Mediawatch Midweek is our weekly catch-up with Lately. This week Colin chats to Karyn about TVNZ signalling the possibility of payments, a scaled-down Sunday paper, a sports feature with a difference and the backstory to that famous Olympic Black power salute 50 years ago.
Sunday Star Times slims down
Mock-ups of the new compact-sized Sunday Star Times. Photo: Photo / Stuff
The format change will save a bit of money but what difference has it made to the content?
There are fewer news stories but more columnists and writers in the new version. Do they have the right stuff to persuade people to each Sunday or carry on their subscriptions?
One new recruit - 'How to Dad YouTube star Jordan Watson - has a deadpan style on video deadpan style that doesn’t seem to quite translate to writing. In a preview of his column last weekend, he told the SST he could turn a day fishing into "a great column." His first effort in the paper - about getting man-flu - wasn't great.
The big question is: can the paper peg back a 13% fall in circulation last year?
Lid lifted on cheap chicken
A still from Stuff's eye-opening chicken series. Photo: screenshot
Stuff’s business writer Susan Edmunds kicked off a series on this with a simple question: Why is chicken so cheap, when it used to be a treat?
Part of the answer is in part 3 of her series: How our chicken got so big so fast
"Fifty years ago it took over 12 weeks for a meat chicken to reach the 2 kilogram weight considered ready for the table. Now it takes five weeks."
Uncomfortable reading at times, but great consumer journalism that fills in the gap between marketing and advertising that obscures these facts and the angry claims of animal welfare activists.
A sports profile with a difference
Fixing Lucy - Stuff Photo: screenshot
A lot of profile pieces of local sportspeople in our media are - let’s face it - not that interesting. To get to the top level they have to dedicate them to their sports and their training leaving little time for things that might make their life-stories more interesting.
Fixing Lucy- an interactive piece from Stuff by Dana Johanssen - is an exception.
Dana is an ex-Herald sports reporter (who talks to Bryan Crump on RNZ Nights once a week about sport). She was appointed as a correspondent by Stuff last year. This sort of piece shows the value of getting good reporters off the rounds and letting them get stuck into a story.
“At the top of her sport and destined to row for New Zealand at the Olympic Games, Lucy Strack suddenly forgot how to scull. Strack got what is commonly known as ‘the yips’.
As she was approaching the height of her career, Strack’s perfect stroke inexplicably fell apart. She lost all form, all timing, all rhythm”.
The story shows us what happens when a sportsperson’s technique and form desert them and the choices they and their coaches and families have to make puling the plug on a career at an early age.
The legacy of a defiant gesture
It’s 50 years this week since that famous moment at the Mexico ‘68 Olympics when athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos did the black power salute on the podium.
As they stood for the Star Spangled Banner at the medal ceremony, they raised a gloved fist to the sky and bowed their heads, and gave us one of the most powerful sporting images of the 20th century
It already has been echoed recently by Colin Kaepernick, the NFL player who made a stand by taking a knee during the national anthem at matches to support ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement.
He suffered by losing his professional contract and attracting scorn but has since been the face of a global Nike ad campaign and been praised from sticking up for what he believes in.
But Smith and Carlos suffered for years afterwards with no commercial reward or recognition.
To mark the anniversary Sports Illustrated’s Tim Layden has written a superb article charting the fraught relationship between the two, and their conflicted feelings on the protest
Fifty years ago Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in protest. Here’s my story on a moment that altered their lives and has never been more relevant. https://t.co/Tu9vsrrzwr
— Tim Layden (@SITimLayden) October 3, 2018
Tim Layden told the podcast Second Captains how hard it was to get the stories out of the two men.
The Australian bronze medallist Peter Norman was also caught up in the row.
He died from a heart attack in 2006. This week Stuff published a Sydney Morning Herald story about him by biographer Andrew Webster, who says the incident upended Norman's life
Slowly but surely, Peter Norman is finally being recognised as the hero he deserves – and always wanted – to be. About time, too. It's only taken half a century.
Sad story.
The Ratline - a story of intrigue and evil
Photo: screenshot
The BBC's sprawling 10-part podcast in search of the truth about of a Nazi war criminal has ended.
This week a bonus extra episode popped up featuring the creator - human rights lawyer Philippe Sands - and one of its voice actors Stephen Fry hosting a live Q and A session.
Only when Sands answered a man with a question from the the floor that I realised what the series was really all about: the struggle to persuade another person that evil exists.
