Stop enjoying your long weekend

Your happiness is costing the media precious clicks and views

If there’s something I’ve learnt from my decade-or-so working in the media, it’s that no one reads, listens to, or watches anything on the Easter long weekend. It’s a total dead zone.

I recall that one Easter Sunday shift on ABC radio was so flat that the host, desperate to fill time, gave me a whole talk break to slag off people who didn’t microwave hot cross buns. I was surprisingly venomous and it would have been surreal and terrible listening for the audience. I don’t think anyone noticed.

I suppose this is a good thing. It means people are out frolicking in the world enjoying their lives just as the Easter Bunny/Jesus intended.

But all this enjoying life comes at a cost to those of us who work in, or aspire to be, the mass media.

If you don’t need to be distracted from the boring reality of your life, you won’t open emails or click on links which leads to precious views and, eventually, advertising dollars.

So — much like the man who’s the reason for the season — the media goes into a little period of hibernation during Easter. They roll out the reserve stories, do enough to keep the lights on and give their main journos a break.

But when you put the B-team in charge, things can get a bit weird.

Take this little story from news.com.au for example:

If you’re wondering what that sex mistake was (and don’t pretend that you’re not) the nice young woman pictured here regretted watching her boyfriend bonk another chick during a threesome.

They haven’t even gone to the effort of pretending there’s a news angle here. It’s honestly impressive how unapologetically the author of this article has combined the powerful elements of clickbait and hot women.

However, I do wish news.com.au would be more consistently horny, you know?

It’s just that it’s hard to become fully aroused when the titillating sex article is sitting just below this one on the homepage:

Ugh. Talk about a mood killer.

The thing about news.com.au is that it does mostly deliver on the promise of its name. You go there and you can read the news. But there are also enough pictures of women in painfully small bikinis that they can’t really be ignored either.

It’s a business model which would be unacceptable in almost any other industry.

Imagine, if you will, occasionally getting a pair of erotic underpants in your Weet-Bix box.

“I thought I was just getting cereal,” you might say. “I didn’t expect a pair of crotchless underpants in there too.”

“A lot of people love the erotic underpants. They’re very popular,” Sanitarium would reply.

“But… that’s not what it says on the box. It just says Weet-Bix.”

“Well, people might not buy our cereal if it was called Weet-Bix and Erotic Underpants. That would sound sleazy.”

Bizarrely this has been acceptable in the media for a long time. There are plenty of news websites I can go to not fully knowing whether or not I’ll be reading about someone’s threesome.

But who am I to lecture on consistency? This is supposed to be a newsletter about cars after all.

Enjoy the rest of your chocolates and I’ll see you next week.