58: Into the crank file

A few weeks ago, several of New Zealand's biggest newsrooms received an impassioned email from a member of the public, pleading with them to investigate the biggest story of the past few decades - an incredible secret that needed to be exposed in public, and revealed a massive conspiracy of remarkable proportions.

This e-correspondence demanded to know why nobody was looking at the fact that Princess Diana's death had been faked, and that she was, in fact, David Furnish, the (apparently) male husband of Elton John.

You can see where the email's writer was coming from. After all, the resemblance is uncanny:

The email earnestly implored the targeted journalists to look closely into this staggering revelation, and concluded that if they didn't, they were obviously in on the whole thing, helping keep this terrible secret for... well... reasons.

Shockingly, nobody in the news media picked up on this bombshell. There were a few mocking tweets, and that's about as far as it went. The 'delete' key is a good news editor's best friend, and judicious use was made of it in this case.

This is an extreme example, but newsrooms are getting this kind of shit all the fuckin' time, and public email addresses become choked with conspiracy spam, and outright lunacy from the dedicated readers and listeners.

And when staff levels in newsrooms everywhere are being progressively decimated, and more and more actual journalism is demanded from those that remain, nobody has got any time for this dopey crap.  
 
There have, admittedly, been some great stories that came out of the crank files, as a sharp-eyed editor spots a nugget of truth among the ocean of shit, and follows it to a thorough and proper conclusion. But this is an extremely rare occurrence, and happens less and less, as the amounts of emails and Facebook messages full of total horseshit continue to slide in.

For anybody who is keen to take this messy and complicated world, and give it a simplistic and explainable rationale, it's comforting that the real truth is out there, and is only being kept from the wider public by a sinister cabal of the media elite.

Maybe there is some weird shit going on at the highest levels of the media - noted piece of dung Rupert Murdoch has objectively made the world a shittier place through his fear-mongering and fascist-loving media empire - but there is no big conspiracy that everybody, from reporters on suburban newspapers to board members at media conglomerates, is involved in.

After all, journalists are an obviously contrarian lot, and newsrooms are full of people with wildly different opinions about anything and everything. You won't get four reporters in the same newsroom to agree on anything - deciding what to get when they're ordering a goddamn pizza on the late shift is hard enough, let alone a vast and terrible conspiracy spreading across the globe, lasting for decades, and motivated by... well, we'll get back to you on that one.

(Anybody going for the obvious answer that it's the money, the motive is always money, should take a look at the carpark of your local newspaper or radio station. Nobody on the take is driving those shitboxes.)

None of this is likely to convince the bloke, (and it's always a fucking bloke), who wrote the email about Diana and David. It's also extremely unlikely anybody ever bothered to reply, and they just let the mad, lone voice get lost in the cacophony. But nobody is covering up this crap, it's just a load of bollocks, and we don't have time to deal with that.

Then again, we would say that, wouldn't we?

- Ron Troupe

57: Fuck you, Mr Barclay

After being shamed out of office due to his predilections towards secretly recording his staff members - as well as the subsequent bullshitting around it - far south MP Todd Barclay has gone to ground, before shuffling away at the next election.

While his political career is deader than Dillinger, he's still on the public dollar, and will earn tens of thousands of taxpayer funds by hanging about until the election. There are some fundamental questions to be answered here - RNZ's Checkpoint has 10 simple, open questions that deserve some answers - and somebody needs to front to it.

But Mr Barclay isn't going to do it: nobody has seen him in Parliament, and he has made no public appearances, despite the National party's insistence that he continues to serve his constituents faithfully.

So when a couple of decent local journos went to talk to him, they weren't really surprised when they were turned away without getting any comment on record. They were a lot more surprised, however, when they heard there had been an official complaint, and that they had been accused of having bullied and intimidated staff at his office.

Luckily, they had some video rolling, and it all turned out to be a load of horseshit. The old saying that you don't pick a fight with an organisation that buys ink by the barrel-load is routinely ignored these days, but it's a shit-sight harder to rewrite the facts for political purposes when there is some inconvenient footage showing exactly what went down.

It's satisfying that the journos involved had the goods, and could slap down any allegations instantly, with the use of the video footage. The media's current thirst for never-ending digital video content has actually paid off for once, providing proof, and fact, and shutting down a brutally ham-fisted attempt on Mr Barclay's part to claim the status of aggrieved victim.

It's obviously also worrying, because it's part of an increasing trend of shooting the messenger, with politicians taking management and leadership skills from Gerard fucking Butler in 300, yelling 'This is Gore!' while metaphorically throwing reporters down the well. Do journos now have to make sure they're recording every fucking thing from now on, because who knows when an innocuous interview will become something else entirely? Is that what it has come to?

Also, it's actually fucking offensive, and annoying, because if there wasn't proof, and it came down to a he said/they said thing, you just know everybody would believe the proven liar, rather than the professional reporters who suffer extreme consequences if they are ever caught making shit up, (as in, it can instantly destroy your whole fucking future in the business).

Everyone knows this motherfucker is a bullshit artist, but if the media are saying things you don't like, then it's open season on them, in every way. This kind of tactic keeps the moronic rubes happy, and gets some short term results, but is a catastrophic long-term strategy, because the truth will eventually come out, and anybody attempting this strategy will go down in history as a fool and a charlatan.

Some politicians see the media as an easy target - Winston Peters is still smarting over the fact that news media have painted him as a racist, just because he said racist things and advocates racist policies, and can't let a day go by without sneering at the professionalism of people who try to uncover the truth for a living.

But if more reporters are going to be forced to record every interaction they have with people in any kind of power, just to keep them safe from unsubstantiated allegations, politicians won't be able to hide behind that flimsy barrier of 'fake news' for very long. And maybe, just maybe, they'll grow up and face some fucking facts.

- Ron Troupe 

56: This is a comms emergency

Comms people working for the highest levels of our government have been practising the art of obfuscation for decades, and have got pretty good at it, to the detriment of wider public knowledge. Trying to get anything out of Parliament and senior MPs can be a mentally painful and frustrating experience, with the use of 'just put it in an email' preventing any in-depth response.

It’s all based on the entire concept of arse covering, and making sure you can’t be caught out in a contradiction or lie, because you don’t say anything worth lying about in the first place. For a career politician, the entire art of political PR is proving that it's not your fault when things go wrong, but all your responsibility when something is going right.

This is to be expected of politicians, because this is what they do, and it takes expereinced and savvy political journos to cut through all the slimy bullshit. But it is genuinely crushing to see that attitude of non-accountability filter through to the country’s emergency services.

When bad shit is going now, people need to know what is going on, and they need to know right fucking now. Threats of fire, or flood, or tsunami; all need to be reported quickly and clearly, on as many platforms as humanly possible.

And while some emergency organisations have some comms teams, and have mastered the use of social media to get the message out, others are so busy arse covering, and trying to make sure everything is 100 percent right before saying anything, and this can disintegrate some valuable time.

There have been several recent cases where Civil Defence has failed to do this part of the job - their tsunami warning systems is a shambles, forcing breaking news reporters to resort to multiple sources, often offering conflicting information. They're so terrified of putting something out that might not be 100 percent accurate, they don’t say anything, and can waste more of that precious time before declaring whether there is actually a tsunami coming, or how big it will be.

Various police comms teams can also be awful at withholding information, with reporters unable to reach the right person, fobbed off with the promise of a media release that are always too fucking late.

There are comms people in New Zealand's emergency crews who are terrific, and they tend to be the ones who have embraced the spreadable nature of new communication tools, like Twitter. The Fire team have a dedicated media Twitter feed which has proven incredibly effective at dishing out the fastest, most important information, with invaluable data spread during terrible events like the Christchurch port hills fires.

Comms people get annoyed when they have to take 10 calls from 10 different media organisations, but not everybody listens to the same radio station, or reads the same websites, and everyone needs to know there is a goddamn inferno bearing down on them. During the Canterbury emergency, everyone got short, sharp public statements from that Fire twitter at the same time, and everyone had the same vital evacuation news.

Across the whole country, NZTA is actually pretty darn good at keeping everyone updated with transport-related emergencies and road shutdowns. It can still be hard to talk to an actual person, but their social media team get the message on road closures and delays out there bloody quickly..

This isn’t just a matter of reporters whining because they’re being put on hold while trying to confirm a report other organisations have made. These are important issues around getting important information about safety and danger out to as many people as possible, as soon as possible, and not waiting for the sign-off from someone with the power.

A lot of comms people who have come from journalism forget this as soon as they sign up for the dark side, but there really isn't time to arse about with power games. It's literally a matter of life and death.

- Katherine Grant

55: News sites with too much junk in their trunk

If you believe all the market research carried out by news media companies desperate to find out who the hell their audience actually is these days, we've all got the attention span of a dog in a forest full of squirrels. We need constant updates and new things, every hour, every minute, every second of every day.

That's the theory anyway, a theory that has been embraced by many of the big news websites in this country. Everything needs to be constantly updating, new stories have to be always going up, and that lead story needs to be changing all the time.

And they obviously do need to do this - a news website has to have all the latest breaking news, and needs to have new pretty things to look at all day long, or the mass audience is going to just drift away, looking for new novelty elsewhere.

But there is a real danger in getting up too much stuff, and overloading everybody by having way too much junk in the trunk.

The most obvious hindrance from this constantly-updating attitude is that a lot of the good stuff gets buried. Long, worthy pieces that go up first thing at 5am can be pushed out of the top stories list by the time some late-rising reporters get out of bed, and they get more than a little disgruntled when they find their hard-won stories have already been buried by editors who have been on the early shift for four hours, and is now beneath a story about Peter Burling eating a burrito.

It can avoid this ignominious fate by making an immediate impact on the numbers, and quickly gaining a noticeable audience, but no story has time to build, and can be flushed away as old news within a couple of hours. The internet is near infinite, but there is still only a finite amount of precious display space left for editorial content on a major news website, and no matter how important a story is, it can get pushed right down to the nether regions of the site, remarkably quickly.

It's a delicate balance for online news editors, who are pushed to grow numbers by any means necessary, but are also high-level users, constantly refreshing their home pages, and getting bored by seeing the same stuff so quickly, because that's all they are looking at all day. This is why stories get no time to build an audience, there's a constant flow of new stuff, and nowhere to put it all.

You particularly see this on the biggest news sites - Stuff and the NZ Herald pack their pages with new novelties, and are always updating, always pushing the unworthy further down the page into digital oblivion, replaced by the new thrill. TVNZ's entire internet concept is about the constantly updating log of stories, with fuck-all curation of the flow.

In this respect, the recent redesign of the Herald site has made it even more difficult, there are just far fewer stories at the top of the site when you go there, far fewer things to grab the immediate attention (including the loss of the 'latest news' ticker, which showed the site was alive and updating, while also giving unexpectedly popular stories a chance to get some hits). Especially if you're still going to it on the desktop, where the easy scrolling of the mobile phone just doesn't happen - it's the classic journalism lesson that if it's 'below the fold', it's not going to be read.

A lot of the smaller newsrooms in this country, including the Newshub, NBR and RNZ crews, have sites that don't churn through the day's events quite so fast, and give stories that might not generate a mass audience a bit of a profile. It's okay for stories to sit at the top of their pages for a few hours, and give everybody a chance to see them. It can certainly pay off -  Newshub's sharp online presence was named the best news site at the recent Canons.

The world does feel like it's speeding up sometime, with a sheer deluge of news and information, but there are benefits to taking it a bit easier, and spacing things out a bit. Chasing the clicks just means an avalanche of content, and that smothers us all.

- Ron Troupe