Welcome to the Bulletin World Weekly, an email exclusively for The Spinoff Members. As a one-off, we’ve put today’s edition up for everyone to read. If you want to get this every week, sign up to The Spinoff Members here. In the last week, outbreaks of the Covid-19 coronavirus have shaken countries well beyond the … Read more
If RNZ hopes to court the youth audience with its new brand it should take some cues from the ones who’ve had that audience all along: student radio. RNZ has had a month from hell. News the state-run broadcaster was considering scaling back its long-running RNZ Concert network to make room for a new youth-focused … Read more
A Twitter spat blew up into a full blown controversy. The trailer for Guns Akimbo makes it look like a fun romp, the sort of film your flatmate who keeps all the bowls in his bedroom watches a million times on your Netflix account. Daniel Radcliffe has guns taped to his hands! Newly minted scream … Read more
He’s been the country’s leading supporter of the strangest films in the world, and now he’s made his first feature film. Sam Brooks talks to Auckland film champ Ant Timpson about his directorial debut, Come to Daddy. My first encounter with industry legend Ant Timpson was from afar, at a 2010 screening of The Room, … Read more
First the broadcaster was caught up in an online swindle using Facebook – now it’s surfaced via the other media giant, with an ad that sends you to a fake NZ Herald site. The Herald says it’s seeing an ‘exponential growth in fake and fraudulent content’. “Hosking’s Latest Investment”, went the headline on the Google-served … Read more
Host Duncan Greive is joined by The Spinoff editor Toby Manhire to discuss the dramatic events surrounding RNZ this month on The Spinoff’s media podcast, The Fold. It’s an institution whose major point-of-difference is its stability – while the rest of media is slashing and pivoting, RNZ has shows which run for decades without major … Read more
RNZ management wants to grow a youth audience without having to build a costly new platform. Anna Dean offers a bunch – none of which involves scrapping RNZ Concert. Over the next few weeks RNZ National Concert staff are set to take part in strategy workshops focused on “growth in audience reach, size, strength, diversity” with … Read more
‘A life-changing experience’, ‘The greatest of the great! It must be experienced!’, ‘That show with the dancing lady on the billboard.’ Shen Yun ads are impossible to avoid, but what on earth is it? So what is Shen Yun? According to the Shen Yun website: “It is a brilliant artistic revival and celebration of China’s … Read more
Linda Burgess climbs the eternal staircase at the Opera House in Wellington to watch the virtuoso actor. At the interval her legs are aching. But in the second half, magic happens. There’s one person wearing a face mask, just the one, and it turns his face into a disposable nappy with two scared eyes above. … Read more
The controversy over the fate of RNZ Concert, and the proposed youth music network to replace it, have sucked up a lot of attention this week. But the idea the government might foot the bill for a new youth brand haven’t gone down well with iwi stations suffering from years of underfunding, writes Alice Webb-Lidall. … Read more
Accepting his Oscar, national treasure Taika Waititi gave a widely-praised acceptance speech that he nevertheless later described as ‘the worst’. Giving speeches that get everyone talking has become something of a habit for the actor/director/screenwriter – here are 10 other examples Taika Waititi is unique among public speakers in that he seems to actively reject … Read more
Concert FM is to be stripped down in favour of a new station for youth, even as the government prepares bigger plans for restructure. Toby Manhire on the mood inside and outside the national broadcaster. No one seriously thought things could stay as they were. RNZ’s music outputs had been subject to reviews, personnel changes, … Read more
A recent survey showed millennials are having less sex than older generations. AM Show host Mark Richardson claims it’s because millennials “take all these booty shots” and “photoshop themselves on Facebook”. I was going to write a thesis rebutting all of Richardson’s strangely aggressive and contradicting claims about millennials’ sex lives, but I’m busy doing other things.
In episode two of The Spinoff’s newish media podcast The Fold, host Duncan Greive conducts an exit interview with Hal Crawford, the departing head of Newshub. Hal Crawford landed into a TV3 newsroom in crisis in 2016. Campbell Live had been axed. Hilary Barry had resigned. He had been hired by Mark Weldon, the much-reviled … Read more
With moves underway around RNZ Concert and a new state-funded music station, how will experimental and less commercially-focused musicians be affected? The Spinoff spoke to New Zealand-born and London based jazz musician Myele Manzanza about the cultural and financial landscape for non-mainstream artists in Aotearoa. The future of publicly funded music platforms is currently in … Read more
Between the city and the coast lies an insurmountable gulf, or so they say. Fresh from university, Michael Andrew decided to test that by interning at a local paper in the West Coast and found himself beguiled by the strangeness and the beauty. I had never smelled fresh newsprint coming straight off the press before. … Read more
Over the weekend, Sir Ian McKellen resurfaced the extensive blog that he produced while filming The Lord of the Rings in New Zealand. Alex Casey plucks out the most wholesome highlights. It’s pretty cool that in the 20 years that have passed since Sir Ian McKellen posted his first blog about The Lord of the … Read more
As Australia came to terms with the fact that climate change is fuelling its bushfires, deniers began a rearguard action centred around claims that arson, not climate, is to blame. Media analysts Timothy Graham and Tobias Keller look at how bots and troll accounts tried to shift the conversation. In the first week of 2020, … Read more
New Zealand needs a decent summer silly season story, and we need it now. A year ago next week, New Zealand went bananas. A posse of visitors from the once European nation of Britain was travelling the country, leaving in its wake a gust so profound and pongy it threatened to rip our pearls from … Read more
Nick Kroll discusses lessons he’s learned in comedy, including how an applicator tampon works. Nick Kroll is always changing and somehow everywhere. On Kroll Show, his three-season sketch comedy show, Kroll rotated through dozens of characters from Larry Bird the basketball player to Liz the insufferable PR to Bobby Bottleservice the ultimate douchebag. On Big … Read more
In the latest from our pop-up podcast, The Spinoff Book Out Loud, Toby Manhire revisits the days of Jacindamania. Listen to episode one, Madeleine Chapman on life after those chip rankings, here, episode two, Alex Braae on Extinction Rebellion, here, and Alex Casey on Sensing Murder, here. It’s election year in New Zealand, so what better time … Read more
David and Anne Clarkson have been reporting on the antics of the Christchurch courthouse for 17 years. They retired in December, and leave behind a legacy of court reporting that will be hard to match. In my first year as a journalism student I watched the beginning of a murder trial from the media bench … Read more
How Australians affected, and concerned family and friends living overseas, can keep up with the latest developments on the fires ravaging the country. As I write this, fires are consuming huge swathes of Australia and conditions are expected to worsen. The situation is attracting global interest, and reporting has been extensive. But it isn’t always … Read more
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, unless you’re a journalist, in which case Christmas is just another day. So what’s the vibe like in newsrooms on Christmas Day? And why can’t journalists just take the day off? First published on 25 December 2018 A state highway is blocked after a car crash. There’s … Read more
In the third instalment of our new pop-up podcast, The Spinoff Book Out Loud, Alex Casey recounts the time she spent an evening with Sensing Murder’s Sue Nicholson during her Answers From the Other Side tour. Listen to episode one, Madeleine Chapman on life after those chip rankings, here, and episode two, Alex Braae on … Read more
The 2010s will go down in media history as the Take Decade. Hayden Donnell combed through every single take made in New Zealand in the last 10 years to compose this list of the worst ones. If there’s one overarching media trend from the 2010s, it’s our inexorable move toward a take economy. Look at … Read more
The latest Star Wars film is out, and a lot of people have a lot of opinions about it, including culture editor Sam Brooks who saw a midnight screening last night. These are his fast reckons. Spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, obviously. Did you read the headline? Look. Nobody wants a review of … Read more
In the second instalment of our new pop-up podcast, The Spinoff Book Out Loud, Alex Braae reads his unexpectedly personal post about the rise of climate protest movement Extinction Rebellion. Listen to episode one, Madeleine Chapman on life after those chip rankings, here. How far would you go to save your future – and those … Read more
After a year spent reporting on and analysing the chaos enveloping New Zealand’s media industry, The Spinoff managing editor Duncan Greive has finally cracked and started a podcast to cover it. Here is a short and necessarily incomplete list of things that have happened in New Zealand’s media in 2019: Three was announced as being … Read more