WiredWomen: Naked News Explained

Oct. 3 -- Kathy Pinckert knows why her news Web site's getting up to 6 million unique hits a month.

It's the quality of the newscast. It's the fact that the site offers an alternative form of expression. And, OK, it's because the newscasters happen to be naked.

"I'm not naïve," she says. "It's not that I don't recognize what's going on here."

But Naked News, the site "with nothing to hide," isn't just about nudity, Pinckert maintains. It's about the way it presents that nudity; a fact some viewers understand, and some just don't.

Pinckert, the vice president of Naked Broadcasting Network Inc., has relocated from California just long enough to find out if the rest of the world is going to catch on.

So far, it's looking good.

From PR to NN

Eighteen months ago, Pinckert was a successful marketing and public relations consultant in Los Angeles. Owners of a new news site asked her to take a look.

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"I was sitting there and all of a sudden, this newscaster starts to take off her clothes," Pinckert remembers. "I was uncomfortable, it made me uncomfortable. But I thought 'OK, I can be professional about this.' And then I started to laugh. I got what they were doing. That was all it took."

What are they doing, exactly?

"If you look at the women, they're all very attractive," she says. "But they're not the same kind of women you might find on other sites on the Internet. These are healthy, wholesome, normal looking women. Seeing them makes you feel better about the way you look.

"You take these women for what they are, you understand they've got nothing to hide."

It's the Content, Stupid

In August, Naked News added two new staffers to its lineup. Pinckert spent four days interviewing more than 1,000 applicants — all of them fully clothed. The real challenge didn't have anything to do with getting naked, she says, it was reading the TelePrompTer.

"We were looking first for neck-up qualities, for people who had a certain intelligence, a spark," she says. "They really needed the ability to communicate the story."