Excellent piece on TV3 at Spinoff this morning:
Swapping News for Reality – Looking Back on a Bad Year for TV3
With yesterday’s terrible news about flagship current affairs show 3D, Duncan Greive assesses the MediaWorks’ strategy, a year on from its flashy relaunch.
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News used to be a signature of TV3 – pacy, punchy, no-bullshit news. It had an energy and attitude which seeped into everything the channel did and stood for. But the summary execution of two of its biggest news properties, despite an uproar and Campbell Live‘s extraordinary ratings, gives credibility to the conspiracy theorists.They’ve long muttered that the Weldon-Christie duo really are ridding TV3 of anything resembling hard news, anything problematic to their political views. I still don’t think that’s the case. Seems too crazy, despite the circumstantial evidence. I’m leaning more toward another diagnosis: incompetence.
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[Weldon]’s presided over a period in which TV3’s brand, for so long so strong, has been badly eroded on multiple fronts. And, correspondingly, the company’s owners Oaktree Capital, now possess a media company which is no longer anything like so valuable as it was. That exit strategy looks a long way off.Which makes you wonder – will Weldon last the year? And will some poor sap have to come in and clean this mess up? Starting with rebuilding the news brand? More specifically, in time, will the axing of 3D look like the end of a tough period of reorientation. Or the last, flailing act of an administration which got it very badly wrong.
My guess is the latter.
Danyl might find some of his question answered here on TS in this Q&A session with Scoop’s Alastair Thompson. It’s a grim picture for news over all, and we are much (much) the poorer for it.
All the more reason to support great investigative journalism where we find it. Kudos to Kirsty Johnston at The Herald for this series (two down one to go) on education:
Education investigation: The great divide
Search continues for schools silver bullet
Friday: What is working: A simple idea helping bring families and schools together.
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