The Chaser (newspaper)
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The Chaser is a satirical Australian enterprise, most famous for their newspaper and web site which are known to push the limits as to what they publish and for "striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence."
The newspaper, first published in 1999, was The Chaser team's most famous (or infamous) enterprise. Among other things, they have published Australian Prime Minister John Howard's private, unlisted home phone number on their front page, which caused wide controversy. Apparently the phone number was sent to one of the writers by SMS and they sat on it for a while, until the opportunity to use it came up when John Howard ignored anti-war protests. The Chaser only had a limited fan base, with the average sales numbers per issue well under 30,000. But when their newspaper was shown as a lead story in all major Australian news broadcasts, not only was the headline widely spread, but the concept and the popularity of the newspaper leaped dramatically.
The Chaser team have gone on to create the ABC TV Logie Award winning show, CNNNN; Election specials The Election Chaser and The Chaser Decides; as well as the Triple J radio drive program, Today Today. CNNNN was a satire of not only the popular news network CNN, but it also cleverly incorporated Australian and World current affairs into the program. The Election Chaser was the team's coverage of the Australian Federal Elections of both 2001 and 2004. The coverage, as with all the Chaser productions, were not really factual, but a different view on the way the election was covered by the local media.
Another coup by the Chaser team involved the award ceremony for Australian Television, the Logies. The top award presented - the Gold Logie - is decided by a popular vote. Due to the small level of voting (restricted only to readers of the magazine TV Week), the Chaser team encouraged all their readers to vote for a little known SBS news reader for the award. According to reports the ploy was only just unsucessful.
In 2005, production of the paper was wound down due to lack of profitability, as well as to ease the demands on the writers. The Chaser team did however announce that they will be concentrating on other forms of media in the future.
External link
- The Chaser (http://chaser.com.au)