Naked News

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The Naked News logo.
The Naked News logo.

Naked News, billing itself as "the program with nothing to hide", is a subscription website featuring a real television newscast prepared in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The male and 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. Regardless of the gender of the anchor, the male demographic is particularly high for the show.

Contents

[edit] History

Naked News was conceived in 1998 by Fernando Pereira and Kirby Stasyna and debuted in 1999 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 which has currently grown to 10 female anchors, plus guest anchors. The website was popularized entirely by word of mouth, and quickly became an internet meme. 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. Currently a bikini version of Naked News is available to non-subscribers.

A male version of the show was created in 2001 to parallel the female version. It does not however enjoy the same popularity and fame, and there are currently more female than male anchors. Although it was originally targeted towards female viewers (at one point said to be 30% of the website's audience), the male show now openly promotes itself as news from a gay perspective.

Naked News is probably the most successful cross-over from the Internet to Television, in history. By going to the home page of Naked News and clicking on the "where is Naked News available" button one can see everywhere Naked News currently airs on television and mobile.

Naked News is probably also the longest running weekly PayPerView program in history. December 2006 will be 5 years that it has presented a new episode every week on U.S.-based Indemand PayPerView.

This revision was created by David Warga, President and Executive Producer of Naked News to correct prior misinformation as to history and creators.

[edit] 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 media 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.

The current female anchors are:

  • Victoria Sinclair - The first NN reporter, she originally performed solo before additional news anchors were added. Sinclair left the show in Sept. 2001, and returned in Nov. 2002

Past female anchors are:

  • Gia Gomez
  • Athena King - a.k.a. "Athena the Greek".
  • Ashley Jenning
  • Samantha Page
  • Cameron Shore
  • Lisa Benton
  • Erica Stevens
  • Diane Foster
  • Brooke Roberts
  • Holly Weston - She continued on the show throughout her pregnancy.
  • Carmen Russo - At age 42, she was the oldest cast member. She is unrelated to the Italian model of the same name.
  • Devon Calwell - At age 19, she was the youngest cast member.
  • Erin Sherwood
  • Allyson Jones
  • Gretchen Frazier
  • Kaye Grant
  • Kelli Graham
  • Sarah Winters

The current male anchors are:

  • Matt Waterman
  • Dale Danforth
  • Jeremy Chase
  • Malcolm Matisse
  • Lucas Tyler - The first male anchor of the show, now also producer and director, said to bear a strong resemblance to NBC newsman Matt Lauer.

Past male anchors are:

  • Jack Lange
  • Joshua Holt - Recently announced he was gay in the pages of The Advocate magazine.
  • Cole McQuade
  • Warren Michaels
  • Robert Milan
  • Raoul Santos
  • Johnny Saputo
  • Derek Shaw
  • Brock Stern
  • Brendan Tanner

Current writers are:

[edit] Imitators

The initial success of the show's concept spawned several imitators, mostly on the websites, but also including "The Daily Flash", a news program on Playboy TV.

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.
  • Radio Tango - Oslo, Norway radio station once featured stripping female weather readers on their website.
  • Počasíčko - A 2002 featurette on Czech television network Nova TV where a nude woman (or occasionally, a man) gets dressed in clothing appropriate for that day's weather forecast.

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.

A very similar phenomenon (going by the name "Noodie News") appears in Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, a work of fiction.

See also Svetlana Pesotskaya.

[edit] External links

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