WiredWomen: Naked News Explained

Oct. 3, 2001 -- 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.

"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."

Rewind to the early days of Playboy, when the standing defense among men was that they read it for the interviews. Pinckert acknowledges the similarities in her argument, but says that doesn't change the story.

Her site's news stories, delivered by newscasters standing full-face, and front, to the camera, are what you might see on any news roundup.

This week's news included British Prime Minister Tony Blair's promise to support anti-terror moves, President Clinton's disbarment by the Supreme Court, and the doings of baseball's Seattle Mariners.

"I think in our culture we have a real hard time with taking something for what it is, nothing more, nothing less," she says. "You go to Naked News, you see the newscasters standing there naked, you listen to some excellent news reporting.

"It's not about feminism," she says. "It's about freedom of expression. It's about choice. That's it, that's what it's all about."

Culture Shift

Pinckert points to the popularity of shows like HBO's The Sopranos and Sex and the City as other harbingers of a cultural shift toward less sexual repression in the United States.

"Our world is evolving," she says. "We're starting to see this kind of thing as not necessarily gratuitous."

Besides, she says, there's nothing more natural than nudity.

"We all come into the world naked," she says. "We're all naked at some point. There's really nothing to hide."

A teacher and a journalist, Dianne Lynch is the author of Virtual Ethics. Wired Women will be going on hiatus after this column.