November 20, 2003 – 9:59 am
Earlier this evening, I was interviewed for tomorrow morning’s Morning Report by a very thorough and (apparently) genuinely interested reporter by the name of Patrick Lane. He even called back to check facts, and ran the intro past me to see if he had it about right.
That was certainly more decent of a member of the journalism profession than one is led to believe you can expect. It’ll be interesting what makes it to air.
You see, what happened is this:
Russell Brown mentioned this post of mine about ZM and the use of Radio Data System technology in today’s Hard News on Public Address.
Now of course, while a couple of people I know occasionally stop by at this weblog out of courtesy and politely read my ramblings when they remember to, pretty much everybody reads Hard News. As a result, my site traffic went through the roof, comparatively speaking.
And so the story came to the attention of the RNZ News Team. I did protest that it wasn’t strictly speaking “news” as such, but you have to admit, the idea of a major radio network remotely controlling listener’s car stereos is at least worthy of the ‘fluffy-bunny-Friday-morning-end-of-the-bulletin’ story.
It’ll be interesting to hear what they make of it – and how selective they are about the bits they recorded.
Lane read me his opening line. Something about ‘media commentator claims commercial radio network is abusing technology’. I said it made me sound very cross, but if that made it sound more like news, then sure.
I suspect he might rethink the word ‘abusing’. I hope so anyway. Especially if they do that story straight after the Michael Jackson one.