123. This things we believe (signing out for the holidays)

Media Scrum is going on its holiday break a little earlier this year - we were going to write a couple more posts about the suicide reporting in this country and how Terfs should stop being such fucking Terfs if they want everybody to stop calling them Terfs, but that can all wait for the New Year. We're done with 2018.

It's a beautiful day out there, so we're going to go soak up some sun, and we'll be back in mid-January with the usual bile and bitching.

In the meantime, here's an updated list of our beliefs. Last year's list is already tragically out of date, even if the first rule remains 'fill the fucking space', but we stand by everything we say. Even the posts we wrote when we were drunk as fuck.

This is some more of what we believe:

* That hate speech isn't free speech, and we definitely don't need to always hear both sides of the story.

* That Greg Boyed was one of the good ones.

* That Twitter has its uses, but isn't near as influential as it thinks it is, and that a move to prime-time is always good for current affairs TV shows, but there are some drawbacks.

* That a good picture is worth 10,000 words

* That we're losing tonnes of great journos, that the pivot to video has been a fucking disaster, that the newsrooms are often criminally understaffed and overworked, that the wire has died, and that the whole industry is suffering terribly due to a lack of new talent.

* But it ain't all bad.

* And sometimes, you just can't avoid the churn.

* And there are still some fucking amazing journos out there.

* That while fake news is fucking up the industry, no professional journo gets away with making up shit and we don't need to make up shit when life is so fucking crazy.

* That journos should let their natural accent fly, display a bit of professional goddamn courtesy and never, ever give a shit about what their advertisers want, especially when they're not delivering the money.

 *They also don't usually get blackout drunk and sleep with their sources, even if there was some iffy ethics around a reporter and a disgraced MP this year that lived up to a lot of those cliches. 

* That lovely stories about cute animals are just as important as tragedy and death.

* That a witch hunt is really a dickhead hunt, that a member of Run the motherfuckin' Jewels could teach everybody something about apologising, that cartooning is a serious business, that Aucklanders are human too, and that you don't give away your bloody secrets.

* That people in position of power have to be held accountable and that accountability doesn't just melt away when you slink out of office.

* That being the only journo at the barbecue is a pain in the arse.

* And finally, as always, that we need to kill the comments. Kill them with fire, then take off and nuke them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Happy new year, everybody! See you in 2019.

Love,
Media Scrum

122. Advertising keeps the lights on, but stays out of the newsroom

Almost every decent newsroom is attached in some way to an advertising department. The only one that avoids some kind of symbiotic/parasitic relationship is good old public radio broadcasting, which doesn't even have a marketing department to talk up its own deeds.

But that's the exception, not the rule. As the advertising department likes to constantly point out, it's the ads that pay the bills. Their end product would be nothing but letterbox filler without the editorial content to attract an audience, but the ad crew will never let you forget who ultimately pays everybody's wages and keeps the lights on.

Still, while they usually share the same roof, the editorial and advertising teams are fiercely independent. Editors don't tell sales managers how to sell their space, and nobody from advertising can come onto the newsroom floor and dictate how the news is going to be presented to the world, even if it makes a client look bad.

The two departments might come together for special projects, and there may be some crossover in the worlds of advertorials and B2B publications, but in general the two departments in all good and proper media companies remain strongly separated.

Unfortunately, the news media is fucking awful at advertising this independence, because there are some gross misconceptions about the influence advertisers have on the final news presentation.

In an excellent recent Twitter thread recently, Washington Post reporter Laura Helmuth revealed how smart, sharp and educated people who were inquisitive and had read newspapers their whole lives still had some incredibly firm and incredibly wrong ideas about the way the news media worked, and the first question went straight to the relationship between advertisers and editorial.

Helmuth rightly pointed out that the news crew had no idea what ads were being sold, and the advertising people didn't know what stories were appearing. Anything else and all your credibility goes right out the window, and nobody will ever take you seriously if you show how far you're willing to bend over and take it from corporate interests.

Any decent newsroom would be appalled to have their conduct dictated by the ads that were being sold. It's just not acceptable. A newsroom has got to have some goddamn ethics, or it's just a mouthpiece for the rich and powerful and the masthead becomes worthless.

Many, many journalists take this very seriously. Media Scrum has personally seen people from the advertising department literally marched off the newsroom floor when somebody tried to complain that a web story cast a bad light on a company that spent a lot of advertising dollars. They didn't last a minute.

There are, as always, annoying exceptions to this moral position, because reality is more awkward and complicated than it looks from up on a high horse. There is the aforementioned advertorial, which is usually 100% produced in the advertising department (unless an editorial writer needs to score some quick cash by bashing out some anonymous copy after work). It is also a bit harder to argue that some columnists have been fully detached by advertising on an issue, but that's because columns are pure opinion, and every piece of advertising ever created is all about influencing somebody's opinion on something.

And there are straight up newsrooms who follow their masters call explicitly, no matter how ideologically dodgy they get, and nobody should ever take anything they say seriously.

In fact, the only time advertising can really be weaponized against editorial in a morally justifiable way is if the editorial content is so odious, so full of hatred and bullshit, that a consumer boycott of advertisers brings about change.

This isn't a matter of free speech, or shutting down balance - nobody needs a media outlet telling us that pedophilia and murder is a-okay, and nobody needs anybody espousing views that are unmistakably Nazi (hot tip for the easily confused, if you're reading or listening to something that is saying Nazi things and saying that those Nazi things are worthwhile, you're reading or listening to fucking Nazis, and fuck those guys always.) Despite bleating about freedom of speech, this is just capitalism at full force, with society dictating that this shit is not acceptable, and does not have a God-given right to be supported by any advertising dollars

But that's the extreme end of the scale, and most of that scale is full of newsrooms who want nothing to do with the advertising side of things, as long as they get their pay every week.
 
Of course, this is a time when most of the advertising money that has kept the business chugging along has vanished in the slow plod towards digital news content, swallowed up by the gaping maws of Google and Facebook. Who can keep the lights on when the classified ads have all shifted to TradeMe?

But that's a problem for the folk in those advertising and marketing departments. The newsrooms can only do what they always do, and try and create the best content they can. RNZ might be the only place don't have to deal with the demands to get an audience to keep the dollars rolling in, but every serious newsroom just needs to keep that fair distance away from the money.

- Ron Troupe

121. Excuse us

Don't be this guy.

The news media industry in this country is being increasingly squeezed into oblivion, but there is still one thing that will always have currency, no matter how much the news is devalued, and that is showing some professional goddamn courtesy towards your fellow journos.

It’s only common courtesy, but it can mean the world to your fellow professionals, and those that show a lack of it are frequently ostracised right out of the business. Even as we’re all scrambling for exclusives and scoops, we don’t do it by shitting on the people in the same race as us, because then we all end up covered in it.

There are two excellent examples of professional courtesy in this business that can be seen every day. One of them takes place out in the field, and the other is confined to the office, but a bit of basic politeness in both is essential for the well-being of all journos in this country.

The first is out in the real scrum, at a media stand-up or press conference, where a number of reporters and visual journalists are trying to get the full story from a spokesperson or politician or emergency services representative. These things can get pretty fucking crowded, especially when everybody is covering a big story, and they can take place in a confined area, when everybody needs good audio or visuals.

Fortunately, there are unwritten rules about dealing with these scrums - everyone should get the same chance to ask their questions, and shouting over somebody who has already got well into their question is highly dubious. Everyone involved also needs to be aware of everyone else's line of sight, and has to ensure they aren't blocking anybody else off from getting an important shot.

Anybody who breaks these rules will get some sour looks from other reporters on the spot, and justifiably so. If we didn't follow these rules, it would be anarchy at the stand-up, and nobody would get anything useful because it would all get wiped out by everyone trying to fuck up everybody else's day.

The only one who really gets away with overpowering a press conference in this country is the mighty John Campbell – even reporters from his own newsroom can dread seeing him rock up at a news conference, because he’s going to run right over everybody, and soak up a lot of the question time, especially when the group who have called the conference have made it clear it’s a strictly limited amount of access. Campbell gets away with it because he’s just a genuinely lovely human being, and we all know he’s probably working on some transcendent piece of journalism. So we usually just let him do his thing, but that’s rare, and anybody else who hogs all the questions, or fucks up someone else’s audio cut or photo, is not going to be popular.

At least in cases like this, the aggrieved journos get to make some splendid stink-eye at the other reporters who are fucking up their day, but there are also some unprofessional shenanigans going on back in the office, where online editors are actively encouraged to rip off (or “match”) their rivals’ big stories, and to give the original source as little credit as humanly possible.

The strange nature of scoops has been discussed here before, and there is the paradox of wanting to be the first and only one to break a big story, but also needing everybody else to pick up the ball and run with it if you ever want to see your story grow.

But sometimes, one news outlet gets a brilliant interview, or a particularly juicy OIA request comes back, or they just do the hard fucking yards and pull together a great story through sheer hard work, and nobody else can match the story without giving the first newsroom to break the story the full credit.

To be fair, some media outlets in this country are great at giving the full credit, and don’t hesitate to throw a link to the original yarn, even if it’s at a hated competitor.

But other places seem to have an online policy of giving as little credit as possible, and can frequently be seen ripping off a story word for word, with barely a mention of where the story originated. An official response to a story can be used as a way of getting around the credit, but it is still a shitty thing to do.

This is far more passive-aggressive than a shuffling for position at a press conference, but it’s no less annoying, and just plain rude. Some places, like the Newsroom website, have broken a lot of great stories in the past year, and they have often been denied the credit they deserve from other organisations (which have far, far more reporting resources than the young media outfit).

This is an industry where your reputation is everything, and a lack of professional courtesy - whether it’s bad behaviour in the scrum, or failing to properly credit great work – will be duly noted by everybody. There are only so many newsrooms in this country, and that kind of dick behaviour isn't going to get anybody very far.

We're all in this together, and sometimes that means stepping back and letting someone else take the lead for a while. It's only polite, and journos should help show the world it could use a bit more politeness.

- Katherine Grant

120. Your community can get stuffed

Stuff's decision to gut its suburban newspapers in Auckland is both predictable as hell and stupid as fuck – the company has shown over and over again that it has absolutely no interest in servicing the needs of locals, and is only interested in a national audience. Even if going hyper-local is the only way to keep these kind of things alive, Stuff is abandoning the communities that have kept them going for decades, and blindly relying on a dubious low-staff, high-social media strategy.

The company was always going to use the merger bid with NZME as an excuse to cut staff, and now that the merger has now been apparently taken out behind the chemical sheds and shot, the carnage has begun in earnest. NZME has decimated its sports teams in recent weeks, and Stuff told its staff last week that 19 journalist jobs were on the chopping block at the suburban papers dotted around the country's largest city.

Stuff will, of course, argue right now that it's only a proposal and that it hasn't actually slashed its staff numbers yet, but it's the kind of proposal that is a proposal in name only, and it's highly unlikely that anything major is going to change with the plan. A lot of talented journos are going to lose their jobs.

But nobody, including those unfortunate reporters who will now be scrambling for any kind of work, can really be surprised by all this. The corporate body of the media giant have shown no interest in the suburban papers for years, and have steadily cut resources. The papers, which actually managed to generate decent revenue during all these cutbacks, wasn't sexy enough for the big boys on the board, who were infatuated with a digital future.

But as predictable as this news is, it's still a little surprising that it also manages to be so, so stupid in so many ways.

For starters there is the hegemony of product between all the surviving newspapers under the new plan. It will see journalists working at a centralised headquarters, producing content that can be easily shared across region, filling the space between the ads with the same shit that everybody else has. The same stories will be subbed the same way, while going out to different audiences, ignoring the possibility that things that are vitally important in Waitekere don't seem very relevant to the people of Onehunga.

Stuff has already moved in this direction – the Southland Times and the Christchurch Press should not have the same fucking front page, right down to the banners, but that's happening quite regularly now.

It's also stupid because community papers are a vital stepping stone for many, many young reporters – half the news media scene in Auckland started out on the the suburbans, and half of them seemed to be editor of the Central Leader at some point. The gutting of these papers takes away some incredibly important entry points into the industry - something that, as we've only just said, is awful for everybody - and doesn't provide the raw recruits with the opportunities to learn their craft. If they fuck up a story about the local garden society, they learn not to make that kind of error again before moving onto bigger outlets.

The company is already making a big deal out of the fact that it's hiring a tiny handful of senior reporters to fill these papers, but this is another aspect that doesn't seem very smart at all, because you've got to wonder what sort of senior journo is going to want to work in that kind of churnalism environment.

The biggest issue, of course, is that these media companies are just not going be in the community they profess to serve. As noted by former Rodney Times editor and Media Scrum fave Rhonwyn Newson, you're going to lose all the quirky, cool stories that do grab a national audience, while still serving local needs, but also the stories about local roads and infrastructure that local readers are genuinely interested in.

Instead, there is a heavy implication that journos will spend a lot of their time trawling through social media for local stories, which is a horrifically dumb idea. You're not going to get proper news from  Neighbourly, which is already choked with your racist neighbours and dumbarses moaning about vaccinations and other vacuous bullshit.

Neighbourly is good if you want to find a new babysitter, or need to know the best place to get a haircut in your area, but it's not a news source, it's a community notice board. Nobody uncovers corruption or incompetence in society's power structures by reading the noticeboard at your local supermarket, and they don't get it from badly researched and ignorant social media posts.

This latest move proves that Stuff is straight-up giving up on the communities it professes to serve. There is a huge difference between local and national news, just as there is between national and international. There can be crossover, but they have different needs and different audiences and different goals, and you can smash them together without having a significant impact on the end product.

Right now, there is a street-level audience that is being extremely poorly served by the big news media companies. Stuff needs to stop pretending they give a shit, and sell – or just give – their titles back to the community. This is easy to say, and harder to do, but there does need to be some robust discussion about the possibilities of local trusts and government help. We need to talk about this more, if we ever want to be a real community.

- Margaret Tempest

119. Where have all the kids gone?

The entire news media has had a severe dose of the existential shits for years now. It has spent all of the 21st century dealing with the fallout from consumer apathy, political fuckery, corporate incompetence and the entire concept of the internet. The industry remains in a huge state of flux, with no guarantees that there will even be a news business in the future, or at least one that is recognisable to current eyes.

But there is an increasingly dire trend right at the start of the business, where raw recruits are fed into the media meat grinder – there just are not enough of them coming into the business, and this will have long-term repercussions for the quality of the media product in this country.

There used to be loads of different journalism courses in New Zealand that were dotted up and down the country, and now there are only three – and even they are struggling to fill smaller classes.

The reasons for this are fairly obvious. Everybody - including the media - talks about how the news industry is a dying business, with little hope of a long-term career. You can't blame guidance counsellors and teachers for not pointing young people looking for a career in that direction.

The general growing distrust in the media also doesn't help, and neither do journalists themselves, and they way they frequently talk about the shit pay, terrible hours and little things like death threats (something Media Scrum is certainly guilty of, like the bunch of fucking hypocrites we are.) None of that would sound very promising to anybody interested in it as a career.

But the industry is not dying as fast as those fuckers say, and there remains a crucial need to create news content for the country's bulletins, publications and websites, and there are still plenty of entry-level jobs out there for somebody with the proper qualification and training.

Newsrooms need a constant stream of keen young staff to keep things going. They're an essential ingredient, as much as the crusty old court reporter who knows all the lawyers' names. You need the enthusiasm and drive and ambition of young reporters, or you're a dying newsroom.

But there is also the issue of the quality – when there are way more candidates for positions on a j-school course than are available, then you just get the smartest and sharpest, but if you're forced to take everybody, you're going to end up with people who might not be ready for the stress and demands of modern reporting.

As it is, j-school classes always suffer a loss of up to a quarter of students throughout a full-time course, with people who find they are unsuited to things like the disciplines of deadlines and concise writing, or are just plain useless at getting information from people. If tutors are forced to take anybody they can, just to keep their budgets, there are only going to be bigger levels of drop-outs, especially when they are thrown into their first actual job and have to hit the streets.

There is no easy answer to the dwindling supply of young, keen reporters, Maybe we just need to get back to those guidance counselors and teachers who have read too many Facebook articles about the death of news, and let them know that no matter how the industry changes, there will always be a need for people to create the content (even if social media sites tend to reap the rewards by ripping that content off).

As much as Media Scrum likes to turn this blog into a bitchfest about the state of the industry, we all fucking love being journalists, and wouldn't swap it for any corporate gig in the world. We get to be endlessly creative every day, and occasionally meet some of our heroes. There are always going to be a need for editors and writers to create content to fill society's never-ending hunger for the latest news, and we feel privileged to feed that hunger.

And as much as we moan about the conditions, we're still here, and have no plans to abandon the profession for the dark side of PR and comms, and we can only hope that more young talent is found, cultivated and given the opportunity to join us.

As a profession, maybe we should try a bit harder to talk about these kinds of benefits, before we lose all the qualifications and skills we barely have now.

- Steve Lombard

118. Pivoting your videos right up your arse

It really wasn't surprising to recently hear Facebook admit that it had wildly inflated the reach of the video content posted to its site. This is a tech company that has sucked the revenue out of the news media business, without really giving anything back, and has refused to take any responsibility for its own practices and standards. Of course they were fucking lying about their videos too.

It also wasn't a surprise because video is something that has been forced on the readership of news websites without the demand to really drive it. There were enough dumbarse futurists predicting that everything could be video-based in a few years to convince media companies to go big on it, at a time when resources were already being tightly squeezed.

And it's a big gamble that hasn't paid off for many. All that optimism about a shiny, digital video future just hasn't been matched by reality. Journalists can do things with video they can't do in any other medium, but that doesn't mean everybody wants all video, all the time.
 
Sometimes you just want to skim-read a fucking article in less than a minute, rather than have somebody spoon-feed you the words for four minutes. Sometimes you get a bit sick of endlessly telling a news website to 'never auto-play', and the loudest noise in the whole wide world is video that suddenly starts auto-playing at full volume when you're trying to get some quiet time in a quiet bathroom, and there is somebody in the stall next to you.

Power-hungry videos can also eat up a user's data and power, and when they get stuck 38 seconds into a video, they lock up everything on a device and render the technological marvel that is a modern smartphone as useful as a turd in a hurricane.

And they just require more attention from the consumer for longer - while you can flick back and forth on a regular text article between your other daily business, you have to keep your eyeballs and ears focused on a video report, which is at odds with society's ever-decreasing attention span.

Despite these shortcomings, many print, radio and TV media companies have invested heavily in this promised audience, often at the expense of "old-fashioned" shit like regular reporting on dull-but-worthy subjects - stories that might not have a sexy video angle, but are a vital part of a decent news organisation.

Some newsrooms in the US have effectively fired their entire staff to pay for a new team with a video-first direction, and now that they aren't getting the hits they hoped for, they're firing those video teams as well, leaving nothing but scorched earth and the lingering stench of over-reach.

There is no denying that there are good things about the video revolution in online news - media stand-ups have far more punch when they are live-streamed, and there is a definite audience for strong video content.

It was also the only part of the whole online business that was actually making any proper money for years, because they could put ads in the front of them; and people just like a lot of their news with moving pictures - even though many media experts often like to point out how little they watch television news, the 6pm TV bulletins still get a massive audience that their print counterparts can only dream of.

But it also takes a lot of effort to put out videos that people will actually want to watch, and so many people have been turned off by half-arsed efforts, as stretched staff do the best they can with limited resources, with news and stories that might not merit such attention.

This is why the pivot to video strategy has been such a failure, and Facebook's admission that it was juicing its numbers is going to see a lot of media companies cut back on all that effort, and any that gambled big on a video audience are going to be in big trouble. This is already happening overseas, and New Zealand is far from immune.

Facebook's ubiquity in society means it will somehow get through this whole 'spouting bullshit about its video numbers' with a minimum of fuss, but as ever, the social media giant is leaving a cratered and battered news media behind it. Someone should do a video about it.

- Katherine Grant

117. We don't know how lucky we are

While Media Scrum likes to righteously moan about the way New Zealand journalists are treated by the industry, their employers and the general public in this country, we only have to look as some recent overseas examples to see that things could be so, so much worse.

Journalists are dedicated to exposing incompetence, corruption and injustice, and the worst that can usually happen to Kiwi journos because of that is they might get some mean glances from chief doddard Winston Peters. But in some other countries around the globe, doing that kind of thing is especially courageous, because there is a good chance it could lead to a sudden and violent death.

We're not talking about the tragedy of war correspondents, killed by an indiscriminate shell or a roadside bomb, we're talking about the systematic targeting and execution of journalists for doing their fucking job. The most recent case of such awfulness is in Turkey, where journalist Jamal Khashoggi walked into a Saudi embassy to sort out some routine paperwork, and was brutally and cowardly murdered. The details of his death that have already seeped out are truly horrific, and there is the awful feeling that it's far from over.

The death of Khashoggi is going to have some huge political ramifications, especially when the Kingdom is trying to paper over the mess with complete utter bullshit, and raises important questions about the ongoing safety of reporters out in the field.

Reporters, by nature, run toward the dangerous shit when it's all going down, and while that recklessness can produce some incredible journalism, none of it is as important as that reporter's own safety. And even a story that might just be a harmless yarn about some dude who has built a personal submarine can have horrific consequences (and they are consequences that do not in any way need to be dramatised, despite the recent announcement that the terrible death of Kim Wall is going to be made into a six-part TV series).

The world's hot spots are full of people risking their actual lives to get the story out, and often losing them, which is just terrible. And even more worrying is the blind hatred seen in some of the attacks on the general media, which can lead to things like the awful shooting at the Capital Gazette  newspaper in the US, where one fucking lunatic manged to murder a bunch of people who were just trying to do their jobs.

It swiftly got buried in a mound of other mass killings in the States and, as ever, nothing was fucking done about it – that's life in modern America, where the entire country is held ransom by gun culture, which is largely just a bunch of assholes with tiny penises who get off on big bangs. But you can bet every journalist took a moment to wonder about the security in their own office, and how easily some fuckhead with a shotgun could walk in and open fire.

There can be no doubt that the dumb shitbirds who threaten to bring a gun to a newsroom, and those few idiotic enough to carry out those threats, are emboldened by the talk about the mainstream media being the enemy, and trying to destroy your way of life, talk that goes all the way up to the buffoon-in-chief in the White House.

That kind of talk means the blood of the newsroom staff of the Capital Gazette is on the President's hands, just as the blood of Jamal Khashoggi is on the Saudi government's, and if we're very, very lucky, they might actually be accountable for this shit.

But it's genuinely terrifying to see the mob cheer on the US President when he talks about how cool it was that a reporter got body slammed by a politician, and when he says that killing a journalist is probably quite bad, but that we can't let that get in the way of selling billions of dollars in murder machines to foreign regimes.

New Zealand isn't immune to this kind of shit-talk - there are a lot of local journos who will forever maintain Michael Laws is a irredeemable pile of dogshit after he once blithely suggested that somebody should take a shotgun to the offices of the Herald on Sunday. Luckily we don't have that kind of gun fetish culture in this country (despite the National party's bizarre current efforts to create one), and the HOS newsroom was left unscathed. But there are a lot of dangerous morons out there, and no newsroom anywhere is totally safe, from the smallest community newspaper to the big TV studio.

Only tyrants and psychopaths think people should be assaulted and murdered for trying to expose the truth, because the truth always needs to be exposed. Journalists have enough shit to deal with, endless having to adjust to the shifting media landscape and keep their fuckin' jobs. They don't need to worry about being physically attacked as well.

- Ron Troupe

Another break for pizza

It's been a busy fucking week, and none of the Media Scrum crew have had time to have a proper moan about things, so we're just going to go eat some pizza instead. Some of the pizza will have the finest gourmet toppings, and some of it will have pilchards and pineapple and spaghetti and whatever the hell we feel like putting on it. It's all pizza. It's all good.

Before we get stuck into that, we would just like to take a brief moment to congratulate all the New Zealand journalists who did a fucking stellar job dealing with the National Party leak stuff yesterday, which was an extraordinary event to cover, especially when Jami-Lee Ross undercut the whole thing with a string of strong tweets just minutes before Simon Bridges stepped up to the podium.

It all happened so fast, and was so well covered by all the big newsrooms. It was a fascinating and entertaining thing to watch unfold - when Ross straight up accused his boss of illegal activity, journos had to quickly make sure that Bridges got a decent right of reply at his immediate stand-up before they could republish the tweeted claims. This kind of journalistic ethics (and legal arse-covering) unfolding in real-time was brilliant to see. 

This story ain't over yet, and we can't wait to see where it goes next. We've got the pizza ready.

***

Added after today's events: Holy shit, you guys. Sometimes, this is the best work in the world. 

116. Who are Media Scrum?

Last week, Media Scrum received a direct message from a dear reader who we will call Trevor, because the name he sent it in under was the dopiest fucking pseudonym, and he's better off as a Trevor.

Trevor told us he had read several of our entries on the blog, and had come to the conclusion that we were a bunch of pinko commie scum, whose obvious left-wing bias showed how fucked the whole fake news media was, and that we don't know what the hell we're talking about and don't know anything about how the news business actually work.

Fuck off, Trev. You're only half right.

He's right about the socialist leanings, because we are vaguely communist scum, and most of the people working on the newsroom floor are too. It's not just a matter of personal ideology, it's a matter of empathy.

The key idea behind left-wing politics is that you should give a shit about your fellow human beings, and their well-being, and what happens to them, even if it's nothing to do with you personally, and that's a philosophy that you also have to follow as a reporter. The moment a reporter can't empathise with the subject and people they're covering, is the moment they become useless as a journalist, unable to ever offer anything but the most superficial of takes.

These socialist tendencies don't infect our professional lives as much as many civilians think it might do, because we're goddamn professionals, and we'll happily expose corruption and incompetence on all sides of the political spectrum. The higher up the editorial ladder you go, the more it starts to skew right, and there are Trump supporters in NZ's newsrooms, (although they usually drink alone). But in general there is more sympathy for the poor and downtrodden in this country's newsrooms than there is for maintaining the status quo of the most powerful people in society.

The simple fact is, if you do something cunt-ish, like call an 87-year-old woman a meth crook because she got caught up in that awful meth-testing scam that happened under your watch, and you adopt it as party ideology because your polling indicates your cunt-ish supporters like jerking off over tough-on-crime fantasies, don't be surprised when people call you a bunch of cunts about it. That's not media bias, that's just not being a cunt.

So we take that pinko label and fucking own it, but we do take issue with Trev's other contention, that we don't know what we're talking about, because we're fairly sure we know a shit-sight more than our mate Trevor.

Between the four of us, we are two journos who are in their second decade in the industry, one who has just started in the business, and one who is somewhere in between. There are four decades of knowledge between us, and while that only equals, say, one Rod Pascoe, it's still some significant time spent in a lot of different newsrooms.

We're all from a print background and between us we have worked at all the big newspapers, and nearly every decent regional newspaper from the Northern Advocate to the Southland Times, and have spent time in both the big TV newsrooms (although some of those experiences were a few years ago). Radio is a bit of a blind spot among us, to be honest, but we've pretty much seen it all in the past few years.

You might not agree with us - shit, we barely all agree on everything as it is, up to and including the use of the c-word earlier in this post, (and this entire post in fact, which one of us thought was way too self-reflective). But we speak from a position of experience and barely restrained outrage at what is happening to our industry.

We are still cowards, hiding behind anonymous pseudonyms from Superman comics, but that's because we like our jobs and want to keep them. Sometimes we need to slag off our own organisations, and we can't do that if the bosses and all you fuckers are watching everything we do.

Other than that, we're committed to total honesty here at Media Scrum. There is so much bullshit out there, and while we're probably responsible for our fair share of it, we're also getting a sick thrill from telling it like it is. That's what gets us through the day, and gets us through this profession.

Thanks for the feedback, Trevor. Duly noted.

- Katherine, Margaret and Steve

115. Three years in a leaky political boat

A large part of surviving in politics is about always having somebody to blame. If you fuck up, the only way you might survive is if you have somebody to take the fall for you.

So it's no wonder that politicians hate leakers, because the anonymity of the action means they have no target. Even if the information was still going to come out anyway, and it's all just a matter of inconvenient timing, political leaders love to launch inquiries that attempt to root out any traitorous insiders.

Both the Labour and National parties are on a rat hunt right now. Last week, the PM took time off from showing the world how a working mum does it to launch an investigation into how details of the confrontation that brought Meka Whaitiri down got out, while National leader Simon Bridges is still fuming about the slightly early release of his travel expenses.

It's all a sideshow, because these inquires never, ever actually find the culprit, (if they're lucky, they might come up with some suspects, but never any proof). But they do deflect the glare away from the substance of the leak. In the initial phase of the shitshow stirred up by a big leak, it doesn't matter who did it, only what the new information reveals. Everything else is posturing.

Down the line, when things have died down and everybody has examined the issues uncovered, the leaking can lead to big questions of political loyalty and party stability. But if somebody thinks it's worth leaking, usually at the risk of their own political career, finding out who it is should not be the greatest priority.

After all, moaning about it can make a situation so much worse, which Mr Bridges learned when the National Party started shaking itself to bits over his travel details. His choice of travel might not have been the greatest look, but he managed to make the stench of disloyalty smell even more pungent.

In the end, all they can really do is make snide remarks about the media itself, about how it is a moral failing to release information without going through the proper channels, which is the last refuge of people in power who find themselves in the spotlight.

***

It should be noted that this kind of discontent with the news media doing what it does isn't confined to politicians, because the country's tertiary institutions have been making a complete PR hash of things themselves in the past week.

This was less to do with somebody leaking some report or document, and more with people going to the media with something a university would have preferred to keep quiet. Fuelled by some fine work at the country's student newspapers - which shows how vital they still are in the digital age - both Otago and Victoria Universities have been struggling to contain some troubling stories.

Victoria already feels like everybody is out to get it after the weird debacle of its name change, and the vice-chancellor lashed out at RNZ last week when the public broadcaster told the story of a student who was evicted from her accommodation the day after she tried to commit suicide.

Instead of just dealing with the issue, Vic Uni went after the semantics. In an extraordinary statement from the university, which also saw it moan that RNZ 'only gave them a few hours' to reply, it spent most of its time criticising the use of the word 'evict' in headlines and intros.

It was plainly obvious that was just the uni trying to cover its legal butt, and leaning heavily on the idea that 'eviction' was a strict legal definition, but Dani the student definitely felt like she'd been evicted, and it was her story the journos were trying to tell, not the brave tertiary institution's noble fight to make sure its legal ass was watertight.

Besides, RNZ is an equal-opportunities organisation, especially when it comes to pissing off the comms departments at the country's biggest tertiary institutions – Otago University also blasted the public broadcaster after the comms team sent the wrong draft email out when it was dealing with the fallout from the proctor's fundamentally illegal confiscation of bongs from student flats, and put out a press release designed to shame the press about it, even though the final email wasn't that much fucking different.

Getting these types of accusations are nothing new for journos. It's like picking up he phone to get blasted with a legal threat from Ian Wishart, or having Winston Peters openly sneer at you in public, it's just part of the life, and a good sign you're doing a good job.

You must be doing something right.

- Margaret Tempest/ Steve Lombard

114. How to be a professional

If you thought all journos acted like the reporters depicted in TV shows like Sharp Objects, you would wonder how they would have the time to get anything done, when they're constantly wrestling with professional dilemmas. They just so busy, sleeping with every source, or drinking themselves into oblivion every night, or contaminating legal cases with naive blundering, or blowing deadlines, or handing in awful, awful copy that wouldn't get past the first sub.

This kind of depiction pisses a lot of news media people off, especially female reporters and presenters who already have genuine concerns about having to deal with fucking idiots trying to slut-shame them. But they're still there – every reporter in every movie has to be a callous arsehole who just wants the story, or is just irredeemably damaged in some way.

There are people in the news industry who do behave unprofessionally and somehow get away with it – and somehow often rise to the top of the managerial pile - but most people who constantly sleep with sources, or blow through deadlines in a drunken haze, don't tend to last very long in a business where your reputation is everything.

Fortunately, being a professional is very easy for the vast majority of reporters, especially in this country, because it's not hard to do the right thing. Reporters might meet people on the job and get closer with them, but don't fall into bed with every goddamn person they meet, and most keep any hidden addictions well out of the newsroom.

There are still professional dilemmas that news reporters, editors and producers face every single day: questions of ethics and balance that must be confronted, and truths that must be exposed, no matter what the cost.

But really, the hardest time to be a professional journalist is when you meet somebody you really admire, and have to stop yourself from gushing all over them.

One of the great unexpected thrills of a job in the news media is that you often get to meet your personal heroes. Journalists always gravitate towards the things they truly give a shit about, and you might suddenly find yourself talking to a politician or actor or musician or writer who has created work that has profoundly moved you, and then have to talk to them as a pro. That's harder than it looks, but that's the job.

And sometimes it can be incredibly difficult to stop yourself from asking from an autograph or even – sadly – a selfie. Sometimes the PR people make it clear that that's not on, which is fine, but sometimes you have to give it a go, even then. Because you know you will just never forgive yourself if you don't let them know how much of a hero they are. After you've asked all the proper questions, of course.

(It should be noted that younger journos – including one member of the Media Scrum crew – have far less of a problem of getting the phone out for a quick shot. Culture and society changes, and it's a journalist's job to change with it.)

It can also go the other way, and you have to stay professional when you have to work with somebody you personally loathe.

Another Media Scrummer had this experience recently, when she was introduced to a leading radio personality during her day job, and hate to bite back the urge to tell him he was an odious influence on the national discourse, cheapening the overall debate with his mind-numbingly tedious perspective, which always hits out at the poor and oppressed in favour of the status quo, and he'll be forgotten 10 seconds after he signs off for the last time.

Instead she just said 'Nice to meet you, Mr Hosking,' and got on with the job. She assures you all that while this might be the coward's approach, it was also the polite and professional way of going about things.

Those kind of dilemmas are far, far more common than the type seen on Sharp Objects. They don't make great television, but they're still a daily hill to climb.

- Steve Lombard

113. This cartooning is serious business

Working for a big newspaper certainly has its benefits – you get to work on the very biggest stories and are part of a team big enough to set the news agenda for the entire country. But it also means your reporting can be forever tainted by the other things that go out under the same masthead as you. It means all the good journalism at the NZ Herald is infected by the rancid reckons of the Newstalk ZB radio jocks when they share the same homepage, and it means reporters out in the field for the ODT have to justify some dumbarse cartoons drawn by somebody they may never have met.

The editorial cartoon has a long history of walking the line between provocation and unacceptable offensiveness, and often falls right over the edge. It happened twice on the same bloody day last week, when an Australian newspaper and the Otago Daily Times both published cartoons that were downright racist.

The Australian situation was by far the worst example, with the Herald Sun doubling down on its stupidity and bleating that its depiction of tennis star Serena William's on-court meltdown was not anything special, because they exaggerated the features of everybody, apparently trying to prove this odious point by reprinting the offensive cartoon alongside other caricatures.

Their argument that the cartoon was fine if you ignored all the sociological and historical context behind that kind of depiction was downright fucking bizarre, because the whole fucking point of editorial cartoons is that they acknowledge the sociological and historical perspectives of any subject they tackle. And anybody who defends that depiction needs to open a fucking history book to see how people of African descent have been portrayed and treated in the past, and how the Herald Sun's cartoon comes after centuries of disgusting propaganda.

Meanwhile, not to be outdone on stupidity, the Otago Daily Times published a cartoon that implied that learning te reo Māori would make kids dumber.

Leaving aside the fact that numerous studies show that learning any language makes you smarter rather than stupider, it was blatant dog-whistling during te reo week, and reeked of a fear that white people might be forced to learn something they don't want to learn. It didn't make any grand point, or continue the debate, it just threw some more unwanted dumb into the mix.

Individual cartoonists go over the line, and may not have the proper perspective. Most get it right, and realise that punching down just makes you look like a fucking jerk, not a truth-teller. There are many good artists out there who figured this out long ago, such as the NZ Herald's Rod Emmerson (who also happens to be one of the very best caricaturists in the entire global industry) but even the best sometimes step right over the racism line, even without realising it.

(Although it was pretty disappointing to see Emmerson on the TV news blaming the Twitter mob for all the fuss over the Herald Sun, as if you need to be a regular tweeter to recognise racism when you see it.)

But the most disappointing thing about these stupid cartoons isn't just that these artists had a brain fart (and some of them have a lot), it's that these cartoons then go through multiple editorial eyes before getting on the page, and they all thought this was fine. Even though you can bet there are many, many people in the newsrooms who thought those cartoons were just as bone-stupid as everybody else did, the ones who had the power to send the dumbarse idea for a cartoon back to the artist all thought it was acceptable.

Cartoons should be provocative, and can be used to expose abuses of power, incompetence and sheer evil. Artists like the legendary David Low took principled stands that history has rewarded. But the type of cartoons seen last week will go down on the wrong side of history and more people in the newsroom need to be aware of this, not just the reporters who are surprised to see their stories alongside it.

- Ron Troupe

112. Even more journos who get the job done

As tough as the news industry gets - and sometimes it gets damn tough - there are still a hell of a lot of great journalists doing the hard yards every day in the local media scene. A lot of them don't get the credit they always deserve, and Media Scrum is delighted to highlight some of them every now and again.

Here are six more of the best...

***

Rhonwyn Newson
Former Rodney Times editor
Regional and suburban newspapers never get the respect they deserve, even when they're helping to prop up nationwide media outlets. After a stint as a NZ Herald home page editor just before it all turned to crap, Newson and her excellent, tiny team at the Rodney Times broke a huge amount of good local stories that have been picked up and led the whole Stuff site. There are still some brilliant journos doing fantastic work in these tiny offices, and the Rodney area has been well served in this regard. Her replacement - Newson is now the new online features editor at Newshub - has a high standard to live up to.

Eloise Gibson
Newsroom reporter
Sometimes it's awkward for everybody, but nobody should be afraid of going after sacred cows. Gibson's spotlight on Ray Avery for the Newsroom site has been a brilliant example of this. Sir Ray has certainly done his fair share of good deeds, but that doesn't make anyone immune from close examination when there are serious questions to be asked. His attempt to silence Gibson using the Harmful Digital Comms Act should be dismissed for the harmful bullshit it is, and won't silence the reporter. She isn't finished with this story by a long way - there are a lot more slightly unpleasant questions that have to be asked, and a journo who isn't afraid to ask them.

Kimberlee Downs
1News' voice in Australia
Working as an overseas correspondent for a TV network is a sweet gig, but it is also a buttload of hard work, because you have to cover everything in a giant country. TVNZ's Downes is covering all of Australia, dealing with politics and disasters and crime and scandal and everything else under the hot Aussie sun. But Downes goes above and beyond all that with some terrific sports reporting, and looks just as comfortable talking about the footy as she does talking about the new PM - a vitally important role in that sports-fanatical country across the Tasman.

Bridget Burke
Checkpoint's secret weapon
RNZ's Checkpoint programme is going through some massive changes soon, with John Campbell packing up his shit this week and heading down the road to TVNZ, while head producer Pip Keane is heading up the executive ladder. But the show must go on, and they're still in good hands as long as Burke is manning a producing desk for the essential drive-time programme. Ask anyone in the RNZ office who have seen her in action: the former stuntwoman is absolutely the best in the business at getting the essential interview for JC to get his teeth into. She gets people like Matt Lauer when all anybody was talking about was access through his Hunter Valley property, and never relies on the same old rent-a-quote faces. CP will be a very different show with Lisa Owen in charge, but with Burke in the engine room, quality will remain high.

Alex Braae
Spinoff news curator
There is so much shit going on in the world, it's hard to keep track of all the news. And when homepage editors at the big news sites are forced to highlight blatant clickbait at the expense of worthy work, some actual decent curating is so important, and so helpful. Braae's putting together of The Bulletin email for The Spinoff is the best news curation in the country, with a strong mix of the worthy and interesting, and highlighting some incredibly important issues that have already been pushed down the page of other sites for fatuous celebrity bollocks. Braae makes it look easy, but it's a real skill pulling this kind of thing together. If it was that easy, everybody would be doing it.

The Stuff Circuit team
The whole bloody lot of them
It's impossible to pick any one member of the Stuff Circuit crew to highlight, because investigative journalism is a huge team effort, and this particular team are all knocking it out of the park, in both reporting and presentation. They're producing so much great material in all sorts of formats, and are clearly the best investigation team in the country, presenting stories that are so much more than the true crime exposes that everybody else is doing.They're definitely leading the way, and we should all be happy to follow.

- Katherine Grant / Margaret Tempest / Steve Lombard

111. News in briefs

There is so much happening every week in the news media industry - even in the tiny cesspool of the New Zealand scene - that we just don't have time to stop and really consider all these changes and developments, and to properly discuss the full ramifications of the changes in the way we produce and consume our news.

Some weeks there is just so much shit going on, all we can do is pause for a brief moment, and maybe point and laugh for a little bit, before moving the fuck on.

This has been one of those weeks.

***

This is not business as usual

While Media Scrum has gone on record with that claim that staff churn in the big newsrooms is just part of the game and and no big deal, sometimes the quality of a newsroom can be deeply affected by the loss of key reporters and editors, and that's exactly what's happening to the NBR at the moment.

It was bad enough that the business publisher lost tech writer Chris Keall – who had been entrenched there for years – to the NZ Herald, but when NZME doubled down and poached news editor Duncan Bridgeman as well, that's not good news for anybody at NBR Towers.

There are still some fine reporters left at NBR, but Bridgeman – another Media Scrum fave – has been keeping that whole thing ticking over for years now. The two journos also have an extraordinary amount of experience covering business and tech stories, with an insane amount of great contacts and sources that will be a huge hit for the overall quality of the NBR's website and newspaper.

Their reasons for moving on are their own. Maybe they just got a bit concerned by the way publisher Todd Scott is trying to burn the whole world down on Twitter, or maybe the Herald just offered up enough cash, but it doesn't really matter. It will be fascinating to see how NBR gets along without them, but it could be catastrophic if it can't.

***

It's not a game of two halves

But the NZ Herald has a finite budget, and a few high-profile poachings have to be balanced out somewhere, and it's probably no coincidence that not long after the hirings from the NBR were announced, the Herald revealed it was cutting its sports team by a quarter.

Sports reporters have been in the gun lately, with Stuff also gutting its regional sports coverage, and its truly unfortunate that it's coming at a time when there are actually a lot of important stories coming out of the sports world - not just results, but big questions over the huge businesses behind the on-field action, and the vital exposure of all the corruption, graft and incompetence that always comes with it.

But while there are still some great reporters looking at these issues, they're being squeezed out by dull banter and boorish analysis of the stuff that gets the clicks – which means just the big sports, with the smallest token efforts made to talk about the other sports that hundreds of thousands of people in this country give a damn about.

And even the big sports will have fuck-all coverage at a level people can actually engage with. The All Blacks are always going to get loads of attention, but it's not like the good people of Timaru have stopped giving a shit about their South Canterbury rugby team, even if the local paper isn't going to all the games anymore.

There are good things happening in sports journalism – the media's sudden determination to cover the Black Ferns without patronsing the shit out of them is undoubtedly a positive move – but if the big boys are going to go home with their ball, somebody might need to make their own game.

***

There is no exclusive

So last week one of the big news media organisations breaks a story about a dodgy political text, without ever actually seeing that text, and it sets that day's news agenda, with everybody following it up, and then the political editor at a rival organisation reveals they got sent the text ages ago, but did nothing public with it because there were mental health concerns and they were just appalled and disgusted that this was out in the open now, but they got their own back with an exclusive story about the inquiry into the whole thing being called off, which was an exclusive for literally less than three minutes before everybody else got the same news, and we all end the day on the same page.

Oh, and it turns out that one of the media organisations that ripped off the original story was allowed to do so, because it had a content sharing agreement, so that was fine, but what wasn't fine was that they had kept the EXCLUSIVE in their headline, so it looked like they had broken the whole story, and it stayed like that for more than an hour before they quietly removed it.

Sometimes we can't believe this shit is free.

- Margaret Tempest / Steve Lombard

110. Greg

Greg Boyed's death has left a hole in the world that can not be easily filled. The TVNZ broadcaster was a rock-solid professional, a genuinely fun person to work with and an exceptionally enthusiastic musician. There were have been many tributes to the man from colleagues and politicians that speak to this truth, (even if some of them were from people who actively screwed him over).

It's an awful reminder that there is a person beneath the make-up, reading you the TV news every day. No matter how much they keep it smooth on camera, they have the same fears and worries as anybody else. Their feelings are buried for the neutral tones of a broadcast, but they're still there, and sometimes they get too much.

Many newsrooms across the country have people who worked with Greg during his long media career, and were left genuinely shocked and saddened by the news. Especially at TVNZ's mothership headquarters in Auckland, where that sad day's presenters did an incredible job talking about their workmate's passing. God knows how they kept it all together, but Greg surely would have been proud.

109. Sunday morning coming down

The news can be hugely inconvenient sometimes, and doesn't just stop when the working week is done. There are still radio bulletins every hour, and television broadcasts every day, and websites all the damn time, and they all need to be filled with the latest news and events.

Journalists are used to working weird hours for significant portions of their career - the inability to get steady hours that offer someone an actual social life is still one of the major reasons people fall out of the industry altogether - and a lot of them are working in the stuffy newsroom and out in the freezing field every weekend, when everybody else gets to take a break.

To be fair, newsrooms run on a skeleton staff most weekends, and there are still plenty of opportunities to spend time with loved friends and family. There is just the bare minimum of bodies to keep things ticking along.

Most big newsrooms will also stockpile stories that can hold for the weekend, if they have something decent that didn't need to run straight away. (Light-hearted news stories are even more essential than ever, because most of the spot news over a weekend will be about death and despair on our roads, in our rivers, and down our farms.)

Those who are on the roster for the weekend shift will still be busy as hell, because there is absolutely nobody else to pick up the slack. This kind of weekend work does suit some people, who enjoy the relatively quiet and the weird autonomy they have when all the managers are away. And if something truly huge comes along, everyone important will throw everything aside to get into the office and help out, friends and families be damned.

This does happen fairly regularly, but for the most part, weekends are the dullest and driest of shifts, which is why online editors love weekends when the All Blacks are playing, because that gives them something to lead the website with, when everything else is held for the more lucrative weekday shows or Sunday papers.
 
And it's not just the big boys in black, sports news in general gets more of a run, because there is nothing else. Why not give some time to the Warriors, or the Black Sticks or any other sporting team, there isn't much else going on.

In fact, it is one of the great mysteries as to why more PR merchants don't take advantage of this fact - newsrooms are swamped with press releases and media opportunities all through the week, but a decent piece of news can get buried in that Monday to Friday pile.

On the weekend, something with a bit of meat to it stands a much better chance of being picked up, even with the skeleton staff factor, and even though the mass audiences are always smaller on the weekend, there is still an audience. And because all the journos are looking at what their rivals are doing, if it gets picked up by one news outlet, that vastly increases the chances of it getting picked up somewhere else.

Q+A - one of TVNZ's most high-profile current affairs shows - recently moved to a prime time-ish spot later on a Sunday evening, and while that's a good slot to get a larger audience, it's also weirdly reduced the show's influence on the greater media circle, because of the weekend factor.

Make no mistake, this is a great move for the show, and its producers and presenters, giving them more exposure, away from the graveyard area of Sunday morning. Despite some occasional bright spots from the likes of the 20/20 team, there has been a dearth of intelligent current affairs in the evening, and there is some room for some good solid analysis and debate in between all the murder mysteries and reality shows.

But Q+A has also broken some notable political stories in the past couple of weeks that took several days before everybody else noticed. There might be more people watching at that hour, but their stories are less likely to get picked up by the greater media scene.

When it was on in Sunday morning, editors and producers desperate to fill space would find a golden quote or two in Q+A's interviews and stories, and it would get picked up by all sorts of outlets, with all the proper attribution to the source. Nobody really liked to make too big a deal about it, because it is a rival's work, but it helped fill a gap.

But with Q+A now wrapping up reasonably late on a Sunday night, there just isn't any need to pick up the rival's lead and run with it. The digital or broadcast or print teams will be focused on having something juicy of their own for the crucial Monday morning shift, and unlikely to have the time or manpower to follow up Jessica Mutch's latest interview with the Housing Minister.

Getting a decent exclusive is always fun, but this isn't just a case of media outlets ripping each other off, it's a case of TVNZ giving up a tiny part of its ambitions to set the national news agenda. By the time the end credits roll, the online and broadcast audiences are evaporating. The weekend is over. What's next?

 - Katherine Grant

108. How journalists can learn to stop worrying and love Twitter

It might talk a loud game, but Twitter is still a fairly niche medium - the web traffic that comes from a retweet is usually nothing compared to a Facebook post, and all the cool kids have long moved on to Instagram and beyond. But it's one of the loudest, because there is so much shouting going on.

And a lot of that shouting is helping to create a cesspool of bad thought on the website. Unless your feed is heavily curated, it will soon be full of all the worst ideas mankind has to offer. No wonder racists like it so fucking much.

But it can also be an invaluable source of information. When breaking news happens, it can be incredibly useful - any journo who needs to keep on top of the breaking stuff can find out what's going on, just minutes after it has happened, almost anywhere in the world

It's all about getting the right story from the people on the scene, and it's also used by emergency services to release the very latest information - overworked comms staff often direct inquiring journos to an official feed, telling them that's the first place any new developments will be revealed.

There are some large downsides to all this. For starters, any information from Twitter - even if it does come from a fairly official account - must still always be taken with a huge amount of salt. More than one news editor has been fooled by a photo that is too good to be true, like a shark in a shopping mall, and volcanic and earthquake damage can turn out to be from years ago.

Twitter also becomes almost totally useless when a truly huge world event happens, because the entire medium gets swamped with useless hot takes and snarky comments, and it can take forever to dig through it for the gold. And when things have moved on a little, Twitter's penchant towards throwing up things that happened eight or 20 hours ago means something can look like a new development, when it is actually well out of date.

But even if they have to be incredibly careful, journos can also get a lot out of this weird medium of communication. There is the obvious self-promotional element, where reporters can highlight things they have worked on, get instant feedback and get follow-ups from it all. (They can also be subjected to a shitshow of bullshit from the general public, particularly if it's a female reporter, who take way more shit from social media than their male counterparts, and the block function suddenly becomes your best friend.)

It can also be used to get things through, especially to online editors. Reporters at the scene are expected to do all sorts of stuff, including video and photos but now, they don't have to fuck about with FTP transfers or anything like that, they can just throw it up on their twitter feed, which will be followed back in the office.

Reporters still have to be careful what they put up on their feed, and even with all the 'tweets represent a personal view' disclaimers, one ill-thought out statement can literally end your whole fucking career.

The main purpose of Twitter appears to be giving millions the ability to say ‘I told you so’ in the most irritating way possible, and you've got to keep an eye out for the fucking fascists, but the platform can still be used to great advantage. At least until everybody moves onto the next thing.

- Ron Troupe

107. Hate speech isn't the same as free speech

Journalists often don't get a lot of choice about the stories they cover and the people they interview. They get the directive from their boss or their boss' boss, and they do what they're bloody well told, because that's how the whole chain of command thing works. They do the fucking story and try to do the best job they can, even if they hate what they're doing.

So you can bet there were plenty involved in the production of news stories about noted fuckheads Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux in this past week who wished they didn't give them such a prominent platform. It still happened.

Despite spirited defences from excellent journalists like Miriama Kamo and Patrick Gower, these racist arseholes didn't have anything interesting to say, and were just not worth talking to. That's what they want, and nobody is under any obligation to provide it to them.

It was worth covering their visit to Aotearoa and the hilariously futile attempts to get a fuckin' hall to speak in, especially after they'd happily spouted deplorable nonsense in a similar event across the Tasman. The protests and venue shutdowns and fall-out were all informative and fascinating, and if there is one thing you can take from the whole mess, is that this country dealt with the situation reasonably well.

But even as they and their fascist ideals were heartily rejected by greater society, the dopey pair still got some air time on the country's biggest news bulletins, and still got to play the victim. They still got to bring up their usual bullshit talking points in 20-minute profiles, smugly throwing out arguments that had been thoroughly dismissed hundreds of fucking years ago.

But these motherfuckers are just so dumb. They're the type of person who pretends to be a hot fan and comments on their own videos, but forgets to change the fucking username. They're so fucking dumb they squirm out of the woodwork with ideas that are abhorrent to the vast majority of society and are actually shocked when they have to face some gosh-darned consequences for their actions.

They're so fucking dumb, they don't realise that history is going to look back on them as intellectually-stunted aberrations in the story of human development, blaming all their woes on other people because they don't have the guts or smarts to look in a goddamn mirror.

They just don't have anything worthwhile to say, and don't deserve the attention, even if you're obviously criticising their beliefs and everything they stand for. They are spouting hate speech by any objective measure, they shouldn't get any exposure.

A group of Free Speech arseholes - who were weirdly silent on issues like Odd Future coming into NZ, or Tiki Taane getting arrested for singing Fuck The Police at his own gig - have taken offence at the idea that white people aren't getting much of a say in modern society and attracted the usual batch of scarecrows to speak up. You've almost got to admire their gall, using one of liberal ideology's own great sacred cows against them, and claiming their rights to express themselves were being shut down, but they really weren't helping.

Because nobody is shutting these arseholes up, they have still have their own social media outlets to hook an audience of idiots on their philosophical snake oil. Everyone knows who they are, and the dickheads who think they have some kind of insane point on multiculturalism and the treatment of indigenous populations are not being blocked from those moronic views.

In this case, because everything is fucked now, it was capitalism that came to the rescue. No venue could host these dickheads without taking a significant financial hit, with an astronomical loss of goodwill from a free-spending youth demographic, and that was just bad business. It's always funny as hell to see hardcore capitalists realise the free market doesn't always do what they want, and it's also heartening to see people stand up for their beliefs, even if its something as obvious as 'racist shitheads can get fucked'.

It does matter how much media exposure is given to these objectively toxic and dumbarse ideas, and it is arguable that there was far too much. Half the Media Scrum team thought we shouldn't do anything at all about this duo here, just because we're sick of the arguments (and once again for the record, according to our learned opinion, there isn't even any argument because this is 100% hate speech, and will be treated as such).

But the other half were more passionate about laying into these shitbirds one more time, before they fuck off out of our collective consciousness for good, so here we are. Let's just hope we're all done now.

Fuck those fools. Let's move onto the next item.

- Margaret Tempest

106: Goodbye Fairfax, but what's in a name anyway?

The Fairfax name is soon to disappear from the Australasian media scene forever, but there are more important things than a name.

After decades of media dominance on both side of the Tasman, the Australian arm of Fairfax is about to be absorbed by the mighty Nine Network, and it's already been made quite clear that the Fairfax title will be replaced by the bigger media group.

Fairfax has, of course, already been renamed in NZ, with the group taking on the Stuff moniker that has been so successful for its website for 20-odd years now. So when Nine gobbles it up, that's it, it's gone for good.

There have been a number of comment and analysis pieces that have greeted this news with sadness and made a great deal over the Fairfax name will go, and that it symbolises the end of an era in journalism.

It's certainly some sort of era-defining moment, and it will be morbidly fascinating to see how the mega-media company functions over the next few years. But one thing you can count on is that the people on the newsroom floor had more things to worry about than the sign outside the building and all that symbolism it represents, not when they've got kids to feed and rent to pay, and they don't know if they'll have jobs in this new world order.

There will be an inevitable gutting of resources and mass layoffs, leading to vastly more mediocre journalism being produced in bulk, and compared to that, who gives a shit about the name?

Media companies are constantly changing names, especially when a new bunch of executives comes in, and tries to leave some sort of mark with a hugely expensive rebranding exercise. These names are almost always met with a resigned shrug by reporters, editors and producers - they've got plenty of other things to worry about.

We've seen this happen several times in New Zealand here in recent years, and it's usually pretty painless. The worst thing about NZME's birth from the ashes of APN was the executive branch's insistence that pedantic grammar hounds in their newsrooms had to put the full stop on the end of the acronym; while Newshub just sounded bloody weird when TV3's journos had to first spit it out at the end of their reports, but you now see reporters and presenters referring to The 'Shub with some affection.

And nobody really cared when Fairfax became Stuff over here - a dorky and awkward name for a website has become utterly synonymous with the news in this dorky and awkward country, and now the whole company here is lumbered with it.

But so what? It's the work that matters, and the people who do that work in these companies. The biggest worry about the Nine/Fairfax merger is the way the big boys in the Australian boardroom are so mindlessly dismissive of their NZ operations, putting the livelihoods of dozens and dozens of top-class journos over here at risk, (and giving NBR publisher Todd Scott some lunatic ideas for a takeover of the country's biggest publisher, which the Media Scrum team are just going to try and politely ignore and shuffle away from).

Once upon a time, when journos could be guaranteed a job for life with the same company, they might have put some faith in that company's name, but after decades of being treated by shit by the powers that be, journos don't give a damn. It's no use putting your loyalty behind a name that gives none back.

Fairfax is just a name, and it's now officially a name from the past. After all, nobody cares about the actual Fairfax family anymore, not after they gradually pissed away their vast media legacy.

Journalists are the kind of wankers who quote lines from The Crucible in real life, and while nobody is denying that John Proctor's fervent belief that he should be left with his name (because that's all he has!) is a good and just one, because sometimes all you've got is your name. But Fairfax will leave dozens of newsrooms and hundreds of talented journalists behind when it fades away, and they should be the focus for the future.

- Ron Troupe