Obscure Box
From a Fox8 blunder to another
The whole world seems to know of the blunder on Fox8′s Australia’s Next Top Model final show when host Sarah Murdoch announced the wrong winner to a live pay-TV audience. Sydney’s Kelsey Martinovich, aged 19, had just delivered her acceptance speech after being told she’d beaten the Gold Coast’s Amanda Ware, aged 18, to the [...]
Cooking the numbers on Masterchef
I know MasterChef is popular but I’m thinking someone’s cooking the numbers a bit too much on who’s watching the Channel 10 series. The Australian’s Lara Sinclair tells in “MasterChef sparks Coles sales surge” (Monday 21 June 2010) of the shows success and the impact on sales for sponsors. While advertising has boosted sales, it’s [...]
Why we need commas
Many style guides for news organisations here in Australia are lax of the use of commas in numbers 1,000 t0 9,999. They prefer to drop the comma and opt for 1000 to 9999. Commas are fine higher numbers with digits grouped in threes so it’s 10,000 and 1,000,000 and so on. I think the commas [...]
Why using a quote from a media release has its dangers
Too often these days you call an organisation looking to speak to someone for a story only to be told you’ll be sent a media release. Sometimes the protesting works and you get to speak to a human being, sometimes it doesn’t and you are left with a statement that claims to be the words [...]
Not the drumming gorilla we're used to
When the drumming gorilla first hit the web he was a big hit. I recall sitting in one office where the e-mail went from desk to desk, on each occasion the tune was the same. Phil Collins – he of Genesis and solo career fame – was heard singing the opening lines of his classic [...]