The nightly news has begun, and anchor Victoria Sinclair is reporting. Her tone is serious and clipped. As she reads the latest breaking story, the camera pans back.
Enemy warplanes, claims of military hits and government denials.
Without warning, her skirt falls.
“President Bush has taken a hard line …”
She unzips her jacket. Her face seems unaware of what her hands are doing.
With the seriousness of Walter Cronkite, she continues to broadcast: school violence … Borneo … The president of Paraguay may be driving a stolen car …
Her hands reach behind her head and unpin her hair. It falls over her shoulders. Ethnic Albanians targeting Serbs.
Down comes one bra strap. Then the other.
A space station launch.
She slowly slides out of her underwear. Until she is completely bare.
“Welcome to the network worth watching,” Sinclair intones.
NakedNews.com has become an Internet phenomenon, spreading like a virus worldwide.
“NakedNews is news done in the nude,” says spokeswoman Kathy Pinckert, businesslike, as if she’s describing the manufacture of sod.
No need to sensationalize the headlines when newsreaders are standing before you buck naked, forecasting the weather, talking about stock market fluctuations.
There is Diane Foster, weather girl, dressed in only stockings and earmuffs, standing at a weather map, reporting that it’s 18 below zero in Regina, Saskatchewan.
Then there’s Holly Weston, sports reporter, wearing only a microphone while recapping game highlights.
As you watch for the first time, the mind has trouble processing. It hears the news as the news is usually read, but the sound doesn’t register with what the eye is seeing. The eye never really gets over what it learned in the girls’ locker room in junior high: that it stays at chin level and above, no matter what.
“At first I felt a little uncomfortable, because I am not in the habit of watching naked women, but I am there for business reasons,” says Pinckert. “And somewhere in the process of watching I forgot I was looking at a naked person and I started to listen to what was being said. It made me laugh; it got serious. It was a good news show.”
Is this what news has become: entertainment? Because otherwise we’re bored? Our minds dulled by the massive amounts of information heaped on day after day: school shootings, politics, more politics, international wars, endless attempts at peace accords, and blah, blah, blah, and didn’t we hear that yesterday?
Then a show like NakedNews comes along. Launched a year ago, the show has grown from 6,000 viewers a month to 5.7 million, many of them women — “an impeccable example of viral marketing,” Pinckert says. “Originally designed to target young adult males, this group began telling their friends by e-mail and word of mouth about the program. Today NakedNews draws an audience that includes men and women ranging in ages from 18 to 99 and from all walks of life.”
The site is free; the only requirement is that users leave behind e-mail addresses, so the site can track demographics. Users can pay $9.95 per month to become members and see full-screen images and ad-free viewing; show officials say it makes a profit from ads and memberships.
So many women have expressed interest, Pinckert says, that auditions were recently held for nude male newsreaders.
“NakedNews applies to more than just flesh,” says producer Elliott Shulman. “We knew we had to have more than just nudity. You can get nudity anywhere.” The content of the show had to have quality, Shulman says.
The show plays on the inner freak in news viewers, says Mark Kingwell, philosophy professor and cultural critic at the University of Toronto. “NakedNews acts out one of those absurdist impulses we all have where we imagine Dan Rather or Peter Jennings not wearing clothes.”
We do?
This is something that can happen only in a parallel universe like the Internet, says Kingwell, where the acceptable, like watching the evening news, is somehow mixed with what we think of in private. “It rides as a kind of undercurrent of mockery and sarcasm to the mainstream culture.”
The idea for NakedNews came in summer 1998 when two friends, Web developer Fernando Pereira and Web artist Kirby Stasyna, both Canadians, were watching the news together one night. “Hey, what if the news were read naked?” one remarked.
They called Shulman, 42, who was a production manager for a Canadian media company, to come up with a demo tape. Shulman looked no further than his significant other, Victoria Sinclair, to become the anchor. “I figured if I didn’t ask the woman I love, I would be single,” he says.
Sinclair, who describes herself as a celebrant of nudity, had spent 10 years working in marketing and waiting for the right job. She auditioned in May 1999. Immediately they could see she had a talent for reading the news while undressing.
“It is deliberately choreographed. I can’t have death, tragedy and mayhem all together. When I’m talking about the tragic school shooting, I’m not whipping things off,” she explains with no hint of sarcasm. “It is a simple melting away.”
“We report the news,” says Weston, a former actress. “We’ve just decided to do it naked.”
