9. It's the silliest of all seasons

Sometime in the next couple of weeks, when you’re chilling back in the holiday sun, somebody nearby is going to loudly proclaim that newspapers are a bit thin at this time of year, or that the TV news last night had a fairly stupid story buried in its bulletin. This stunning and insightful observation would be a lot more stunning and insightful if it didn’t happen every single fucking year.

Journalists call this time of year the silly season, because it’s the time when silly and downright stupid stories can sneak into the paper or broadcast or website. The main reason for this is because there is fuck-all going on – politics shuts down for weeks and weeks, and businesses are closed, and spokespeople are permanently unavailable. That’s why stupid stories from stupid press releases suddenly fill the news hole, and if you want to get drunk as fuck, you can follow The Spinoff’s drinking guide to summer news stories.  (Although you’ll probably end up in the ER, because every single one of those fuckers given as an example there will certainly pop up in the news cycle.)

There is still big, unexpected news that can be literally earth-shattering. The Boxing Day tsunami, which hit a decade ago, caused an unimaginable amount of death and destruction, and was heavily covered, right during the slowest time of the year. This gave the story time to grow and evolve as it sat in the main headlines, as the actual horror of the event became clearer day by day, and the death toll rose and rose by tens of thousands every day.

But in general, it’s pretty fucking dire at this time of year. This isn’t such a bad thing - this is still the loveliest time of the year, and people are trying to get on with this goodwill-to-all lark, sparking up a good barbecue and going for a swim down the beach. If ever there is a time for light and fluffy bullshit, this is it, because New Zealand is all about the light and fluffy bullshit for the next few weeks.

It’s also worth noting that, incredibly, journalists are human beings too, and like to take time off to spend with family and friends at the Christmas season, and if nobody is going to answer their fucking phone, then they might as well spend the time with their loved ones, and try and break the big stuff when there are actually people to talk to.

If you’ve still got a boner for hard news over the next few weeks, it’s a good time to catch up on some of the country’s best shit from the past few weeks. Check out some of the brilliant long-form work Stuff has put out recently weeks, (especially the prison work) or just sit on a beach and absorb the knowledge from some of RNZ’s terrific new podcast series, including Black Sheep from William Ray, Russell Brown’s dig into drugs From Zero and Mohamed Hassan’s incredibly good Public Enemy series.

So, to embrace the silly season, Media Scrum will be on a short hiatus for the next couple of weeks, and will resume again on January 9, with the Golden Rule Of Journalism.  We’re off to the beach.

- Steve Lombard

8: Bullshit, or not?

One thing every single news journalist needs to have - along with a pen, pad, and sense of news judgement - is a good bullshit detector.

We live in the age of bullshit. It's all around us, stinking up the joint. Your phone is fucking full of it, and the amount of bullshit generated every day around the world is so great, if it was actually literally shit, the world would be constantly engulfed in a massive tsunami of faeces.

One of the unfortunate roles of the news media is to act as a filter for all this bullshit, weeding out all the crap that pretends to be news, and all the rubbish that is trying to get your attention. And if you think the big news organisations are doing a terrible job at this, you should see the main public e-mail inboxes for the large newsrooms - genuine gems of newsworthy content is outnumbered by spam, PR nonsense and all sorts of baffling bullshit.

Of course, there will always be conspiracy theorists who see this suppression of bullshit as suppression of free speech or other vital information, and will always be convinced that the entire media are being paid off by higher interests. (Which, if true, doesn't really explain the aging and decrepit vehicles on show in newsroom car parks.)

But journalists have to reject most of that kind of thing, because it's quite clearly bullshit, and if you fall down that conspiracy hole, you'll be left in the wilderness, mumbling that 9/11 was an inside job, or that Queen Elizabeth kidnapped and ate 10 Canadian children in the 1950s, or that Jack The Ripper was the Loch Ness Monster.

There is, fortunately, a growing awareness of the destructive and harmful impact of fake news, especially after this year in politics, even if the current debate hasn't really progressed beyond infantile name-calling.

It does, unfortunately, lead to things like absolute fucking dickheads using the 'fake news' label to discredit news reports of the latest awful atrocities in places like Aleppo. (Thanks for that hot take, you walking ballsacks full of pus. I'm sure the poor Syrian kids literally choking to death on blood and dust in bombed-out Syrian hospitals are gutted by the fact the conflict doesn't fit with your political ideology.)

But while there are vast amounts of people who won't believe anything anybody tells them anymore, there is always an insatiable thirst for investigation and truth, and uncovering of corruption, and some goddamn basic facts, and all the fake news in the world won't quench that.

In fact, the 'fake news' label has almost been over-used into incoherence in recent weeks, and it encompasses so much, from genuine satire sites like The Civilian and The Onion - which make no secret of the fact that they are total horseshit, and even manage to be occasionally hilarious - to stories about imaginary paedophilia rings in a pizza place, spewed out by malevolent Macedonian munters.

We just need to call it bullshit, because that's all it is. We all have different levels of bullshit acceptability, but in newsrooms, that level has to be real fucking low. Coming back to the indispensability of the bullshit detector, it's more vital than ever.

And it doesn't necessarily have to be fake to be bullshit. There are real issues of PR intrusion on the newspage, and just because something is going viral on social media doesn't mean it actually has any news worth. Sure, your cousin Phil might be amazed by claims that you can predict earthquakes based on astrological reasons, but you know it's bullshit, and editors should definitely know it's bullshit, and easy to ignore.

There is more than enough bullshit in the world, and the news needs to take some responsibility for containing its spread. It's hard fucking work, but that bullshit detector needs to be kept on at all times.

- Ron Troupe

7. Get some colour into you

For all the pretense of speaking the truth for everybody, the news media is unmistakably a middle class affair, and white and male as fuck.

Editorial staff at all the major newsrooms are, at the very, very least, 70 percent pakeha, and the higher up the food chain you go, the more male it gets. The patriarchy's day is just about done, but in the higher echelons of the media, the white male still rules the roost.

There are still fine reporters of all sorts of ethnicities, representing a wide range of culture and creeds. But they are in an absolute minority, and, unfortunately, often get lumped in with rounds that have anything to do with their ethnicity at all, pigeonholed by blood – Lincoln Tan ends up speaking for tens of thousands of Asian New Zealanders in his role as a NZ Herald reporter, but the paper is still shamefully lacking a proper Maori Affairs correspondent

It's a terrible oversight, and the media scene absolutely needs more voices from tangata whenua, and from the Asian communities, and from all of the fine cultures that have come to call New Zealand home. Their stories are desperately needed, or we'll never know what we are missing.

And we need to see the world through other peoples' eyes, or we stagnate as a species. A different perspective on everything in modern society should always be welcomed. The media needs people with different cultural backgrounds, and different sexual orientations, and not just as a patronising way of getting into those communities, but because all these fine people have a perspective that is often missing.

Fortunately, everybody of sound mind can agree on this, and the only people who don't want diversity in our media scene are straight up sexist, racist, trans-phobic fuckwits, and who gives a shit what those mouth-breathing, no-chinned sister-fuckers think?

The media itself can, for once, see which way the wind is blowing, and most newsrooms are only too happy to snap up young, keen reporters with a bit of beautiful colour to them. But it takes a long, long time to get that sort of change, on the generational level.

Look at female representation in the media. There are, thank goodness, far more female voices in the media than there used to be, with media courses often heavily skewing against the blokes. A very large proportion of the young journos nailing it day after day are women, and they do a fucking great job, even if they still have to put up with a tonne of bullshit casual sexism (just ask the Herald's Kirsty Johnson how much she loves getting asked how she finds breaking big, important stories when she is such a "cute. young thing", as if that's got anything to fucking do with it.)

There are more and more women at the next level of news, chief reporters and news editors and producers, but it's still taking too fucking long for them to filter to the top levels – of editors and publishers and corporate-level shenanigans. The sooner, the better.

Different voices sometimes have to shout to be heard at all, but they shouldn't stop yelling yet. And the bigger media outfits need to get out there and listen out for them, before they become totally irrelevant to much of their audience.

- Catherine Grant

6. Stop fucking lying

Every now and then, somebody does a survey on what the public want from their journalism, and it's always the same – they want quality work about big stories, deep-rooted investigations into vital subjects and the uncovering of corruption. They don't want trash, they want the important stuff.

Which would be great, if it was true. But it's not, because everybody is fucking lying about it.

We know you're lying, because people just don't click on this stuff, and we can see exactly what people do click on. While some big, meaty stories do get a lot of love, in general, people just say they want it, and when it gets served up, it gets roundly ignored.

You can blame it on the presentation, but online editors actually fucking love it when a decent and worthy story goes off, because it's a fucking vindication of their role. And they fucking love it because it doesn't happen as often as it should.

This disconnect between what people say they want and what they actually want can be maddening. It's easy to say you want the worthy shit, because you might actually think you want it, but then you can't actually be bothered when it gets served up on a plate.

It's the Trump thing, where all the polls said it wasn't going to happen, but it turned out a bunch of people were talking shit when they were polled about it, and when it came time to make their mark, they thought the Mexican family down the street were a bit scary, and voted the way all the racist fucks wanted them to vote.

It's almost certain that you're doing it right now, even as you're sitting there, reading this. You're not the one who is encouraging all this clickbait. It's always someone else. Oh sure, you looked at that story about The Bachelor the other day, but that was just to see how far standards have fallen. It isn't you, it's everybody else that is the problem. (Never mind that hate-clicking is just as valuable as normal clicking, and analytics don't give a flying fuck about your reasoning).

And people lie about it, because they're embarrassed by the truth, because they know it's something to be ashamed of. Nobody can see what they are doing in the anonymity of random web surfing or the voting booth, so there is no way to be judged.

We're not going to get anywhere if we can't be honest about this bullshit, because if the disconnect between what people say they want and what they actually consume remains this wide, nothing will really get done about it.

So own it. If you like the trash, say it. Who gives a shit? You're not impressing anybody by lying in a survey about it. The person doing the surveying doesn't care.

And sure, there is the smugness of feeling like you're better than the media, but that isn't impressing fucking anybody either. We're not getting anywhere unless we ditch the bullshit and smugness.

-Ron Troupe

5: In it for the breaking news

Journalists aren't in it for the money, because there's none, and less every day. And they're not in it for the respect, because the public who gobble up their product - usually for free - have made sure of that.

Some of them are in it for the glory: a byline is their main goal. And some of them are in it for the smugness: knowing they haven't sold out their talents to the dark side of comms or PR jobs. And some of them are just in it for the breaking news.

It can be an absolute rush, dealing with a sudden, breaking story. Getting as much information as possible, confirming it, and sharing it with the world can be a shot of adrenaline, and then constantly dealing with updates, and often a huge flow of copy that follows the unexpected event.

There can be arguments about the definition of breaking news - and the over-use and diluting power of a breaking news banner is a topic for another time - but we all know big, breaking news when we see it.

The New Zealand media has become a lot better at dealing with breaking news events over the past few years, with huge news events like the catastrophic Christchurch quakes, and the horrific deaths at Pike River. Everyone knows the routine for earthquakes in particular: there isn't a journo in the country who isn't intimately familiar with Geonet and the USGS quake trackers, and there is almost an instant formula for a breaking quake story, of location, depth and strength, followed by ongoing reports of damage or clearance.

Earthquakes strike right out of fucking nowhere, hitting at any time of day or night, often at editorially inconvenient moments. But when a big one does go down, it's all hands on fucking deck, whether it's one o'clock on a Monday morning, or four in the afternoon, when half the newsroom is about to clock off.

Big breaking news always comes out of nowhere, with a mixture of shock value and the need to know more. You can't manufacture this kind of news, but you always know it when it happens.

This week, of course, the big unexpected news was the announcement that prime minister and renowned dork John Key was stepping down. Nobody saw this coming (although several have claimed they called it beforehand), it dropped during a sudden press conference, during a period where the government is in reasonable shape.

For the record, the mighty Andrea Vance at TVNZ definitely broke the news about Key's resignation before anybody else. For a good 90 seconds, she was the only person saying that he was going. She got it right on the nail, before anybody else, and after a minute and a half of newsrooms around the country filling with the cries of 'WTF?', everybody else in the world piled onto the news.

It was a familiar pattern from there – stringing together a quick story that quickly filled with reactions and tributes. All the opposition politicians put down their hatchets for a minute to say nice things about Key (with the always notable exception of Winston Peters, who is too old and grumpy to waste time on platitudes he doesn't mean), there were plenty of 'This Is Your Life' pieces, and then a million hot takes on what it all means for the country. Some journos were just happy that wouldn't be stuck transcribing Key's usual garbled quotes - the man never used four words when 16 would do - but life went on.

The next step, if warranted, is the investigative process – why it really happened - which can take years. There were awful rumours about the 'real' reasons for Key's departure less than half an hour after his announcement, but it might take years or decades to actually discover the real truth.

At least, for now, the Key resignation is one of those slightly rare big breaking news stories that doesn't involve some kind of misery, death or tragedy. Journos with enough self-awareness always feel awful when they get excited about something that is causing hardship and pain to other people, but the Key news was a reasonably happy piece of coverage.

It might never really last, but breaking news never does, and there is always something new to report, every day, every hour, and every minute.

-Steve Lombard

4: Time is not on our side

The most valuable thing in the modern newsroom is time. There is never enough of the fucking stuff, and it gets filled up so easily.

Older, seasoned pros will talk about the old days, when they could all just go for a drink after they hit their deadline, because their job was done. If they weren't on a daily publication, nobody really gave a fuck if you didn't do much work the day after deadline. When younger journos hear talk of days like this, they usually want to cut out the old chinwobbler's heart with a spoon, because it certainly ain't like that now.

Now a reporter isn't expected to file their story and fuck off, they've got to get a first take out there for the web, and then do a full story for print or broadcast, and then they're back doing updates for the online shitshow again. Guys like the Mediaworks team might have to do a live cross for the 5.30 Prime broadcast, and then have to turn around 20 minutes later and do it all over again for the Newshub at 6pm show.

And editors are dealing with a deluge of copy. Behind the scenes, vast swathes of jobs are simply gone, and skeleton staffs can be dealing with massive amounts of editorial content. Stories don't get the full once-over, and there simply isn't the extra 10 minutes needed to really massage a piece into perfection. 'Good enough' is the biggest result.

Online editors at the bigger newsrooms can be dealing with dozens and dozens of stories a day. If they're lucky, they might get 15 minutes to sub and prep a story, looking for mistakes, making sure it makes goddamn sense, finding a picture, formatting the story, adding related links, adding tags and giving it a snappy headline. Special projects, like long-term investigation pieces, obviously get more love and attention, but the vast majority of copy gets nothing more than a few minutes.

And on weekends, and outside regular office hours, the news flow might finally slow down a little, but there are even fewer staff. If you're wondering why it takes a while for things to appear on some of the big sites on a Sunday afternoon, or why it's taken so long for a fuck-up to be fixed, you really should get a fucking life, but the real answer is that even the largest newsroom might just have one single person dealing with the whole huge mess, all day long.

All this, of course, leads to all sorts of mistakes and oversights, as frazzled staff don't have that extra minute to double-check or confirm. It all just gets shoveled on, because there are 100 more things to deal with before you can go home. The kind of shitgobbler who spends their day moaning about these mistakes had more time to comb over the story than the poor fuckers who were actually responsible for it.

It won't get any better, not anytime soon, not with so many mergers demanding more from less staff, and more layoffs meaning more work is lumped on the damned souls who survive the inevitable culling.

As valuable as time is as a commodity, it's only only going to get squeezed tighter, and more errors and delays are on the cards.

- Catherine Grant

3. There's journalism everywhere

The modern media landscape is every-changing and fluid, and under pressures that are unique in the industry's history. Nothing is certain, everything is in flux, nobody knows what the fuck is going on.

There are plenty of legitimate criticisms about modern journalism that deserve to be debated, especially around funding issues and the presentation of all this crap, but even as newsrooms shrink and advertising dollars evaporate like a fart in the wind, there is still some amazing shit going on out there.

There is so much noise, and so much bullshit, it can often be hard to seek it out, and we're all so fucking lazy these days, and why can't some poor bastard feed it to us on a plate, so we can all sit there like those fat fucks on the space ship in Wall-E? Sometimes a bit of effort is just worth it, because there is truly great stuff out there every goddamn day.

Just here in New Zealand, there is some stunning stuff coming from local and national newsrooms. Even with all the upheavals at Mediaworks over the past year, reporters like Amanda Gilles, Michael Morrah and Lisa Owen are fucking nailing the big scoops and huge interviews, while the weekend morning chin-stroking-fests on the telly provide vital analysis. TVNZ also has the best breaking news team in the country, and the reporting squad at the NZ Herald is loaded with great talent, alongside Harkanwal Singh and the data journalism crew, who have been writing the goddamn rules on amazing visualisations. Reporters like Shannon Haunui-Thompson and Maiki Sherman have been covering great and important stories in their native affairs beats, and there are some strong voices on various Pacific Island beats.

The NBR has its perfect audience, and the only comments section in the country worth reading. RNZ is wonderfully beholden to no corporate interests, breaking loads of big, important and slightly boring stories. Seasoned pros like Paula Penfold still take massive stories all the way to their full and proper conclusions, even if they have to switch companies to do it.

The ODT remains a vital part of its community, and the Bauer current affairs magazines are stacked with great long-form work. A few months ago, Anusha Bradley at RNZ and Matt Nippert at the Herald independently performed a pincer movement on the big Kiwisaver providers, shaming them into pulling investments in some appalling products. They got a goddamn result.

There are great business, sports, entertainment teams in the big newsrooms, and some terrific local angles coming from the smaller daily and community newspapers – with many reporters cracking enough great hyper-local yarns to get the attention of the big boys. The Timaru Herald's police notebook is a bloody national treasure, the best court stories in the country come from the West Coast, and the photographers at the Marlborough Express produce stellar images, year after year.

The Spinoff is asking the questions nobody thinks to ask, and there are heaps of truly magnificent freelancers beavering away in pitch meetings and long, lonely days where they forget to talk to another human being. Behind the bylines, there are great teams of passionate journalists getting it onto a page or screen near you. They have to be passionate, because they're not in it for the fucking money.

In the past year, there have been great stories of injustice, and substandard steel, and mental health failures. Ministers are grilled on fucking everything, to the point where several senior MPs just flat out refuse to go on The Hui or Morning Report, because they'd prefer the sycophantic safe hands of breakfast TV.

And fuck, look at all the great international coverage coming from the biggest papers and broadcasters in the world. The lack of global correspondents at NZ's companies is a fucking tragedy, but now have access to unbelievably strong material, every single day. It's all just two clicks away.

We're fucking drenched in it, and it's easy to sneer at all the populist shit, and certainly an argument that the way a lot of this great stuff is presented and sold needs some good, proper thought, but there are reporters, editors, producers and directors producing incredible work every single day.

And it's work that should be celebrated as much as possible, because the industry is a fucking shitstorm at the moment. Mergers and other upheavals are putting all this great work under pressure, so ignore the bullshit and fucking enjoy it while it lasts.

-Catherine Grant, Ron Troupe

2. Everybody is in the media

There is one easy way to figure out if somebody is an expert or just an ignorant piece of shit when they're talking about the media, and that's if they talk about the media as if it's just one big thing.

If they say things like 'The media needs to...' and 'It's all the media's fault', they're going to have to be a little more fucking specific, because that's a goddamn huge net they are throwing there. There are multiple levels of media saturation in the 21st century, and while it's all part of the noise, some voices are louder than others, and some are more worthwhile than others.

Big media is the first, most obvious level, and the one this site will be mostly concerned with, because it's the most interesting, and the one we're usually talking about when we all blame/congratulate the media. It's the places that measure daily website hits in the tens of thousands, and reach hundreds of thousands of people with TV broadcasts, radio shows, newspapers and magazines.

The next level are the things like minor news sites, significant blogs and B2B publications. Less news, more analysis, and more blatant shilling. They're still a loud voice, especially in their own community, but are too focused to really influence the wider media scene.

The lowest level are people who leave comments on news stories and create their own sites to 'tell it like it is'. Nobody gives a flying fuck what these people think, no matter how loudly they yell in caps lock.

This site is obviously in this category, an irony that has not been overlooked by its creators.

But even putting these things into easy-to-define categories like that is a gross simplification, as there are parts of the media world that don't fit into nice little boxes, or great institutions that become sad jokes.

And they are all part of a vast, swirling and magnificent media mess, even in a relatively small country like New Zealand. You can't talk about it in absolutes, because it incorporates multiple points of view and objectives, and is too big and ever-changing to pigeonhole into easy categories.

Even in a comparatively tiny area like 'radio show host', you can't compare the urine-stained fear-mongering of Larry Williams and chums at Newstalk ZB to the social pleading of John Campbell at RNZ – they're both technically doing the same job, but have different views, goals and audiences. Even Guyon Espiner, on the early morning shift at RNZ, is doing very different things to Campbell later in the day, and getting very different results.

Blaming the media for everything that is wrong with the world is easy, but you really need to clarify which part of this glorious mess you're talking about, or you're not saying fucking anything.

- Steve Lombard

1. Who would be a journalist anyway?

Being a news journalist in the modern media world is fucking amazing. You deal with the rush of breaking news, get to talk to – and work with - all sorts of amazingly smart and charming people, and get to be insanely creative on a daily basis.

It also pays shit, the hours can be gutfuckingly awful, and the rest of the world thinks you do a terrible job and that they can do it much better than you can, because they can "string a few words together".

This is the true story of life as a news journalist in New Zealand in the year 2016, written by several jaded, cynical and painfully sincere journalists who are all currently working in some of the country's newsrooms. Unlike every other son of a bitch writing about the media scene these days, we have no goddamn opinion about the future of the medium and industry, because that's still unwritten, but we have a fair bit to say about the state of the here and now.

We also prefer to keep their names private, because we don't want to lose our fucking jobs, and because it's none of your fucking business.

But we are going to show you what it looks like at the other end of a notepad.

New posts will appear every Monday and Thursday.

Welcome to the media scrum, and stay out of the TV guy's fucking eye-line.