Delayed gratification

Well, it has taken a while to sort out but I can finally make a few announcements.

Exactly a month ago, I had a big whine about the clos­ure of the Capital Times and what it meant for print review­ing and for me spe­cific­ally. It was a shock, of course, but the impact turned out to be pretty grat­i­fy­ing. The feed­back from read­ers was ter­rific­ally reward­ing (“You like me, you really like me”). Even the one neg­at­ive com­menter out of the 25 who wrote to me here demon­strated that he cared enough to con­trib­ute, even if he did think that review­ers “were going to way of the dodo”.

And there were some pretty good offers too. Some from print pub­lic­a­tions, some online, some even involved get­ting paid which was a bit of a novelty.

So, after a month of sift­ing through the wreck­age of the Capital Times, I am pleased to announce the following:

• As of now-ish, I am the new Managing Editor of ONFILM Magazine and onfilm.co.nz. ONFILM is New Zealand’s screen pro­duc­tion magazine and it’s been in print since 1983 (apart from the cur­rent hiatus, that is). We’re relaunch­ing the magazine and the web­site and are going to work our nads off to get good qual­ity, enter­tain­ing, inform­at­ive con­tent into the hands of the industry elec­tron­ic­ally, and with ink on paper. You can read more about this at the cur­rent ONFILM web­site where the form­al announce­ment has just been made. You won’t see any changes until mid-May at least as we work through the lengthy to-do list.

• As of the May issue, I’ll be provid­ing a monthly film column for Wellington’s essen­tial FishHead magazine. Richard at FishHead has been most excel­lent (and most wise) at pick­ing up a few Capital Times cast-offs and I’m extremely pleased that I’m going to be writ­ing for a pub­lic­a­tion where the ink stays on the page. The dead­lines are pun­ish­ing, though.

• The weekly reviews of everything are con­tinu­ing here at F&S and I’m work­ing on vari­ous schemes to increase traffic here and get more online read­ers wherever those read­ers like to con­greg­ate. There have been some gen­er­ous offers to syn­dic­ate these reviews so it looks as if you might stumble across them at vari­ous loc­a­tions such as Scoop and Wellingtonista. ONFILM would also seem to be a no-brainer.

We live in inter­est­ing times. Three months ago, I was General Manager of a tick­et­ing com­pany and writ­ing for a weekly news­pa­per. Now, I’m a fully-fledged part of the media and work­ing from home five days a week. And work­ing from home can mean only one thing – I will be updat­ing you with kit­ten audi­tions very soon.

Thanks to every­one for your support.