Given the topic of this post, some of you will know exactly why this still, from the 1978 Steve McQueen movie An Enemy of the People, is relevant. If you don’t know, head here.
Admittedly, I was getting far more hits on this blog when I was exposing Facebook and Google for their misdeeds. Of course I have less to report given I use neither to any degree: Facebook for helping clients and messaging the odd person whoâs still on it (but not via Messenger on a cellphone), and Google as a last resort. I shall have to leave all this to mainstream journalists since, after a decade on this blog, itâs all finally piqued their interest.
It also seems that my idea about pedestrianizing central Wellington, which appeared in my 2010 mayoral campaign manifesto (which I published in 2009) has finally reached the minds of our elected mayors. Auckland has a plan to do this thatâs hit the mainstream media. I notice that this idea that I floatedâalong with how we could do it in stages, giving time to study traffic dataânever made it into The Dominion Post and its sister tabloid The Wellingtonian back in 2009â10. Either they were too biased to run an idea from a candidate they âpredictedâ would get a sixth of the vote one actually got, or that foreign-owned newspapers suppress good ideas till the establishment catches up and finds some way to capitalize on it. Remember when their only coverage about the internet was negative, on scammers and credit card fraud? Even the ânet took years to be considered a relevant subjectâno wonder old media are no longer influential, being long out of touch with the public by decades.
To be frank, my idea wasnât even that original.
If you are on to something, it can take a long time for conventional minds to come round.
Scott Milne and I had a little fun over ‘American English’ recently on Twitter (and hopefully US friends will see this in the humour in which it was intended). He wrote:
It's the 23rd of November. Black Friday's are the 13th. Unless I am missing some imported America bullshit, I call bullshit.
I responded that Americans like big numbers. It’s a big country, and everything must sound more impressive, even yuge. Therefore:
Rest of world: Audi 100
USA: Audi 5000
Rest of world: 2019 Range Rover Evoque
USA: 2020 Range Rover Evoque
âBlack Fridayâ
Western world: Friday 13th
USA: Friday 23rd (it was this year, anyway)
1,000,000,000
Originally in English: ‘one thousand million’
USA: ‘one billion’
1,000,000,000,000
Originally in English: ‘one billion’
USA: ‘one trillion’
I realize Americans mean something different when they say ‘Black Friday’ (and it doesn’t mean we need to adopt a change in definition, though judging by the last two we probably will), and I realize how their model years work (and they have nothing to do with calendar years).
Megan McArdleâs excellent opâed in The Washington Post, âA farewell to free journalismâ, has been bookmarked on my phone for months. Itâs a very good summary of where things are for digital media, and how the advent of Google and Facebook along with the democratization of the internet have reduced online advertising income to a pittance. Thereâs native advertising, of course, which Lucire and Lucire Men indulged in for a few years in the 2010s, and I remain a fan of it in terms of what it paid, but McArdleâs piece is a stark reminder of the real world: there ainât enough of it to keep every newsroom funded.
Iâll also say that I have been very tempted over the last year or two to start locking away some of Lucireâs 21 years of content behind a paywall, but part of me has a romantic notion (and you can see it in McArdleâs own writing) that information deserves to be free.
Everyone should get a slice of the pie if they are putting up free content along with slots for Doubleclick ads, for instance, and those advertising networks operate on merit: get enough qualified visitors (and they do know who they are, since very few people opt out; in Facebookâs case opting out actually does nothing and they continue to track your preferences) and theyâll feed the ads through accordingly, whether you own a ârealâ publication or not.
It wasnât that long ago, however, when more premium ad networks worked with premium media, leaving Googleâs Adsense to operate among amateurs. It felt like a two-tier ad market. Those days are long gone, since plenty of people were quite happy to pay the cheap rates for the latter.
Itâs why my loyal Desktop readers who took in my typography column every month between 1996 and 2010 do not see me there any more: we columnists were let go when the business model changed.
All of this can exacerbate an already tricky situation, as the worse funded independent media get, the less likely we can afford to offer decent journalism, biasing the playing field in favour of corporate media that have deeper pockets. Google, as we have seen, no longer ranks media on merit, either: since they and Facebook control half of all online advertising revenue, and over 60 per cent in the US, itâs not in their interests to send readers to the most meritorious. Itâs in their interests to send readers to the media with the deeper pockets and scalable servers that can handle large amounts of traffic with a lot of Google ads, so they make more money.
Itâs yet another reason to look at alternatives to Google if you wish to seek out decent independent media and support non-corporate voices. However, even my favoured search engine, Duck Duck Go, doesnât have a specific news service, though itâs still a start.
In our case, if we didnât have a print edition as well as a web one, then online-only mightnât be worthwhile sans paywall.
Tonight I was interested to see The Guardian Weekly in magazine format, a switch that happened on October 10.
Itâs a move that I predicted over a decade ago, when I said that magazines should occupy a âsoft-cover coffee-table bookâ niche (which is what the local edition of Lucire aims to do) and traditional newspapers could take the area occupied by the likes of Time and Newsweek.
With the improvement in printing presses and the price of lightweight gloss paper it seemed a logical move. Add to changing reader habitsâthe same ones that drove the death of the broadsheet format in the UKâand the evolution of editorial and graphic design, I couldnât see it heading any other way. Consequently, I think The Guardian will do rather well.
Graham Adams, in a very good opinion in Noted, suggests that while there is a public interest in knowing the identity of the married National MP who had an affair with her colleague, Jami-Lee Ross, the media have been silent because of the relationship it enjoys with parliamentarians. He contrasts this with The New Zealand Heraldâs publication of the identity of my friend Bevan Chuang as the woman who had an affair with then-Auckland mayor Len Brown, and concludes that councils have no such relationship.
Adams makes a compelling case. His suggestion is that if the MP is making a stand for family values, then the hypocrisy should be pointed out. However, personally I have little interest in details of who is sleeping with whom, and I suggest the double standards are not to do with the reason he identifies, but to do with race. I Tweeted:
Not sure if the married MP Ross mentioned is being protected because of her status, but because of her race. @MsBevanChuang (mentioned in the story) never got to enjoy her privacy. Weâre used to seeing #doublestandards in the immigrant community. https://t.co/3g7JFjMlmy
It wasnât just because I was a nobody, but it was because I was Chinese. Portraying a Chinese woman as a whore not only is exotic but also fits the stereotype that all Asian women wants white men. Much more âelicitingâ than a Pakeha woman sleeping with another Pakeha man. https://t.co/ZomxKK7GwL
She never wanted the limelight on what was a private matter, but we have certain stereotypes at play.
We even see certain people incensed that we would even stand up for ourselves.
The sands are slowly shifting, and from what I see on social media, the majority of New Zealanders have no issue with giving everyone the same treatment regardless of their colour or creed.
Establishments and institutions have proved more difficult to shift. Our media are slowly changing, but many newsrooms have yet to reflect the diversity in our nation. Cast your minds back only to 2013 and newsrooms were even less diverse then.
Then there is the whole Dirty Politics angle, and as the decade advanced, the National Party seems keen to evolve into a caricature of its past self, borrowing elements from the US in what appears to be a desire to become a conservative parodyâexcept many arenât in on the joke. Itâs a pity because this is the party of certain politicians I admired such as the late George Gair, and it was within my lifetime when its policies had substance.
Iâm not here to bag National (at least not in this post) and maybe the anonymous MP enjoys some protection because of the party sheâs in, whereas Bevan found herself embroiled in an anti-Labour attack.
Of course, the reality could be a combination of all three.
The one we can do something about really quickly is the race and sexism one. All it takes is the shifting of attitudes, and to call the double standards out when we see them.
I see British filmmaker Steve McQueen has remade Lynda La Planteâs Widows.
I was younger than he was when it aired, and didnât appreciate the storylines to the same extent, though I have recollections of it.
What I did recall was a Smith and Jones sketch, which had a voiceover along these lines: âFrom the makers of The Sweeney and Minder, Eusless Films presents Widows: exactly the same, but with women in it.â
The reality was that La Plante wrote Widows because she was unimpressed with how men wrote female parts in scripts (she was the actress Lynda Marchal, and I still remember a small role she had in The Professionals). It was actually ground-breaking. Verity Lambert produced.
I hope McQueen does well with his remake, with Viola Davis, and the setting shifted to Chicago.
I worry a bit given that Hollywood also remade Edge of Darkness or State of Play: pretty decent miniseries that werenât as good when transplanted and turned into feature films, according to period reviews.
I saw the former and while it was a pacy actioner, even as far as employing the same New Zealand director, Martin Campbell, it lacked the depth and suspense of the original; I darenât even see the latter as the original remains one of my favourite miniseries and I donât want to see it butchered, even if Scottish director Kevin Macdonald helmed it. It was a wave of American efforts to remake anything with John Simm and Philip Glenister.
But tonight I did think about the other famous Euston Films series that were remade or reimagined. The Sweeney was remade but with the action still in South London. The 2012 version by Nick Love had a tight budget but plenty of violence, perhaps recapturing the grittiness that audiences would have felt when they first saw the Armchair Cinema special of Regan. Ray Winstone, who guested on the original, took the lead, and channelled Jack Regan well; Ben Drew (Plan B) had even more of a coldness and wild tension on screen as George Carter than Dennis Waterman did. Itâs perhaps best known for a car chase involving the crew from Top Gear, who took the opportunity to build a sketch around it during production. It wasnât as special as the original, and I didnât rush to repeat the DVD. Reviewers didnât like it, but in my opinion it ranks above Sweeney!, the first attempt to turn the TV series into a silver screen film but using the original cast. There, we saw countless acts of violence explained away at the end in one meeting with Thaw and Michael Latimerâs characters after a plot that seemed to build up a complex conspiracy. Sweeney 2, by Troy Kennedy Martin (the brother of the creator), was far tenser and the better effort, and it was fun to spot the Ford press fleet vehicles with the VHK prefix on the number plates.
Minder never went to the big screen, but a remake, or sequel, appeared in 2009, with Shane Richie and Lex Shrapnel. I sat through the first, found it tolerable, and at least in the spirit of the original, but it always felt like an imitation trying to live up to its forebear, not something that carved its own direction. Many donât seem to remember that Minder was created as a vehicle for Dennis Waterman, not George Cole, even if more and more scripts wound up focusing on the latterâs Arthur Daley, leading to Waterman quitting the series. The 2009 seriesâ premiĂšre followed on from that later formula, whereas to me it always required the two stars being on par with each other.
So, will the Americanized Widows follow suit? Will it be âexactly the same, but with women in it,â or, with McQueen as talented as he is, will it be a solid retelling with the same sense of ambiguity at the conclusion as the original? I might have to see it because of McQueen and screenwriter Gillian Flynn, and McQueen says he has been a fan of the series since he saw it as a teenager. Even the original Dolly Rawlins (Ann Mitchell) has a cameo.
Now, who’ll star in a new Van der Valk?
