Many tributes to David Bowie have been published and aired since he died recently, both here and overseas. Mediawatch looks at some that stood out and a unique one tucked away in a local paper here which went global.
Listen
'Three score years and ten' used to be the shorthand for life expectancy.
These days most of us expect to live longer than 70 years, but three rock stars from the '70s checked out recently before living out their own seventies; Glenn Frey of The Eagles, Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead and - prompting the greatest sorrow in the media - David Bowie.
He was one of a handful of artists whose death could monopolise front pages and lead news bulletins all over the world and, in addition to being a star man of pop and a one-man brand, Bowie was a student of the media.
He was a strong critic of it from time to time as well, especially in his own field. Back in 1983, he turned up to be interviewed on music channel MTV, but ended up asking searching questions about the channel’s own music policy.
That encounter ended only when David Bowie ended it. He was smarter than your average pop star for sure.
Friends in high places
Even the characteristically conservative weekly The Economist got in on the eulogising act this week, subtly slipping Bowie song titles into sub-headings of its world news summaries.'Changes' was used to describe political movements in Tunisia and Cameroon, 'Under Pressure' for the slumping price of oil, and so on.
The Economist's subtle salutes to the Thin White Duke Photo: screenshot
UK music magazine NME declared the planted tributes “pretty cool,” but it will be trickier for them to do the same when - say - Joseph Stiglitz passes on.
Thinking outside the square
Hit song titles like Sorrow and Ashes to Ashes were a gift to newspapers putting the story on their front pages, but not exactly original. But what stood out among all that was written and published about him?
Lorde’s widely-shared short thoughts on Facebook began wearily with this:
When a hero dies, everyone wants a quote.
She went on to say it "seemed garish to to talk about oneself" at such a time, but then went on to do just that, recounting how she felt the one time she met him when she was just 16.
In a very different tribute for The Spinoff website, Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement wrote about pretending to be Bowie - to create the hilarious song Bowie’s in Space – but never actually meeting him.
I’m still glad he didn’t meet us. Perhaps he would have liked to, but he would have blown our minds.
But while that was also widely-read and enjoyed, it was a novel tribute from The Timaru Herald which went truly viral - and global.
The Timaru's Herald's unique tribute to the late David Bowie Photo: supplied
The following day, Melbourne's main daily paper The Age copied the idea, offering "profound respect to The Timaru Herald" for it. In the UK, Metro called it “adorable,” but added: "By the looks of it, residents of the southern port city aren’t quite as trendy as Mr Bowie was".
Bit harsh. Not many people are.
But harsher still was Richard Metzger on the the Dangerous Minds blog in the US, who declared it the world's worst Bowie tribute and a work of “magnificent and dumbfounding stupidity” which reflected badly on the paper.
If you’ve ever toiled at a daily newspaper you’ll know how many layers—copy editors, photo editors, editor editors, graphic designers—are between what you initially write and what ends up on the printed page. Who along the way looked at this in the hallowed halls of the Timaru Herald, and gave the thumbs up?
The answer to that came in the paper itself soon after.
In his weekly column last weekend, Timaru Herald news director Grant Shimmin wrote:
Full disclosure here: Tuesday was my birthday and I took the day off, so I had absolutely no input into the exercise, but I love it, because reporter Chris Hyde’s idea is truly brilliant in its simplicity.
Timaru Herald reporter Chris Hyde told Mediawatch he had not been saving the joke up, and waiting for Bowie to die. The idea came to him round midnight after David Bowie when he was listening to the old songs, including Space Oddity.
"It's always hard to find a local angle when someone of that magnitude dies. I thought this would be a quirky way of doing it, and someting to brighten up the day," he said.
No-one reacted badly to it locally, he said, though some people felt Timaru had been painted in a poor light when the story went global. And Chris Hyde did worry that some of the local folks (and their shirts) pictured in the tribute were then ridiculed on social media, and punished just for playing along with his idea for the paper.
Given that the line in Space Oddity is actually about unwelcome media attention for Major Tom, is it also ironic it prompted the paper to stop locals on the street to ask about their shirts for the tribute?
Possibly, but sometimes a little Sorrow comes with Fame.