Crowne of Thorns

A new hotel on Liverpool St in Hobart was hoping for a boom launch this week. The moment had been somewhat delayed due to coronavirus, but the Kalis Hotel Group property came out all publicity guns blazing:
“…the new-build Crowne Plaza Hobart welcomes guests into the new era of Crowne Plaza, offering a contemporary design-led experience, inspired dining destinations, and innovative spaces to blend work and play.”
Indeed the hotel did open, with guests, and with a few people in its hospitality zones. What didn’t go as planned were embarrassing revelations about the Tasmanian Hospitality Association pulling political levers to get interstate workers in without quarantine during the lockdown period. The ABC reported:
Opening Crowne Plaza on Tuesday, Tasmanian Hospitality Association chief executive Steve Old personally thanked senior bureaucrat Tim Baker for helping ensure some of the project’s construction workers were exempt from quarantine upon arrival in Tasmania … The THA donated about $270,000 to the Tasmanian Liberals ahead of the 2018 state election, while Kalis Hospitality, owned by Kalis Group, donated more than $50,000. Kalis Group chief executive Alexia Kalis said the Tasmanian Government was “fantastic to help us get those specialist [workers] in” for the hotel, which has already taken more than $1 million in bookings. Mr Old said the Crowne Plaza workers were essential to the project, and he made representations to Mr Baker on behalf of Crowne Plaza owners Kalis Group.

Crowne Plaza Hobart

The other Elvis mansion, Beigeland? No, it’s Crowne Plaza Hobart.

Meanwhile at TT we had our own angle. Among the PR gush was this:
“Guests staying at the hotel will enjoy… stylish touches that echo the Tasmanian landscape and the forestry history seen through timber accents and complementing textures.” They also claimed that sustainability of the hotel was ‘at its core’.
Accordingly, we put the fairly straightforward question: Where were your ‘timber accents’ sourced from? Given that state logger Sustainable (so-called) Timber Tasmania does not have Forestry Stewardship Council certification as a sustainable supplier, where was the timber from? If indeed it is from Tasmania? If spin central is going to flog on about “design integrity that speaks to the unique landscape”, you’ll be able to answer that, right?
The first response simply ignored the question. The second response was an “I don’t know exact timber companies sorry” from the PR flack who is either stonewalling or not doing her job. We will keep pursuing the issue.

Hold the (head)phone with the victim-blaming

Tasmania Police recently put out this statement:
“THE HAZARDS OF USING HEADPHONES WHILST YOU WALK
Devonport Police are asking parents to remind their children of the risks of wearing headphones whilst walking to school, after a crash at the intersection of Lyons Avenue and Berrigan Road in Miandetta.
At 0800hrs this morning, police attended an incident where a 16-year-old student was hit by a car.
Early indications suggest the student was wearing headphones when he walked onto the road and was struck. It appears the student did not hear the oncoming vehicle approaching.”

Okay, so because all that is a frankly abysmal exercise in victim blaming, the only thing we can do to save it is to re-write the thing from scratch:
“THE HAZARDS OF BEING AN INATTENTIVE DRIVER NEAR CHILDREN
Devonport Police are asking drivers to pay special attention where children might be walking to school, after a crash at the intersection of Lyons Avenue and Berrigan Road in Miandetta.
At 0800hrs this morning, police attended an incident where an inattentive car driver hit a 16-year-old student.
Early indications suggest the student was hit by a driver who failed to watch where he was going, and to observe the road law that pedestrians have right of way. It appears the student did not hear the oncoming vehicle approaching as he was walking around his peaceful neighbourhood, not expecting to be mown down by a rubbish motorist with poor driving vision and little respect for their own duty of care while piloting a large, metal, death machine.”

You’re welcome, Tasmania Police.

Alexa, stop it

Tasmanian Times gets lots of offers. And no, not all of them from the Nigerian lawyer who needs our help to access the inheritance of unknown rich people who died in a plane crash. Some of them are from people who want to write for us. While the genuine ones are welcome – please Contact Us if that’s you! – there are a lot of chancers. Some offer to write us terribly bland ‘content’ that ‘our readers will love’ and just happens to contain links to some site which is paying them to drop such doo-doo all over the internet, like your rogue neighbourhood labrador gone global with a leaky bowel.
And then there are people who want us to buy their services. Alexa is one of these. Alexa, please introduce yourself:

Who Let the Flogs Out? 1

If this is the standard of your ‘copywritting’, we can do without the help ‘kthanxbye!

Don’t shoot please, We’re the Moundies

Let’s set the scene: Moundsville, West Virginia. As the city council describes it, “Moundsville is a small town nestled in the northern panhandle of scenic West Virginia. Moundsville is a growing family based community rich in heritage and history … Moundsville, WV is a melting pot of fine education, a strong blue-collar workforce, bountiful heritage and beautiful landscapes.”
Sounds utterly terrifying. You’d think, in a moment when a wave of awareness of police heavy-handedness is sweeping across the USA, that a journalist might go warily on a piece about a fancy new piece of hardware. Military hardware. You think it might be relevant to perhaps provide some context about why on earth it is required by the Po-lice Department of Moundsville. But…

Fake Neeeewwwwsss

Who Let the Flogs Out? 2
It might be ‘fake news’ but flagging it doesn’t work. Yeah we’re talking about real fake news here, not the imaginary Donald Trump kind which is any story by a publication that doesn’t worship his almighty ego. Many people view news on social media, yet the production of news items online has come under fire because of the common spreading of misinformation. Social media platforms police their content in various ways. Primarily they rely on crowdsourced ‘flags’: users signal to the platform that a specific news item might be misleading and, if they raise enough of them, the item will be fact-checked. However, real-world data show that the most flagged news sources are also the most popular and—supposedly—reliable ones. In a Danish research paper Distortions of political bias in crowdsourced misinformation flagging, Michelle Coscia and Luca Rossi show that this phenomenon can be explained by the unreasonable assumptions that current content policing strategies make about how the online social media environment is shaped. The most realistic assumption is that confirmation bias will prevent a user from flagging a news item if they share the same political bias as the news source producing it.
You can probably get a reasonable view of their work by reading the introduction and the conclusion. For us, this part stood out: “Finally, the model does not take into account reward and cost functions for both users and news sources. What are the repercussions for a news source of having its content flagged? Should news sources attempt to become mainstream and gather following? Such reward/cost mechanisms are likely to greatly influence our outcomes. We plan to address the last two points in future expansions of our model.” We look forward to future insights.

Silence is Golden

“The World Health Organization (WHO), Project Everyone and Tiger Aspect Productions have partnered to launch a Public Service Announcement (PSA) using global comedy cartoon star, Mr Bean,” announce the WHO in June. Oh wow! That’s fantastic thinking, because the wonderful thing about Mr Bean is that he’s so non-verbal. He’ll be brilliant at explaining things with his physicality. With the urgent need to communicate well some important points about COVID-19 to with people with low levels of literacy, he’ll be just the shot.
And then:

The WHO, in their hour of need, managed to turn one of the world’s best non-verbal communicators into someone who pulls a blind down to display a bunch of words. That didn’t even have any illustrations. In cruddy blue typewriter text on a green background. We have a lot of respect for the WHO and the medical expertise and assistance they have offered around the world as the COVID-19 crisis has unfolded. This, however, is a textbook piece of awful communication. Also, the cartoon Mr Bean is nowhere near as good as the live action Rowan Atkinson Mr Bean, so there.

Payday Mayday

So hey Aussie mate dingo dinkum working Aussie who might need an Australian-made bundle of pocket usury for Australian Aussie battler chums, cop this.
We reported recently on the (devilish) MyPayNow who provide an app to bilk you 5 bucks per hundred to access future pay. The bits we quoted in that from their media release were only the ‘factual’ bits. Today we went back through their less-than-one-page and counted up references to Australia (5) and Aussies (5). Sometimes even together in the same sentence. “Nic Bennetts identified a need to update Australia’s outdated pay system and allow working Aussies access to their pay ahead of their scheduled pay periods.” In fact ‘Aussies’ appeared twice as ‘everyday Aussies’ and twice as ‘working Aussies’.
Now we’re curious. Have My Pain Now identified got a Venn diagram showing a bit overlap between flag-waving patriots and the vulnerable living payday to payday? Because that would be interesting. Or are they simply following the advice from the classic Only When I Laugh: “if you’re going to shave a man, make sure to give him a damn good lathering first”?