- Naked News
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Naked News Genre News, nudity Created by Fernando Pereira, Kirby Stasyna Country of origin Canada Language(s) English Production Location(s) Toronto, Ontario Running time 25 minutes Broadcast Picture format wmv Original run June 2000 – present External links Website Naked News, billing itself as "the program with nothing to hide", is a subscription website featuring a real television newscast. The show is prepared in Toronto and runs daily, with 25-minute episodes 6 days per week. The female anchors read the news fully nude or strip as they present their news segments. Naked News TV is its offshoot pay-per-view or subscription service. The male version ceased production on 31 October 2007.
Naked News also aired briefly as a late night television series on Citytv Toronto.
Contents
History
Naked News was conceived by Fernando Pereira and Kirby Stasyna and debuted in June 2000[1][2] as a web-based news service featuring an all-female cast. It began with only one anchor, Victoria Sinclair (who is still with the program), and has currently grown to eight female anchors, plus guest anchors. The website was popularized entirely by word of mouth, and quickly became a popular web destination. During the height of its popularity, the website was receiving over 6 million hits per month. Part of the large amounts of web traffic in the site's early days was because the entire newscast could be viewed for free and supported by advertising. By 2002, after the crash of Internet advertising, only one news segment could be viewed freely, and by 2004, no free content remained on the website. Beginning in 2005, a nudity-free version of Naked News was available to non-subscribers. Beginning in June 2008, two news segments could be viewed freely. However, this ended in December 2009. The UK channel Sumo TV briefly showed episodes of Naked News, while Playboy One, a free-to-view channel in the UK, currently broadcasts the show at 9:30pm Mondays-Fridays.
In 2001, Bulgarian director Stilian Ivanov began working in MSAT and produced the Naked news which were commented in the media around the world and received positive international reports. The show has been stopped by National Council for Radio and Television. Shortly after which this control authority was dissolved.[citation needed]
A male version of the show was created in 2001 to parallel the female version, but has ceased production as it did not enjoy the female version's popularity and fame. Although it was originally targeted towards female viewers (at one point said to be 30% of the website's audience), the male show later promoted itself as news from a gay perspective.
In January 2006, Naked News Japan was launched as a joint venture between Naked News owner eGalaxy and Sunrise Corp, a seller of goods and services over the Internet. Due to Japanese broadcasting laws, the presenters currently only strip to their underwear, although the producers have indicated they hope to go further in the future.[citation needed]
In January 2008 eGalaxy announced another expansion, of which the centerpiece was Naked News Italia (which debuted in March, but closed in 2010 due to poor following).[citation needed]
Cast
Most of the show's announcers have been recruited through classified ads in alternative newspapers in Toronto. As such, most of the show's crew comes from the Toronto area. The show features occasional on-the-street interviews by topless newscasters, which are made possible by Ontario's Topfree equality laws. Since the show's inception in 2000, there has been much turnover among the newscasters, and many guest anchors. The female announcers have been featured in almost every medium including television (CBS Sunday Morning, The Today Show, The View, Sally Jessy Raphaël, and numerous appearances on Entertainment Tonight and ET Insider) newspapers and magazines, (TV Guide, Playboy) and as guests on multiple radio shows including Howard Stern.
Naked News at Toronto Pride Parade 2007
Similar shows
A comedic "precursor" to this concept occurred in an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, in which Terry Jones began performing a striptease while giving a fast-paced rundown of economic news.
In the late 1990s, British cable television channel L!VE TV broadcast Tiffany's Big City Tips, in which model Tiffany Banister gave the financial news while stripping to her underwear.[3]
The initial success of the show's concept spawned several imitators, mostly on the internet, but also including The Daily Flash, a news program on Playboy Channel.[citation needed]
Among the imitators on the internet:
- Comédie! – In 2001, this French cable TV network ran a series promos featuring males and females casually undressing as they read jokes. In 2006 they copied the NN format in its entirety in a striptease newscast called Les Nuz, except the anchors keep their bottom underwear on.
- Radio Tango – Oslo, Norway radio station once featured stripping female weather readers on their website.
A very similar phenomenon by the name "Noodie News" appears in Canadian Margaret Atwood's 2003 novel Oryx and Crake.[4][5][6]
A late-night public channel news show, Голая Правда (The Bare Truth), was widely broadcast in Russia some time in the early 2000s.[citation needed]
Počasíčko (diminutive of "weather") was Czech TV Nova's past-10PM featurette launched in January 1998 where a nude woman (or occasionally, a man) got dressed in clothing appropriate for the next day's weather forecast.[7] This was discontinued after several years and returned as web-only in February 2007. When Nova launched a new online portal in May 2008, it included a "Red News" section causing controversy; asked about the Naked News, they denied securing license and stressed Počasíčko's primacy.
In June 2009 Naked News Korea was launched under the guise of being a franchise of Naked News. It featured a similar format to the Canadian version but with less nudity. Barely a month later it ceased operation and the CEO, Yoav Sinai, disappeared without having paid his staff or compensating subscribers.[8]
In March 2010, students at Cambridge University presented a news segment on Cambridge University Television in the nude.[9]
French spoof news site Les graves infos (Serious News) was launched in mid-2009 with a stripping weather girl.[10] The site closed in February 2010.
Teasenews is an upcoming Australian site which is exactly similar to Naked News. Presently they just have a sample clip on the site and they hope to go full fledged soon. Its been quite a long, long while they have been saying "soon" but, its not really quite clear when this "soon" will become a reality, if at all it does become a reality one day.
Parodies
A 2005 episode of the satirical New Zealand news show Eating Media Lunch depicted newsreaders fornicating in a parody of Naked News called "Fuck News".[11]
References
- ^ whois, whois.
- ^ waybackmachine, wayback.
- ^ Ashley Hames, "Sin Cities", Tonto Books, 2008, ISBN 0955632609, p.33
- ^ Coral Ann Howells, "The Cambridge companion to Margaret Atwood", Cambridge University Press, 2006, ISBN 0521839661, p.186
- ^ John Moss, Tobi Kozakewich, "Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye", Re-appraisals, Canadian writers, volume 30, University of Ottawa Press, 2006, ISBN 0776606131, p.398
- ^ Sharon Rose Wilson, "Myths and fairy tales in contemporary women's fiction: from Atwood to Morrison", Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, ISBN 0230605540, pp.43,49
- ^ Jan Čulík: More Moribund Manoeuvering, Central Europe Review 1999
- ^ "The Cover Up: Naked News Korea Is Shuttered As Anchors Seek Past Due Wages", [Digital East Asia]
- ^ Sarah Harris, "Nudes at 10", Daily Mail, 6 March 2010
- ^ http://wikiwix.com/cache/?url=http://www.lesgravesinfos.fr/
- ^ "TVNZ and Morrish and Valenta - 2005-137". http://www.bsa.govt.nz/decisions/2005/2005-137.htm. Retrieved 2008-07-15.
External links
Categories:- 2000 Canadian television series debuts
- Canadian news television series
- News websites
- Nudity
- Canadian websites
- Internet memes
- Citytv network shows
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