Naked News

Naked News, billing itself as "the program with nothing to hide", is a subscription website featuring a real television newscast prepared in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The male and female anchors read the news fully nude or strip as they present their news segments. Naked News TV is its offshoot pay-per-view or subscription service. Regardless of the gender of the anchor, most viewers are men.

History
Naked News was conceived in 1998 by Fernando Pereira and Kirby Stasyna and debuted in 2000 as a web-based news service featuring an all-female cast. It began with only one anchor, Victoria Sinclair, who is still with the program which has currently grown to 10 female anchors, plus guest anchors. The website was popularized entirely by word of mouth, and quickly became an internet meme. During the height of its popularity, the website was receiving over 6 million hits per month. Part of the large amounts of web traffic in the site's early days was because the entire newscast could be viewed for free and supported by advertising. By 2002, after the crash of Internet advertising, only one news segment could be viewed freely, and by 2004, no free content remained on the website. Currently a nudity-free version of Naked News is available to non-subscribers.

A male version of the show was created in 2001 to parallel the female version. It does not however enjoy the same popularity and fame, and there are currently more female than male anchors. Although it was originally targeted towards female viewers (at one point said to be 30% of the website's audience), the male show now openly promotes itself as news from a gay perspective.

Cast
Most of the show's announcers have been recruited through classified ads in alternative newspapers in Toronto. As such, most of the show's crew comes from the Toronto area. The show features occasional on-the-street interviews by topless newscasters, which are made possible by Ontario's Topfree equality laws. Since the show's inception in 2000, there has been much turnover among the newscasters, and many guest anchors. The female announcers have been featured in almost every media including television (CBS Sunday Morning, The Today Show, The View, Sally Jessy Raphaël, and numerous appearances on Entertainment Tonight and ET Insider) newspapers and magazines, (TV Guide, Playboy) and as guests on multiple radio shows including Howard Stern.

The current female anchors are:

Christine Kerr
Yukiko Kimura
Michelle Pantoliano - Former radio & TV broadcaster from New York City.
Alex Pantos
Sandrine Renard
Whitney Saint-John
Victoria Sinclair - The first NN reporter, she originally performed solo before additional news anchors were added. Sinclair left the show in Sept. 2001, and returned in Nov. 2002
Erica Stevens
April Torres
Roxanne West

Past female anchors are:

Gia Gomez
Athena King - a.k.a. "Athena the Greek".
Ashley Jenning
Samantha Page
Cameron Shore
Lisa Benton
Diane Foster
Brooke Roberts
Holly Weston - She continued on the show throughout her pregnancy.
Carmen Russo - At age 42, she was the oldest cast member. She is unrelated to the Italian model of the same name.
Devon Calwell - At age 19, she was the youngest cast member.
Erin Sherwood
Allyson Jones
Gretchen Frazier
Kaye Grant
Kelli Graham
Sarah Winters

The current male anchors are:

Matt Waterman
Dale Danforth
Jeremy Chase
Billy Prescott
Enza Supermodel
Pedro Cavallo
Lucas Tyler - The first male anchor of the show, now also producer and director, said to bear a strong resemblance to NBC newsman Matt Lauer.

Past male anchors are:

Jack Lange
Joshua Holt - Recently announced he was gay in the pages of The Advocate magazine.
Cole McQuade
Warren Michaels
Robert Milan
Raoul Santos
Johnny Saputo
Derek Shaw
Brock Stern
Brendan Tanner
Malcolm Matisse

Current writers are:

Greg Preece
Steven Shehori - Also a director

Imitators
The initial success of the show's concept spawned several imitators, mostly on the websites, but also including "The Daily Flash", a news program on Playboy TV.

Among the imitators on the internet:

Comédie! - In 2001, this French cable TV network ran a series promos featuring males and females casually undressing as they read jokes. In 2006, they copied the NN format in its entirety in a striptease newscast called Les Nuz.
Radio Tango - Oslo, Norway radio station once featured stripping female weather readers on their website.
Pocasícko - A 2002 featurette on Czech television network Nova TV where a nude woman (or occasionally, a man) gets dressed in clothing appropriate for that day's weather forecast.
A comedic "precursor" to this concept occurred in an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, in which Terry Jones began performing a striptease while giving a fast-paced rundown of economic news.

A very similar phenomenon (going by the name "Noodie News") appears in Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, a work of fiction.

See also Svetlana Pesotskaya. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Profiles

Naked

News