Its #ManWeek in Australia thanks to TripleJ and ReachOut and I was tagged by Gavin Heaton to write a post about my experiences. However being a fairly typical Aussie male who rarely shows emotion or talks about personal issues, I thought I’d deflect attention by writing about media and how males are represented.

Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s Australian males were presented a homogenised and stereotypical version of the Aussie male. TV characters were knock-about, stoic, courageous blokes. Our movie heroes were Crocodile Dundee, smart but naive, Mad Max, stoically seeking revenge, or the Bryan Brown-style blue collar mumbler.

Our sportsmen were of a similar ilk. Solid, hairy and dependable. Think Ray Price playing league, Dennis Lillee hurtling down the cricket pitch and Pat Cash on the tennis court. Tough, hard-working heroes.

This was the role model for guys growing up in Australia and what we were regularly exposed to in the media. Its a lot to live up to. And clearly for many Australian men, it was too much to live up to. Australia became a world leader in male suicide and depression.

These days, however, a fragmented and hungry media delves into every nook and cranny of modern life. Our role models and heroes lives are laid open for all to see. No news is off limits.

Now I must explain to my two young sons why Andrew Johns takes drugs, or what the hell his brother was up to in New Zealand. That’s not easy. I also have to explain why a guy called Bruno is mincing around with a new form of stereotyping. A leading TV character today is not the tough Aussie bloke, but a confused and creepy school teacher called Mr G.

The hope is that this warts and all exposure of the male species, while confronting and unavoidable, may lead to a generation of males more at ease with themselves. It hopefully leads to guys being able to open up about their problems and being able to reach out to someone. Hopefully it means that young men today will be less prone to succumbing to the pressures of living up to the simpler stereotypes of yesteryear.

The Newcastle Ratings Week Ending 28 June 09

Prime must be very anxious for the new seasons of Dancing with the Stars and Packed to the Rafters to launch next week after suffering their biggest ratings fall in recent times. NBN romped home as usual on the back of Origin football and News, while Southern Cross Ten continued to enjoy support for Talking About Your Generation, NCIS and Masterchef.

But Prime really sank this week with ABC soundly beating them into 3rd place. Its the lowest weekly ratings for Prime in years and has allowed SC TEN to overtake them in the year-to-date figures.

The second half of the ratings year is going to turn into quiet the battle for second place in Newcastle.

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The National Ratings
Source: David Dale, Sun Herald blogs

Seven will think twice before devoting a night to rugby union again. As of Saturday morning, the three networks were neck and neck in audience share for the week. As of Sunday morning, Seven finds itself in the rare position of coming third. Here’s how the week worked out: Nine 26.3 per cent of the prime time audience, Ten 25.8 per cent, Seven 25.5, ABC 17.6, SBS 4.8.

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I’ve been reading Neil Shoebridge in BRW for  years and admire the fact that he always tells it like it is. In the current issue of BRW he is doing just that. His piece, “Advertising shift permanent” will be bad news for traditional media owners who think that things will bounce back post-recession.

Shoebridge notes that executives in FTA television and newspaper, who have suffered most from the advertising downturn,  believe that the good times will return soon and that the worst is over.

But speaking to marketers and media agency executives, Shoebridge reveals that the drop in ad spending is part of a much greater shift, rather than the economic cycle.

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Guest Report: by Renai LeMay of ZDNet.com.au news

This commentary is the modified text of a speech given to the Insight Exchange’s Twitter’s Impact on Media & Journalism event in June 2009.

In my daily professional life, I often feel as though I am a medieval knight who has been called into action to defend with sword and shield the honour of a great lady of noble birth.

That lady’s name, of course, is Journalism.

Now, there is no doubt that she is currently beset on all sides.

Her bountiful wealth of gold and silver is speedily disappearing as digital mediums demolish her traditional revenue models. Her social media rivals for our attention grow ever more beautiful as time goes on. And of course her virtue is beset by public relations professionals, whose numbers are legion.

And yet, I take solace from the fact that she has chosen the right champion.

I am not one of the traditional defenders of journalism.

I am not a 60-something newspaper editor who cannot understand the internet. I am not the chief executive of a television studio who is suing YouTube for re-publishing his TV news clips. And I am not a media magnate with a sprawling publishing empire that needs to keep his share price up by talking up his print assets.
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Newcastle’s television viewing habits have always been a little different to the national average. Since aggregation in the early ’90s NBN has maintained its local dominance in defiance of national trends, and we’ve just come to accept that.

But lately the commercial TV viewing habits in Newcastle have been more puzzling than ever. In fact, they are inverse to the national viewing figures. Look at last weeks ratings for example:

National                                                    Newcastle

Seven 27.0                                              NBN (Nine affiliate) 31.5

Ten 25.8                                                  SC TEN (TEN affiliate)  22.3

Nine 25.2                                                Prime (Seven affiliate) 19.9

Why is the affiliate for the nation’s top rating station struggling to 3rd place in Newcastle?

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This weeks Newcastle Television ratings have worked out with the 3 main players scoring in the 30s, 20s, & teens respectively. In the 30’s comes 1st place contender NBN. Running in 2nd place in the 20’s is SC Ten and 3rd but not least is Prime with a score in the teens. It seems, as this has occurred now over the last few weeks, that these place gettings are here to stay.

Check out this weeks Top Ten Programs and The Stations Ratings:

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The National Ratings
Source: David Dale, Sun Herald blogs

It couldn’t last, of course. After Seven showed a pile of football on Friday night, Channel Ten had to relinquish its leadership in audience share. But its strong showing in the first three days of the week, mainly due to Masterchef, meant that the final prime time averages were: Seven 27.0 per cent of the audience, Ten 25.8 per cent, Nine 25.2, ABC 17.1, SBS 5.0.

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Source: socialmediaportal.com

The web has been a buzz this week about reported evidence from search engine Google launching a microblogging search engine that will index content from popular services such as Twitter.

Micro-blogging has seen phenomenal growth over the last twelve months, with Twitter in particular growing in size by some 1700 per cent.  Since the launch of Twitter’s own search functionality, there has been much speculation that the micro-blogging service was soon to rival Google.  Read more

We have just posted Need marketing ideas? 6 steps to an effective internet marketing strategy over at GetSticky.  It discusses how very few companies seem to have a proper internet marketing strategy despite investing in a website.

We’ve included 6 basic steps to follow in order to start building your own powerful internet marketing strategy. Feel free to use our Web ANLYZR to gauge how effective your website is. We’ll get a report back to you shortly.