KEY POINTS:
The growth of 3G mobile phone technology has led Telecom and Vodafone to expand from selling phone services to providing content.
But some aspects of the move into the media business are an odd fit with the telcos' corporate marketing.
At the most basic level the issue is illustrated with both Telecom 3G and Vodafone Live offering pictures of half-naked "babes" as backgrounds or digital wallpaper for the screens of mobile phones.
It is easy to see why they are doing it.
The digital pictures must cost little apart from a small copyright fee and they sell at $3 a pop. The margins must be magnificent.
And there is a captive market for pictures of naked women - teenage boys, a market getting larger as the 3G services become more common.
Depending on your sensibilities, the images are pretty tame and both Telecom and Vodafone say the babes are a small part of their wallpaper offering.
But "babes are by far the most popular category and dominate our mobile downloads each month", a Telecom spokesman says.
One new Telecom category, called Tats On Baps, features tattoos written across women's chests. "Baps", by the way, is apparently a euphemism for breasts - although it was a new one to me.
Vodafone provides some of its babes' images in a deal with the lads mag Maxim, but says its images are "soft" in nature and generally feature women in bikinis.
"None of our wallpapers show images which won't be seen on a billboard or adverts and we are very strict with what we provide," said spokeswoman Caroline Jessop.
The telcos do not sell plans to people aged under 16 and both say they are within voluntary codes.
But Vodafone does seem to see the danger of negative reactions from parents buying kids one of the flash new 3G plans.
"We are at the moment putting access controls in place to protect minors from restricted content which should be available next year.
"We appreciate that parents do sometimes buy plans for their children. If they are concerned about the content then they could choose a mobile without Vodafone Live capabilities."
Harder in cyberspace
Former lawyer Christopher Harder has gone into the media business.
Back in March, Harder vowed to reinvent himself after agreeing to be removed from the Law Society roll of barristers and solicitors.
And away from his old legal practice he has done just that - with a new legal portal called lawyermeup.co.nz, which he intends to be a one-stop shop for "lawyers and people having trouble with the law".
Among its roles, he said, the site would offer referrals to selected lawyers and provide legal resources.
Harder made a name for himself as one of the country's most colourful lawyers and has been a critic of the legal system and aspects of the profession. He said that lawyermeup.co.nz would include a "forum" section and that it would try to be apolitical.
The website would be funded through advertising and promoted through television commercials.
Since beginning on November 3, lawyermeup had been attracting 150 hits a day but this was expected to increase, he said. The site is controlled by a company called Great Spirit Publishing, which is owned by Harder's wife, Phillipa.
A minority shareholder in the website is Ardlui Media, a company whose directors include Jock Anderson, a former investigations editor at the National Business Review who writes another legal website called Caseload.com.
150 and counting
The Television New Zealand board will meet on Thursday next week to hear Rick Ellis give his strategy for the company.
He is expected to press for around 150 redundancies.
Staff we approached expected the layoffs would be made in January. Some thought the 150 jobs would not be the end of the matter and more cuts were needed do bring down overheads.
Insiders say Ellis has been aghast at the number of news and current affairs staff, which has ballooned over the past three years.
Some senior corporate staff have already resigned. The programmer for TV One, Liz Fraser, has already taken redundancy and the head of programming, Annemarie Duff, will leave at the end of the year.
There will be relief that Ellis has acted after a long period when the only tangible change at TVNZ has been the continued decline in TV One's ratings, a drop that will have made a significant dent in TVNZ revenue.
Grey ghost's daughter
That decline at TV One now appears to have been arrested with the appointment of TV2 programmer Jane Wilson, who now decides what runs when on both TVNZ channels.
Early signs have been encouraging and Wilson has made common sense improvements such as the return of a Sunday Theatre spot.
Wilson, by the way, actually grew up in the shadow of TVNZ. Her father is Graeme Wilson, a former general manager of TVNZ during the times of John McCready and Neil Roberts.
The older Wilson was at one time in charge of TV One and TV2 and staff gave him the nickname The Grey Ghost as he survived countless management upheavals.
Graeme Wilson eventually left to run a big pay TV system in Japan and returned to New Zealand a couple of years ago to be chairman of the Government-funded production industry lobby group The Screen Council.
Another former Television New Zealand executive with a key role in Asia was Trish Carter, who heads the Kuala Lumpur bureau of the new global English-language Al-Jazeera channel.
Many at TVNZ thought that Carter, a former deputy head of news and current affairs, thought she was most qualified to take over when news and current affairs boss Heaton Dyer stepped down because of stress.
But rather than give Carter the top news job, chief executive Ian Fraser gave it to Bill Ralston and Carter was pushed out during the regime change.
Clarification
In this column last week, in an analysis of circulation figures for the Independent Financial Review comparing them with those of the previous owners, we included a comment on the paper's editorial policy, made nine months ago by former managing editor Jenni McManus when the paper was sold to Fairfax Media.
This comment noted the paper's commitment to exposing "scams" and its aim to "keep the record straight and the market informed". The inclusion of the comment in the piece on circulation may have implied to some readers that former owners including McManus were involved in dishonest behaviour.
The Herald and columnist John Drinnan apologise to McManus for any such implication.
