February 24, 2007 at 00:43Rabbits as a media tool
Newspaper Hollywood Reporter reported on Thursday about a new upcoming project from Yahoo. The Internet giant plans to make its popular but “dry” information resource Yahoo News more “juicy” by adding a prefix called Odd News Underground, a video podcast in which a professional journalist talks about the news, wrapping them in the form of songs of different clockwork genres.
Yahoo spokesman Scott Moore asked to take the project more seriously, although he promised that the host’s outstanding singing and stage talent would force listeners to “kick” his tunes. Although his identity is still kept secret, Moore said that this person is quite famous.
Only positive news will be selected. And that’s all that is known about the repertoire of the singer-reporter. Whether he will sing about the American administration, the election campaign, Jobs and Gates, Windows and Linux, as well as dozens of other “slippery” topics, or will he confine himself to deliberately ridiculous gossip and curiosities - this is still a mystery.
Actually, when approaching the decoding of the title of this post, such a technique, as Yahoo uses in Odd News Underground, is called News Bunny. This name appeared and became a household name after the broadcast of the now deceased British television channel L! VE TV of one interesting information program.
The program itself would be unremarkable if it were not for the hefty red-haired crawl with pink ears, which constantly loomed in the background during the narrator’s narration and reports from the street. His function (of course he is a man dressed in a suit) was to emotionally color the impassive words of the hosts: he showed a thumb and positively waved his paws, if it was something good, and sadly lowered his eyes and hung his ears if the news was sad.
Over the three years of his life, News Rabbit became famous throughout Britain, managed to light up in one shot with the Prime Minister and a whole bunch of celebrities, and as a result he himself became known as the founder of a whole direction in television. His “colleagues” later became girls in bikinis throwing darts at the map of the country during meteorological forecasts conducted by a comedian, as well as other characters designed to attract the audience to a poor but ambitious cable channel.
Even before the closing of L! VE TV in 1999, television producers around the world tried to adopt the ideas of its creator, Kelvin MacKenzie. In Russia, the most famous such project was the Naked Truth program on the Moscow channel M1, the host of which was slowly undressing during the news release. But these ideas found wide popularity only with the development of broadband Internet and Internet television that came with it, when it became possible to get an extensive audience for relatively little money.
And now, even Yahoo itself has taken up the breeding of "rabbits." Whether this company will be able to take the matter of turning news into entertainment to a qualitatively different level - we will learn about this in March.
Yahoo spokesman Scott Moore asked to take the project more seriously, although he promised that the host’s outstanding singing and stage talent would force listeners to “kick” his tunes. Although his identity is still kept secret, Moore said that this person is quite famous.
Only positive news will be selected. And that’s all that is known about the repertoire of the singer-reporter. Whether he will sing about the American administration, the election campaign, Jobs and Gates, Windows and Linux, as well as dozens of other “slippery” topics, or will he confine himself to deliberately ridiculous gossip and curiosities - this is still a mystery.
Actually, when approaching the decoding of the title of this post, such a technique, as Yahoo uses in Odd News Underground, is called News Bunny. This name appeared and became a household name after the broadcast of the now deceased British television channel L! VE TV of one interesting information program.The program itself would be unremarkable if it were not for the hefty red-haired crawl with pink ears, which constantly loomed in the background during the narrator’s narration and reports from the street. His function (of course he is a man dressed in a suit) was to emotionally color the impassive words of the hosts: he showed a thumb and positively waved his paws, if it was something good, and sadly lowered his eyes and hung his ears if the news was sad.
Over the three years of his life, News Rabbit became famous throughout Britain, managed to light up in one shot with the Prime Minister and a whole bunch of celebrities, and as a result he himself became known as the founder of a whole direction in television. His “colleagues” later became girls in bikinis throwing darts at the map of the country during meteorological forecasts conducted by a comedian, as well as other characters designed to attract the audience to a poor but ambitious cable channel.
Even before the closing of L! VE TV in 1999, television producers around the world tried to adopt the ideas of its creator, Kelvin MacKenzie. In Russia, the most famous such project was the Naked Truth program on the Moscow channel M1, the host of which was slowly undressing during the news release. But these ideas found wide popularity only with the development of broadband Internet and Internet television that came with it, when it became possible to get an extensive audience for relatively little money.
And now, even Yahoo itself has taken up the breeding of "rabbits." Whether this company will be able to take the matter of turning news into entertainment to a qualitatively different level - we will learn about this in March.