97. Nobody home

Many of the complaints about the modern news media - from small typos to huge fuck-ups - can be traced back to one simple fact: most newsrooms just don't have the staff they need.

There aren't as many journalists as most people think on the newsdesk, especially outside the usual weekday hours. Newsrooms across the country are chronically understaffed, and there are fewer people working behind the headlines than there really should be.

There might be one online editor at a time running an entire national news website over the weekend, while there are television bulletins that have a dedicated staff of two - presenter and producer. Major newspapers might have just a few reporters to cover the whole city, and forget about finding anybody when things break overnight.

This has been happening for some time, with almost every media company facing an ongoing decimation of its workforce for the past 20 years. Arseholes who moan about the lack of proofreaders on news stories really need to catch up with the programme, because the subs and general editors who catch mistakes before they go to print, air or online were the first out the door, a long time ago.

The problem is, those arseholes are still right, because a lack of people power inevitably leads to a shabbier product - nobody to catch that misspelled word, nobody to make that crucial fact check, nobody to do the ground work needed to get a story in the first place.

The lack of staff doesn't just have an impact on the quality of the product, it also affects the poor bastards who haven't bailed on the industry already. It means rosters are stretched so thin that reporters often accrue huge amounts of holidays, because they just don't have the time to take a break, leading to more stress and discontentment (an issue not helped by the fact that journalism is a 24/7 job, so reporters are also racking up a large amount of stat days in lieu after working on holidays).

And it means everyone has to do everything. A reporter has to have all sorts of skills. It's not enough to just have shorthand anymore, a reporter also need to know how to edit a video package, or do a live cross, or do web copy, or dozens of other small tasks that used to belong to specialists, and are now dumped on the people who remain.

No wonder there is so much burn-out in this industry, especially when the most pressure is put on journos who are just starting out in the business, and dive out again because they can't handle that crush

The other major issue with the nearly-empty newsrooms is that there is no more fat to cut. The decades of cutbacks means the media companies are at a point where there is nobody else to get rid of, because there will literally be nobody left to produce the work.

Everyone is needed now. There are no freeloaders, nobody is just cruising through the job. Everybody is working their fucking arses off and will be severely missed if there are any more redundancies.

It's come to the point where if anybody is going to be cut, there won't be any product at all, and if you're not producing anything, you're out of business.

That's what we're facing now, and it's causing real dread in this industry that we've reached this point. When there are no more staff to cut, there is only one thing left, and that's outright closure.

Look at Stuff's recent moves to shut down several of its community titles. They had to, because they couldn't cut them back any further. There were only seven poor souls working their butts off on those publications, and they're couldn't make any of them redundant because there would be nobody to do the work, so the work will not be done anymore.

There are fewer and fewer journalists left manning the phones, and nobody wins when there aren't enough people to go around. The industry suffers, the product suffers and the consumers suffer. It's not just the poor journo, trying to hang on while they can.

- Margaret Tempest

96. There's a time and a place for hopeless optimism, but launching a paywall isn't one of them

Both of New Zealand's two biggest news websites have been openly eyeing up the opportunity to charge for their online content. With declining revenues in almost every other part of the news media, a paywall can look extraordinarily attractive, and both Stuff and the NZ Herald have made no secret of this fact.

The Herald made a weak effort to gather revenue this way when it tried to charge for its columnists a decade or so ago - and quickly discovered nobody really gave a shit about anybody's opinion that much. Since then, neither of the big boys have made any concrete moves towards properly implementing any kind of real paywall.

There has still been a lot going on behind the scenes, and Stuff and the Herald have both done a tremendous amount of work getting a paywall system set up, so it's ready to go as soon as the corporate winds change. They've actually both come pretty close to pulling the trigger on it - the Herald in particular came really, really close a couple of years ago, before the corporate masters decided they needed to be the #1 one site, and went actively hunting for clicks instead - but all the news is still free.

Still, the whispers about a possible paywall persist, especially when it can be implemented with a couple of clicks. And one of the sites is now actively considering it again and an announcement may be due later this year.

We're not judging the site for doing this - good journalism costs good money and something has to be done. Even after decades of trial and error, we're still trying to work out this whole online news thing, and still trying to work out how to make a sustainable model out of it all.

There have been innumerable examples of paywalls around the world going up and staying up - generating some kind of revenue. Even if they're porous as hell, producing a small amount of money is better than making no money at all, and there are several high profile institutions that have set up and sustained a paywall.

Hell, even closer to home, the NBR has been holding fairly steady with its paywall, and putting more and more of its content under lock and key as it seeks to maintain a solid core of loyal readers who don't mind paying for their biz news.

So nobody can blame the editors at one of the big boys of NZ news for looking at it. They've got to try something, and Media Scrum stands by its theory that we've finally reached the point where all the money and goodwill is starting to really run dry, and something us to give.

Putting up a paywall might even pay off and might turn out to be a good idea after all. What is a really, really bad idea is when unrealistic expectations are set up about it.

Online editors at the publisher kicking the tyres of a paywall have been told for several years to chase the clicks, no matter what the cost to credibility and authority (two things that could be surprisingly fucking useful when you want people to give you money for your words and pictures). Unsurprisingly, they have raised questions about what they're supposed to do when the premium content goes behind the wall - do they focus on those hits, or on spending the time making sure the premium content really does look premium.

And in a mind-numbing display of ignorance, they were told not to worry, because the numbers won't go down. Everything will be fine. This is fine.

This could happen, just like it has never happened with any other paywall that has ever gone up anywhere. Of course the numbers are going to drop, it's going to happen, and pretending that they won't is setting yourself up for massive disappointment. We're all for hopeless optimism at Media Scrum - we genuinely believe there is a lot of great stuff going on, and that journalism still has a bright future - but this is madness.

The head honchos might be saying things like this, but they've got to be realistic about it. People are going to be turned off, even if the vast majority of content remains free as fuck, because that's how human beings work - journalists, of all fucking people, should know that.

All this optimism is going to do is make people working at the online coalface feel like miserable failures, because the thing they were told wouldn't happen has happened, and it's highly likely that they're going to take the brunt of the blame for it. Corporate optimism has a habit of covering the poor fuckers on the shop floor in shit when it all goes sour. It's happened before in newsrooms around this country, and it's going to happen again, because nobody seems to have learned a fucking thing.

Good luck with the paywall, kids. Just try not to panic when it feels like the world is crashing around you.

- Katherine Lombard

95. How (not) to apologise, with Dame Denise and Killer Mike

All journalists agree – the PR industry is the dark side, and our bitter enemy in getting through to the truth. Even though many people in the PR industry are jaded journos who we're all still friends with, reporters, editors and producers just want them to get the fuck out of the way.

But they do have their uses, and Dame Denise L'Estrange-Corbet's media meltdown last week was the classic example of a situation where somebody could really, really have used some PR advice.

Madeleine Chapman nailed the story for The Spinoff, revealing that Dame Denise's World brand was making a mockery of the 'made in NZ' idea by putting it on tags on clothing that had been most definitely produced overseas. The legal technicalities behind this claim still need to be sorted out, but everybody could agree that it wasn't a good look.

But as bad as it was, it got exponentially worse when Dame Denise lost her freaking mind over the story. If she had taken five minutes to talk to somebody – anybody – with a bit of PR knowledge, they would have told her to do exactly the opposite of what she did do, because she immediately starting hooning the wrong way down an intellectual one-way street.

All she had to do was say 'shit, sorry about the confusions, but 99% of our other clothing is made in NZ, so we'll do all we can to sort the situation out, or at least make it a lot clearer. Our bad.' That's all. That's all she had to say

Instead, she totally followed the playbook of how not to handle a tricky PR situation – she lashed out at the reporter and her publisher, and latched onto tiny points about the removal of labels that nobody gave a shit about. She moaned about tall poppy syndrome, semi-accidentally called everybody in New Zealand stupid and did everything she could to paint herself as a helpless victim of outrage. And why couldn't everybody just get over it already?

Dame Denise has been brilliant talent for journalists to talk to about the state of the fashion industry in recent years, and her apparent familiarity with the media must have led her to take this path, without worrying about things like pausing to take a breath, or listening to any advice.

Instead, she has done incalculable damage to her brand – it's now going to be remembered for 'yeah, but Made In NZ was for the tag, not the clothes', not for the fact that it has been operating as a highly ethical and smart company.

The first piece of PR advice for anybody facing this kind of situation is an obvious one, so we're going to reveal it for free: It's just not that hard to say sorry. Apologise, really mean it, learn your lessons and move the fuck on, because everybody else will.

The recent case of Killer Mike's appearance on NRA TV showed us all how to do it. The brilliant rapper is riding on a modern cultural high as half of Run The Jewels, but risked agitating a metric fuck-ton of his fans by apparently going on the TV in the wake of the Parklands massacre and telling students and black people that they just needed to harden the fuck up, an attitude markedly at odds with his politically-aware lyrics.

But before anybody could burn their RTJ discs (or more likely, delete them from their device), Killer Mike put out an apology that explained that he had appeared on that show before the latest schoolyard atrocity, and he wasn't talking about the kids who had made a stand, and he stood fully behind them as a friend and ally. He explained that he had tried to engage with a viewpoint he found ideologically unsound, but he didn't use that as an excuse for the offence he may have caused, and took full responsibility for it, offering nothing but love and respect as compensation.

That's how you do it.

Some people are so abhorrent an apology just won't do – people like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein could offer up the most contrite, heartfelt and true apologies in the history of humanity, and they can still go to hell for all the shit they've caused.

But for something as seemingly trivial as a clothes tag, it really could have been handled  a lot better. As hard as it is for journos can admit, this was a case where a bit of PR truly could have helped, rather than hindered.

- Ron Troupe

Voyagers addendumb: Everyone's a winner, baby

The big media awards night of the year is kicking off in a few hours, and while it means NZ Twitter is going to be fuckin' insufferable for the next day, it's worth it. If we won't say nice things about each other, who will?

Media Scrum would like to congratulate all the winners, and all those who were nominated. It's a formidable collection of great journos - the investigative reporter category alone is filled with absolute blinding talents - and a great indication of the brilliance filling the country's newsrooms. You're all stars.

(Well, maybe not Ben Mack...)

Still, we're all about the invisible hand behind the bylines here at Media Scrum, and we'd also like to take the opportunity to thank a bunch of other people in this godforsaken industry, who are doing the job every bloody day, and won't be stepping up on no awards podium anytime soon.

These include:

* Online editors who read through and sub everything that comes through their digital desk, come up with a decent headline, find an acceptably eye-catching photo, make sure any questionable facts are sorted out, place it on a homepage, and then get told off by colleagues in their own organisation for taking so long  to copy and paste their brilliant prose.

* All the presenters and producers on the non-6pm news shows, getting entire shows out, despite being left with all the resources of a high school media class, and have to fill in when the big kids go dancing.

* Everyone who has ever had to ring around all the police and fire stations at five in the morning.

* Anybody who has had to take the handwritten notes of somebody far too important to ever touch a keyboard, and transfer it into award-winning columns which are mainly about an actress the writer really likes.

* All the subs and designers and proof readers and editors who spend all day making sure the apostrophe in "it's" is in the right place, and that it's always "more than" rather than "over".

* The social media editors who would love to come to your thing, but just need to get this tweet out, and check those comments, and figure out why everybody is saying that headline is problematic, and get that Instagram story going, and....

* Any and all autocue operators - don't worry kids, you'll be on the other side of the camera soon enough.

* Loaders.

* And above all, any poor bastard who is stuck in the newsroom tonight, doing the work, while their colleagues are out getting fucked up and patting each other on the backs. Good job, everybody. We hope you got some pizza at least.

Love, 

Media Scrum

94. Reporting on rumours and all the related bullshit

When police took the highly unusual step of addressing the Clarke Gayford rumours last week, there were, predictably, the usual moaning about the media intruding on the private life of the Prime Minister's partner. That they were stepping right over the line, by giving the noxious whispers whispers any airplay at all.

Even some senior journalists - including respected political reporter Andrea Vance - appeared disgusted by their own profession, that it had all come to this: reporting on scurrilous rumours that had absolutely no basis in fact.

But the actual stories about Clarke weren't the stories being reported, the police reaction was the story, because they very rarely take the step of confirming that somebody is clean. They've done it a couple of times in recent years, but it is highly unusual that the famously tight-lipped modern police force would take this step, and that alone was worth reporting on, because it showed how fucked-up the whole situation was.

It didn't matter what Gayford is supposed to have done, there was no way police were going to repeat the whispers publicly, and there was no way the media was going to repeat them without stacking them up. It was the police reaction that was unusual, and an easy to talk about the issue without casting any shade on Clark.

The fact is, all the big newsrooms had been hearing these stories for weeks, and had all made quiet inquiries, even though the stories had the stench of unmistakable bullshit, with details that didn't stack up to any kind of reality.  Real life is strange enough that even things that sound preposterous can turn out to be true, so it's worth checking out, and nobody was surprised when the stories about Gayford turned out to have all the substance of stale cigarette smoke.

But the rumours have kept coming in recent weeks - literally dozens and dozens of emails and sly messages have flooded into newsrooms; and reporters who find themselves suffering the misfortune of being the only journalist at the BBQ have been told they should be looking into the scoop. They were rumours that spread through book groups and gossip in the pub and posts on social media, and they were fucking everywhere.

In fact, a lot of editors were actually bloody relieved that there was some kind of official statement from the police, because that might shut some of these motherfuckers up, and they can clear out their emails and go back to working on stories about things that are actually true.

They certainly didn't need that crabby letter from a lawyer telling them not to repeat the allegations, because of course they fucking wouldn't. Even if they lacked the moral clarity on the issue - and let's face it, there are a few high-profile editors who do - no legal representative was going to say the stories would good to publish, because they were so obviously defamatory and harmful. (The lawyer who sent out this letter knew this damn well, because she was a highly experienced journo before getting into law, so either forgot everything she ever knew as a reporter, or was just making an extremely snarky point.)

All of this has happened before, and will happen again, and there will be the same wailing and gnashing of teeth about the ethics of it all. There were even worse rumours swirling about Helen Clark's husband when she was in power, and Peter wasn't no DJ. John Key's charming wife got off pretty lightly on the rumour front, but that was probably because son Max was the source of most of the talk. (Obviously, there is a scurrilous anti-DJ agenda going on here.)

The official statement last week should, of course, put all the whispers to rest, but it won't, because people are selfish arseholes who like to hear and spread gossip, and see a goddamn conspiracy everywhere - of course the police would say that, but what are they REALLY hiding? - and there are going to be more whispered stories about Clark's sordid life, like it's any of our goddamn business.

But at least the police did say it was bullshit, and if it stops even some of the clever fuckers who keep messaging us, telling us about this terrible thing they heard about the PM's man, it'll be a relief.

- Margaret Tempest

93. Kill the comments. Kill them with fire.

One of the golden rules of journalism – and there are a few – is one of the simplest: don't read the fucking comments.

The idea that anything useful can be gained from the comment sections on news websites and Facebook pages was kicked out the window a long time ago. Vain hopes that input from the general public could provide some useful new information, or an indispensable perspective on a news story, have been proven to be foolishness.

Instead, they're full of weird political perspectives and strange spam and nasty, vindictive and vitriolic rants. At least half of them will be people insulting the media company who published the story, and the other half will be insulting everybody else. Anybody who has the time to get worked up about a news story, no matter how innocuous it is, and is so willing to spew out their opinion, is someone who is not worth hearing from.

And yet, they're still there, still full of homophobic, sexist and outright misogynistic bullshit, stinking up the joint for everybody. Even though newsrooms can also be held responsible for all this shit, and have to answer to places like the Press Council when their comments are hijacked with people with an odious agenda.

There is nothing to be gained from comments, and everything to be lost. The numbing stress of moderating the comments has driven some people out of journalism altogether, and they're an increasing barrier to people in the greater public arena who aren't used to dealing with this shit.

Take the case of Lower Hutt weaver Veranoa Hetet, who had a story published by Stuff about the gorgeous Māori cloak worn by our Prime Minister in London, but last week took to Twitter to declare she would 'never ever' talk to a reporter again. Not because of anything the journalist did, but because she was shaken and appalled by the comments on the Facebook post pointing to her story:

I am reading the comments that follow the article on https://t.co/jGLWVIQmhS facebook page and crying. Some people are so nasty and have taken the article the wrong way. I'm never talking to another reporter ever. Never ever again 😢

— Veranoa Hetet (@whaeavee) April 24, 2018

And this was on a nice fucking story, about a lovely piece of ceremonial clothing worn on a state occasion, and it was still corrupted and tarnished by the comments. Ms Hetat obviously went into the story with the best of intentions, and had her entire faith in human decency pissed on by muntheads who think they are great keyboard warriors. Nothing was gained, nothing of value was added, it was all just more histrionic and unnecessary bullshit that was hijacking the narrative.

Journalists have a hard enough time convincing people to tell their story without this new barrier. Even people who only have pleasant interactions with reporters might think twice about talking to them when they can be personally attacked. Reporters have to build up a thick skin to this kind of crap, or they're never going to get anywhere in the business, but they can cut to the bone of regular civilians, and who can blame them for shying away?

Comments need to die, and to be turned off altogether. News is not a dialogue, especially when the other side is so moronic and full of hate. Surely we learned this by now. How many more stories like Ms Hetat's do we have to put up with, before media companies take the fucking hint?

The hardcore commentary class might choke on their cries of free speech, but they're free to piss off and create their own forum, and stew in the fetid and rotting filth of their outdated and harmful opinions. Nobody is stopping them. We just need to stop encouraging the fuckers.

- Margaret Tempest