Kia ora and welcome to The Weekend. I’ve taken a break from inane musings such as “does finding hairties on the ground count as foraging?” (yes) to compile this newsletter. The Weekend is here to answer more substantive questions, such as “why does New Zealand love cop shops so, so much?” and “what does AI mean for digital media?” (I keep listening to podcastsabout thisand I still have no informed ideas). No need to weigh in on the hairties, but if you have your freshly brewed Coffee Supremethen I’ll paraphrase Shakespeare/Mark Antony: friends, weekend-experiencers, digital media loyalists — keep reading, and lend me your clicks.
One thing my colleague Chris Schulz and I have in common is that a week ago neither of us had heard of radio station Brian FM. But only one of us (Chris) then listened to the station and wrote a featureabout how it fits within the bigger picture of commercial radio in New Zealand. It’s very informative for people (such as yours truly) whose only experience of “radio” is playing the RNZ app through Bluetooth speakers. Chris says: “Brian FM does everything wrong. How can a rapidly spreading radio station survive without ads or DJs, just by playing back-to-back music 24/7 with playlists made up on the spot? ‘We’re a little more mysterious than the other guys,’ station manager Andrew Jeffries told me. Jeffries has been running Brian for 14 years, and told me about his background, plans, and how he's managing to make his radio station work.”
Introducing the Coffee Supreme Iced Coffee range. Roasted for flavour, cold-brewed for taste and canned for convenience —good times by the can are here.Perfect for those rushed mornings. Available online by the 4-pack now or by the can at your local cafe who uses Supreme. Grab yours.
Thursday is Budget Day, when the government announces which sectors and initiatives will be given funding for the next year. This budget, before the election, is particularly significant – it might give a sense of how the government is framing itself for re-election. Toby Manhire talks to economistsabout what they expect will be in the budget. Further cyclone recovery funding and carbon dividends from the ETS might be on the agenda. The “no frills” line is already out there, but does extra support for those struggling to negotiate a high cost of living count as “frills”?
New Zealand loves cop shows, discovers Sam Brooks, as he compilesa list of 32 of them, from the 1970s until today. “The one thing that I’ve learned while scouring our television history for cop shows is that seemingly every cop on TV in this country has a massive problem that should absolutely prevent them from being a cop. Maybe truth in television? Who knows,” Brooks told me. He also asks: is a secret agent the same as a cop? And is the real villain of One Lane Bridge regional infrastructure?
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Choo choo, all aboard, we are once again talking about TRAINS in The Weekend. Having spent many days of my life in Intercity buses en route to Gisborne to visit my grandmother, I deeply empathised with Emma Maguire, a Wellington-based train enthusiast who has also lived the joyless experience of bussing to Gisborne to see her whānau. If she’d lived several decades earlier, that journey could have been made on a train. “High-speed rail is able to carry many, many more people than a bus or a car or a plane could, it’s on the ground, it allows for multiple stops across long distances,” she points out — and there have been rail lines in place for much of New Zealand in the past. Making rail cheaper and more widely available could be transformative, she says — and save her from going to Gisborne in cramped buses or tiny turboprop planes.
Audio description: Making TV accessible for the visually impaired
You can get a job where you’re employed to watch TV but it’s more difficult than it sounds. Clare Wilson works for Able, an organisation that makes the media more accessible to people with disabilities, and tells Chris Schulz about the process of audio description. She watches an episode of TV, makes a script that describes the settings and facial expressions, then records it, so the dialogue is the same but there are extra details for those who can’t see what’s on screen. It’s an artform, and different describers have different approaches. For people like Thomas Bryan, who has lived most of his life with a visual impairment, audio-described television makes shows much more accessible and entertaining. And there’s still a long way to go – many streaming services and TV shows have no audio description at all, meaning that users who rely on it have a much more limited selection of entertainment.
NSFA/house placement
Everything else
I loved this by Meg Cabot, author of the ICONIC Princess Diaries books, about quitting sports to write stories
This incredible illustrated data visualisation about how rich Jeff Bezos is just won a well-deserved Pulitzer! His money is like a blue whale compared to a white blood cell
Speaking of wealth, Elliot Crossan argues that a wealth tax isn’t enough to solve inequality — workers should be paying less tax too
