Current affairs programs suck
I’ve been importing my old mail into Gmail and discovering some interesting snippets I’d all but forgotten. The following is from a mail I sent a friend when I was the lead programmer for a startup in 2000 doing mortgage brokering online:
One interesting event was that we appeared (for free) on a current-affairs program in various cities one night. [Note: It was "Today Tonight".] That was mental. They saw one of our press-releases about the “true cost of your mortgage”, and thought it would make a good piece. We basically wrote the thing for them and supplied all the people that told their ’story’ on it. Lesson: when you see an ‘expose’, ask who stands to benefit from it. Worked for us though. After it aired somewhere between 4000-8000 people logged onto the site *at the same time*.
Caveat Spectator.
