’s what gives them the edge, the heightened performance they want.

The trick is that they know how to control nerves and how to use them. Broadcasters, actors, public speakers  and performers can convert that energy into excitement, into a high that carries them through their performance and can leave them exhilarated at the end of it.

Most people who appear on camera can be taught how to do the same. Part of it is psychological, but the vital component is learning and practising the techniques that give you the physical control to beat that fear into submission.

I spend quite a lot of time working on these techniques with our clients: the psychological tricks, the exercises, the physical control. It’s not an overnight fix. Like any technique it requires practice. But it can be done, and reasonably quickly – by most people.

I say most people, because there are just a few who will never be able to face the media. Communications staff often recognise this, but have difficulty breaking the bad news to their bosses.  We don’t have any difficulty with this, because we know that for people with paralysing nerves it’s actually often the good news! They know they can never give a credible performance, and when we sympathise and confirm this, they are invariably relieved and delighted to appoint a more relaxed spokesperson.

Sometimes the Big Cheese is happy to be a mouse when it comes to the media.

Dear Telecom

You may remember that I bought one of your WorldMode Roaming phones a couple of years back before Brian and I went to Europe. It was the latest technology and it cost me an arm and a leg, but it allowed me to happily text back and forth to New Zealand from the TGV and phone friends in France for less than using a local phone booth.

You’ve now been calling me regularly for months urging me to “upgrade” to the XT network. I’ve got very good reasons for turning down your kind offers. Here they are:

• My GSM phone works in Vietnam. Brian’s nice new XT phone doesn’t.
• My GSM phone works in Cambodia. Brian’s nice new XT phone doesn’t.
• My GSM phone works in Rarotonga. Brian’s nice new XT phone doesn’t.

So far the only places we’ve been that Brian’s nice new XT phone has worked are Singapore, Sydney and Brisbane. (I’d say “Australia”, but one of our friends can’t get his nice new XT phone to work in Melbourne.) Read the rest of this entry »

Those boring ad breaks - how do you  fill in the time? 

Erudite conversation? Thespian bickering? Or perhaps something like this…

The fine art of persuasion is never as tested as it is on television. Passionate advocates for causes, ideologies and organisations are placed in an alien environment and asked to form, change or reinforce our opinions in a few short minutes. The result  often has less to do with the worthiness of the message than the performance of the advocate.

If you want excellent examples of a) how not to do this and b) how to do it extremely well, you only have to look at a couple of examples from the box this week both, incidentally, delivered by academics:

On The Nation last weekend, Dr Rod Carr from the University of Canterbury put forward the notion that public funds should be directed towards education, particularly tertiary education, rather than supporting ‘the old,  the sick and the dying’.  As a long-term societal argument it may have intellectual merit – in the budget before last the government pumped $1.2 billion into the latter and only $300 million into education – but as delivered by Dr Carr it did not persuade me. Instead I was led inexorably towards the conclusion that both the man and his views were far too Prussian for my taste.  

Contrast this with the performance of Dr Phil Bishop, a senior teaching fellow and ‘frogologist’ from Otago University on Close Up. The plight of the endangered Archey’s Frog has never concerned me in the past. I’ve skipped over headlines and ignored stories. However, this charismatic champion of the tiny frog won me over completely, and I’ll be with him, sitting in front of the bulldozers, if mining in the Coromandel threatens their habitat.

The difference lay not in the merit of their arguments, it lay in their ability to persuade the viewer of that merit. One was cool, aloof and superior; one was charming, humorous and  quietly passionate. I care a great deal more about education than I do about frogs, but a good performer can change the way we feel and sometimes the right spokesperson on paper is altogether the wrong one on camera.

You are a reporter for the television news. You go out, shoot your story, take it back, edit it and record the soundtrack. It is neatly packaged and all ready for the six o’clock bulletin.  The newsreader could deliver the intro and go straight into it – s/he could even do the voice-over. That’s the way news used to be.

But that isn’t good enough for modern news. You,  the reporter, have to go back to the location with your camera operator and stand, shivering in the pitch black, maybe in the rain, and do your ‘live cross’.  It’s bizarre enough at the best of times.  In the depths of winter it borders on insanity.

Why do we have live crosses? Well, there are two reasons: the first is completely legitimate – the news is still happening and you are updating the item you shot earlier; the second is all about (you guessed it) ratings. Read the rest of this entry »

Trailer of the next big Australian feature. Worth a quick look!

So – glasses on, glasses off? It’s a question we’re asked all the time. There’s no simple answer, but there are some guidelines:

•  A pair of glasses is a barrier between you and the viewers. All glasses obscure your eyes to some extent.
•  If you sometimes wear glasses, you’re probably better without them
•  If you always wear glasses and you take them off, you’ll probably look a bit like a mole

Our general advice is, if you’re comfortable without them, take them off.  If you’re not, don’t.

That said, there are definitely specs that work and specs that don’t.  Many broadcasters who wear face furniture have special pairs for the studio.

•  Transition lenses can darken under the studio lights. They’ll definitely go darker if you’re outside in daylight. They should be avoided for television.
•  The best glasses for the screen have fine frames, and lenses large enough not to cut across the eye. Better still if the lenses are frameless.
•  The new, fashionable glasses with small lenses and strong, dark frames look dreadful on telly. Even worse are the ones with tinted lenses. You might as well be wearing a carnival mask.
• Sunnies may be cool – but they’re not cool when you’re being interviewed on television.

And the most important tip of all:

•  If you’re wearing glasses on telly, make sure they’re sitting on your nose properly. If the top of the frame cuts across your eyes you’ll lose all your impact.

If you’re unhappy about the treatment you’ve received from any branch of the media, you have a number of possible courses of action. Which course you take will depend on the seriousness of your complaint. 

If you feel you’ve been misquoted, quoted out of context, unfairly edited, misrepresented, mistreated, misled as to the intention, style or nature of the item, you should write to the immediate superior of the journalist or reporter who did the story. This will normally be the Chief Reporter in the case of a newspaper, the editor in the case of a magazine, or the Head of News and Current Affairs in the case of television and radio.  If that fails, approach the next person up the chain, and the next, and the next, until you reach the top. 

If you still get no satisfaction from the publication or broadcaster, you can take your complaint to the Press Council, in the case of newspapers and magazines, or the Broadcasting Standards Authority, in the case of radio and television programmes. 

The Press Council is a voluntary body supported by the industry and has no power to compel newspapers to do anything or to punish them for their misdeeds. However, its findings on a complaint will be taken very seriously by the publication concerned and will be  published by them whether favourable or unfavourable. 

The Broadcasting Standards Authority is a statutory body and has available to it a range of punishments for breaches of the Broadcasting Standards. These include compelling the broadcaster to broadcast an apology or retraction, imposing a fine on the broadcaster or, in extreme cases,  requiring it to be commercial free for a period.

You should consult a lawyer if you believe you’ve been defamed.

On the other hand, if you feel you were fairly treated, why not let the immediate superior of the interviewer or reporter know that as well. Journalists don’t get a lot of positive feedback either.

For more information here are the links to the BSA and NZ Press Council:

 ”Television and Radio Complaints: A Guide for Viewers and Listeners” (PDF – 56k)

http://www.presscouncil.org.nz/complain.html

Railing at the water cooler? In despair about the quality of our television news bulletins? Think you could do better with your monosyllabic nephew as camera operator and the pneumatic blonde from the dairy armed with a list of pre-prepared questions?  You need Charlie Brooker’s How to Report the News.   Enjoy!

When is a quote not a quote?  When is a quote something you didn’t say or even think in the first place? When you agree with a proposition or statement put to you by a journalist, that’s when.

This happens more regularly than you might think.  How? Let’s take a hypothetical case.

Your company, The Good Guys, is in the spotlight over a spat with one of your competitors. The media are gathering. As far as possible you stay away from them. You resolve to handle this crisis, in public at least, with calm, good humour and dignity.

You’ve managed to get through a print interview with considerable poise, and carefully steered away from invitations to criticise your competitors, The Super Guys.

The journalist is nothing if not sympathetic to your cause. You feel as though you’ve got a friend at court. When she says, “But their business practices are a bit dubious, aren’t they?” you can’t help but chuckle and you say that you don’t disagree with her. Read the rest of this entry »

Mr Ngô writes letters. He writes letters in a small, neat hand on almost transparently thin paper. He writes letters for other people, people who can’t write letters for themselves.

Mr Ngô is the Last Public Letter Writer.

Mr Ngô is 80 years old. He is tiny, less than 150cm tall, with bright eyes, a ready smile and dignified, old-fashioned courtesy. He has been working at the Main Post Office in Saigon for 63 years. He retired officially many years ago, but he still comes to work every day. He still sits in the same place and people still queue up patiently for him to write letters in their native Vietnamese, or translate for them into English or French.

His short sight isn’t so good these days. He has to use a magnifying glass to make out words in his worn little dictionaries, soft and fattened with constant handling. Mr Ngô is very precise. The words must be correct. These are letters of importance, of special events, of births, deaths, marriages. You don’t go to a Public Letter Writer on a whim.

This special job is carried out in a special place. The Main Post Office in Saigon is worthy of any European capital. It was built in grandiose French style in the 19^th Century and is one of the most imposing buildings in the city. The Town Hall, you think. Parliament Buildings.  No, the post office. It’s a place you’d be proud to work, even for 63 years.

So if you ever go to the Main Post Office in Saigon, you should try to make the acquaintance of Mr Ngô. It is a privilege to meet the Last Public Letter Writer.

We used to have this weird habit of paying mega-bucks to travel business class, then skimping on our accommodation. It makes no sense. You spend hours in a plane, days in a hotel. We’ve come to realise that the quality of your hotel room dictates the overall pleasure of your trip. The best day is enhanced, the worst day is soothed by a spacious, pleasant room and charming staff.  We don’t want spas, multiple flash restaurants, bars or enormous foyers – we just want a lovely room and somewhere to get breakfast, but hey, we’ll happily wander down the road to the nearest diner if the accommodation’s good enough.

We’ve talked about this trip to Vietnam for years. Other priorities, too much work, bird ‘flu etc have delayed it until now, so we decided to do this properly and in comfort. This is one of the trips where you save and splurge. We wanted comfort to cope with bouts of culture shock. Read the rest of this entry »

Our affair with Vietnamese food began a few months ago in Sydney. Miss Saigon in Balmain East serves food that is not only perfect for Brian’s diabetes, but so yummy that we ate there three times during our weeklong stay. 

Like any good Mills and Boon, this love affair didn’t start auspiciously. I wanted the fresh spring rolls with roasted duck, vermicelli and fresh salad. Two large objects arrived at the table and we looked at them with distaste. I’ve been trying to find a delicate way to describe them, but truly, they looked like turds in condoms. Fortunately we were starving, because nothing else could have persuaded us to taste them. They were delicious, as was the chicken with onion and ginger sauce, the delicate rice and everything else we tried from the menu. I was told by Auckland Vietnamese that the food in Sydney has become “Aussified”, and that the real thing was even better.

So treating Singapore restaurants as a training run, we hit Hanoi with the intention of eating like the locals. The locals, however, seem to squat on kindy-sized stools on the pavement, and we’re too old, stiff and wary to try that.  Read the rest of this entry »

In Hanoi the sky is leaden, the city grey and misty. We are told it was fine until we arrived.  The first two days it poured.  We were dragged through the teaming rain by our determined guide to admire Ho Chi Minh’s grim mausoleum, and be earnestly instructed at the Temple of Literature, its grounds rapidly becoming a lake. Old ladies gleefully cashing in, offering paper-thin plastic rain capes for inflated prices at every monument. We buy them with gratitude. Soaked jeans, soaked trainers  and increasing misery.  We called a halt. Enough sight-seeing in the rain. Stopped at Shoe Street on the way back for a $20 pair of “Nikes”.

Read the rest of this entry »

I like Singapore. I like the city, I like the people, I even like the steamy heat.   When Lee Kuan Yew was asked to name the greatest invention of the 20^th century he nominated air conditioning, and I’ll admit that it’s only the chill relief of stepping into a building or hotel that makes the heat enjoyable.

Our travel agent cut an amazing deal so we’re staying at the Ritz Carlton. Luxury, silence and a wonderful view from our room.  Who can ask for more? 

Singapore is always building. Illuminated cranes etch the night sky, the new casino is set to bleed the locals dry in a few months, but there’s another botanical garden being built with as much enthusiasm and as many investment dollars.

Singaporeans live to eat and shop.  They’re well-catered for. Brilliant food is everywhere and cheap as chips – even the famous Blue Ginger fails to dent the credit card. Orchard Road slides from Armani to Prada to Louis Vuitton. Chinatown is preparing for Chinese New Year, and there is slightly less subtlety – garish reds and golds, accompanied by a joyous sense of expectation. The Year of the Tiger is on the way; good times are coming.

Brian has a love/hate relationship with the city. Everyone’s too happy for his comfort. Gaggles of young people crowd the malls, the waterfront and the restaurants, laughing and chatting with an innocence that belongs in an earlier decade; the already spotless streets are swept nightly by nanny-state machines;  there’s a touch of the British Raj in the discipline and scrupulous politeness. It’s Happy Days, Brave New World, and it makes him uneasy.  Me, I lap up the ease and security of the place, I applaud the pride the people have in their island state – until it slips into jingoism, but that generally belongs in the public sphere, not on the streets where we prowl, eating and shopping with the locals. I try not to think about legal system and its style of justice.

Tomorrow we’re off to Hanoi. I think it’s going to be something of a culture shock!

A new year has arrived and with it, subject to debate, a new decade. May it bring you all good things and unwind all your recessionary tangles.

I don’t have the resolve to keep up new year resolutions and the end result is a feeling of failure rather than achievement. However, we have promised to see more movies this year, so to avoid this being a doomed New Year Resolution, we started this week. 

We love going to the movies.  We favour the grey power sessions – afternoon showings that come without giggles, texting or popcorn (god, don’t you hate the smell of that stuff?). We occasionally pay the price of loudly whispered elderly commentary, but on the whole the patrons are quiet and courteous and the cinemas mainly empty – we’ve even had an entire cinema to ourselves on occasion.

There’s no expectation of that sort of peace during the holidays, but sometimes you just can’t wait round for the silent season. So we went to see Avatar on Wednesday – and this is the point of this post.

Make a new year resolution: See Avatar. Read the rest of this entry »

We appear to be the only country in the developed world without a public service television channel. By this I mean a channel that is state funded, commercial-free and programmed with the interests of the audience in mind, rather than a commercial imperative.

Now the TVNZ charter is to go, and this will no doubt be the trigger for public outrage and dire warnings. However, before we all start weeping, wailing and gnashing our teeth, we need to look at what we’ve lost.  The Charter was always a paper tiger, so watered down from its original intention of ensuring public service broadcasting, so limp and cautious and ineffectual, that it held the state broadcaster to – well, almost nothing but good intentions.

It came with a very large annual chunk of money for ‘public service broadcasting’, which was accounted for only in retrospect.  That money was spent on a number of projects, some of them very worthwhile.  But it was also spent on programmes that had previously been funded from commercial revenue; it was spent on buying overseas programmes; it was spent on Dancing with the Stars.

The result of the charter disappearing will be that TVNZ no longer has to pretend it is a public service broadcaster, that it no longer has to pay lip service to the needs of the wider public, that it can concentrate on returning a profit to its major shareholder, the Government. I suspect we’ll find that we’ve lost almost nothing but the excuses. Read the rest of this entry »