Where is Sailing Anarchy heading? - Props to Clean Options

[Lonelyboy15]

How about the obvious. Hire a 22 recent college grad to do the play by play to Clean's color commentary? That's the magic ticket.

Hence Katie Burns, which didn't work out for a lot of reasons, the principal one being that she is a great writer, not a great ad hoc speaker. The unanimous success of the D-Cup broadcast convinced me to bring in outside help on the mic - despite what many of you think I neither want nor need to be in front of the camera.

I for one was interested in seeing coverage of the Melges 24 worlds, not a show about Mr. Clean at the Melges 24 worlds.

Every single aspect of the coverage was pathetic and amateurish.

I agree that Katie was not at home behind the mic. But didn't you know that before the cameras rolled for the 1st time? Did you not have her audition before hand? Did you give her any training? Did you even brief her on what was expected from her? Or did you just throw her the Mic and hope for the best. By giving her the gig you have a duty to guide her, to help her prepare and to mentor her.

And after it didn't work out you trash her here.

And as for you smoking on camera whilst commentating. What kind of statement was that supposed to make? That you are too ignorant to know any better? Or are you so addicted to that stupid habit that you can't even wait until you are off camera to smoke? If nothing else it shows complete contempt for your audience.

Clean I have a 10 year old son who is completely besotted by sailing. We watched your coverage of the Moth worlds together. He thought you were a wanker (His words!) After listening to you swear and watching you smoke at the M25 worlds he is now certain.

Ok SA may not be aimed at kids. I would never let him read these forums. But the OTWA as you keep telling us is unique and so should be something that a sailing family could enjoy together.

You continually tell the audience how cool and awesome your live coverage is. It isn't. It is shithouse.

It is however a great idea and with a professional approach it could be 'awesome'.
But as it stands now it is just shithouse.


You do have the on camera presence to pull this off. You know the competitors. You know how the sport works. You don't have to turn yourself into Tucker or Jobson. Keep it loose, fun and informal.
All is required is a professional approach, some hard work and plenty of preparation, both before the event and each night during the event.

An example. When giving the standings before the days racing, you and Katie were reading this from a sheet of paper. Surly you can spend 10 minutes learning this before going on camera.

And endless screen time of you and Katie trying to think of things to say was just so dull. If there is nothing happening and you have nothing to say, then shut the broadcast down. Quality not quantity of screen time is the key.

Please work on it. It is a great idea.

[JimC]

To my mind SA is definitely going through a bad patch at the moment. Signal to noise ratio is way down and egos on display are up.

A few examples

- "the traditional f*** off newbie" that is so prevalent now. There's actually nothing traditional about it. If you use the forum search function you'll discover it was virtually unknown before 2006, and developed in one thread in 2007. As a common greeting to new members it is an artifact of the last 18 months only. Before then new folk who might have something useful to contribute were welcome.

- the Doug Lord saga. Doug was bloody irritating, and I had him on ignore. problem over. Except it wasn't. Torrents of ego driven idiots who like an anonymous fight posted endless knocking drivel and thread after thread, causing endless damage. One person wasn't a problem, the idiots were...

- Clean's ego - 'nuff said! Scott's entitled: he built it, but one is enough.

- too many divisions. Not only are there less threads with anything serious to contribute, but they are also scattered amongst too many places. Whilst I wouldn't read multihull threads regularly, if someone whose opinion I respected was the last poster I'd often dip in and learn something.