Hamilton City’s disappearing act
No one knows you’re there, Hamilton. You have no profile, no daily TV presence, no personality, no marketing angle, no chutzpah. Hamilton, you’re a media nobody. You’re a TV media nothing.
The Hamilton skyline swept across the TV screen.
I caught it out of the corner of my eye and stopped to watch what was going on in downtown Tron.
Dairy robbery? Street march on city council? Car accident? Nigel Murray spotted in disguise down Victoria Street? Nope.
I should have guessed; cricket.
The panoramic shot was following the path of another airborne boundary coming from the Black Caps.
It was 6pm news time on TV and I’d been distracted just long enough not to notice the sports news was already on.
The sweeping TV camera angle showed a great shot of the city from Seddon Park and while it was brief, it made a point that wasn’t lost on me as the 6pm TV news returned to business as usual, which is Wellington and Auckland-centric.
Quickly I arrived at a conclusion. Hamilton, you’re invisible.
And it was the sight of the city’s largest building on TV news that got me thinking about Hamilton’s media profile.
No one knows you’re there, Hamilton. You have no profile, no daily TV presence, no personality, no marketing angle, no chutzpah. Hamilton, you’re a media nobody. You’re a TV media nothing.
Sure you’ll get some coverage when the Rugby Sevens is on and various local marketers will say it’s putting Hamilton on the map, except that’s been claimed by every council and every marketer since the Fountain City days.
And if sporting profile is all you want then have you forgotten the V8s already, Hamilton? There’s plenty of profile there for that one.
Perhaps you’ve forgotten the drive of an earlier council to establish the Waikato as the country’s capital of high performance sport?
But can’t Hamilton do more than gain media profile for the city through sport and the massive amount of taxpayer and ratepayer subsidies that go into it?
Which reminds me, do we really want another Mad Monday Chiefs rugby fiasco?
In 2017 Hamilton took a few big media hits. There was media and blog comment about Wintec’s spending of millions on fake restructures and staff exits and coverage about the proposed medical school and a 16 per cent council rates hike.
The Dio girls got a bit of media coverage for riding near naked through the grounds of Hamilton Boys’ High. Fonterra’s court case loss received coverage.
While former DHB chairman Bob Simcock gained an unwanted national media profile for the city and himself as the Waikato DHB collapsed amid claims of corruption and incompetence in a revealing interview on National Radio.
And then there was some unsavoury coverage about fat people falling and injuring others thanks to councillor Siggi Henry and Mark Bunting’s private email joke that went public through social media.
A few years back, there was the superficial and indulgent Bogans TV series that put Hamilton on the map to the great embarrassment of many who thought the city had more going for it than men and women in black drinking beer and dressing as prawns.
For guaranteed Hamilton TV coverage you can always bank on airtime in June for Fieldays.
And occasionally, Hamilton turns up on TV news for sports events like rugby games being cancelled at Rugby Park.
But as daily national news profile goes, Hamilton, you suck.
Now it’s probably scant consolation, but Hamilton you’re not alone. The TV news power brokers are increasingly going for click bait and easy stories requiring few resources and no travel past the Bombays.
It’s been decades since I worked as a student courier-driver with the Top Half TVNZ crew out of Alma Street. The team provided daily coverage around the city and the Waikato with the late Dylan Taite bringing an occasionally eccentric spin to some of the day’s local news. That was 1985.
Perhaps Top Half is needed again with an online modern take on local stories with pictures delivered online.
If you look further south, New Plymouth, Whanganui, Rotorua, Gisborne, Tauranga, Napier/Hastings and Palmerston North all suffer from the same malaise – a small-town profile with nothing happening of interest to the Aucklanders or Wellingtonians making decisions about TV coverage.
On the FM airwaves National Radio has the excellent local reporter Andrew McRae putting Hamilton ‘‘on the map’’, but increasingly National Radio continues its descent into copying commercial radio personality marketing with the appointment of yet another former TV star to bolster their ranks in the form of former Radio With Pictures host Karyn Hay.
She lines up alongside John Campbell, Wallace Chapman, Jesse Mulligan, Guyon Espiner, and Jim Mora, all TV brand names in their own right.
Today, Hamilton has no daily TV profile and the wider Waikato is almost always invisible on the TV and radio news.
No one seems willing to take the reins to produce an online media presence for Hamilton and the Waikato. So it seems ‘‘Hamilton with pictures’’ will remain a distant media dream.
Except when cricket balls are smashed high into the stands at Seddon Park.