150. This scrum has collapsed

This is the final regular edition of Media Scrum. We've been doing it for a couple of years now, and it's been enormously satisfying to get some of this shit out of our systems, instead of bottling it all inside, but now we're done.

There are still things about the way the news media works, and the way it's perceived, that annoy the living shit out of us, but we have been starting to repeat ourselves quite a lot recently, and have been moaning about the same old things over and over again, so it really is time to put a pin in it and call it a day.

We've never had a huge audience for this blog and never really sought one, because it was always more about getting this out of our heads than spreading it everywhere. So we doubt these regular complaints will be missed that much, but we have appreciated all those who ever told us we had a point, or that we didn't go far enough.

(It's also ending because we're getting increasingly lazy, with one member of the Scrum abandoning us for the bright lights of London, (like they all do), and another dealing with a brand new child, and it's too much to put on the remaining two members of the team...)

We probably could have carried on with this malarkey forever, because there is always some fuckin' stupid thing being said or assumed about the news media, or something fuckin' stupid happening in the newsroom itself. There is definitely room for more moaning about the ways we produce, consume and criticise our news diet, and even though it's going to be notably quiet here next Tuesday morning, nobody here is ruling out slamming out the odd rant, when the fire takes us again.

Especially when there are still a lot of issues to deal with. A lot of great journalists are still being turfed out of the industry, and nowhere is totally safe. Some newsrooms are now operating on the smell of an oily rag, and could be one lawsuit away from total annihilation. When media companies are owned by vulture capitalists, there is no guarantee they won't be shut down tomorrow. There's renewed talk of mergers and frank discussions over how hard it is to turn a profit out of the news, and none of that is going anywhere.

There are also issues with the OIA and government obfuscation that desperately need to be dealt with, and the news media is still dealing with a massive perception problem among the general public, who sneer at the work that is produced, without ever acknowledging that they'd be fucked without someone in this crazy society of ours asking the hard questions of people in power, and exposing injustice and unfairness.

And yet....

Things might be grim, but there is still a lot of fucking amazing journalism going on, produced by multiple newsrooms. After years of redundancies and wage freezes, the ones that are left are the sharpest tools on the bench, and are producing genuinely terrific work every week.

There are a lot of great longform journalistic projects being offered up all the time, there is more breaking news than ever before, and a lot of news options. Many might moan about the good old days, but there are proper arguments that we are still living in a golden age of great content, even if the money isn't there anymore, siphoned away by tech giants and public apathy. There is a lot of good stuff out there.

And, most of all, there are good people working in journalism, putting up with bullshit from everybody from the highest-ranking politicians to the lowest munters on social media, for fuck-all pay. Sticking with the profession, even when PR and comms dangles huge pay cheques in front of them, because they love what they do, and think it's an important part of society, (or at least, more important than pushing out corporate bullshit).

Media Scrum has paid tribute to a few of these great journalists every now and then, but we all work with dozens of other wonderful journos every day. There are, unsurprisingly, still a few shitheads hanging around the newsroom, but they usually don't last that long, and the editorial staff are generally the best people we've ever worked with, in any job. Going into the newsroom is still an absolute thrill, and the people we work with are a huge part of that.

This industry of ours is going through an unprecedented period of upheaval and change, but the terrific journos in this country really do give us hope for the future. As bad as things get - and they do get pretty fucking awful sometimes - there are a lot of great people out there, doing the hard yards, getting the job done.

You don't really need us to tell you that anymore.

Love,
Media Scrum

149. Fuck you very much

Next week will be the last regular edition of Media Scrum for the foreseeable future, but before we get there, there's a couple of things we'd like to get off our chests while we've got the chance.

Firstly, and we mean this most sincerely, fuck you anti-vaxxers, and your harmful bullshit. Fuck you for spoiling conspiracy theories, which used to be fun speculation about who was on the grassy knoll, or just watching The X-Files, and is now the #1 reason for muting family members on Facebook.

You're not smarter and more informed than everybody else, just because you watched a few dumbarse Youtube videos, you're a fucking moron who is causing actual harm to people all over the world by spreading blatant misinformation, just so you can feel superior to all the other sheeples.

It's not just the fact that measles is making a comeback in a big way, it's the way fanatics use these odious theories to justify actual massacres around the world, where health workers who are only trying to make people's lives better are targeted because some violent fuckwits think it's okay. This shit has consequences, and is scientifically baseless, and if you spread it, you are actively making the world a worse place. You fucking tools.

Fuck the 24-hour news cycle, which has distorted perceptions of the news media in such an awful way. It's bad enough that we have to deal with Fox News - which has caused more nastiness in the public discourse than literally anything else on the planet, making everyone look bad by being unrelentingly awful in every way - but it's also changing the way we consume news for the worst.

These channels and stations filled the airwaves with vapid analysis and other bullshit instead of actual news, because they don't have the resources to actually gather the good shit, and now a large segment of the public can't tell the difference between facts and opinion anymore, because all this shit has been hammered into them.

Fuck you, anybody who thinks they can threaten or physically harm journalists for doing their goddamn job. Munters still send threats from comfortable anonymity, and many of them are from fuckwits who just think they're having a laugh, but it isn't very fucking funny at the other end.

If you ever threaten somebody with physical harm for writing or saying something you disagree with, you've lost any fucking argument you were trying to make. You're the fucking loser, and can fuck off and simmer in your own bile.

And while we're there, fuck the police who never do anything when reporters and camera people are shoved and attacked on the street. You see this happen every fucking week, right outside courtrooms, making a goddamn mockery of the whole idea of law and order, at the very place that has been built to uphold it. These people are doing their jobs, and the cops who stand by while they get shoved out of the way, or have their cameras snatched away, aren't doing anybody any fucking favours.  

Fuck you, rubberneckers who won't admit they are rubberneckers.

Whenever we drive by a car crash, no matter how minor it looks, we all slow down and take a look. It's only human nature. There is, of course, always a tone of resigned disgust from the police and transport authorities when the traffic builds up on the motorway because of all the rubbernecking. If only people would carry on as normal, and resist the urge to gawk at the carnage, everything would go a lot smoother.

And we all share in that disgust, especially when we're stuck in that traffic for an extra 20 minutes on the drive home from work. What sort of ghoulish creep stops to look at a crash site?

But why wouldn't you slow down for a look? Every other son of a bitch is also slowing down, and if you don't, you're going to ram into the arse of some other gawker. There's also the safety issue,and the need to keep speed down around a crash site. And because it's interesting and strange, creating an unbearable curiosity - what actually happened?

It becomes a story over the dinner table, or a reminder of the fragility of our road system, and of our own mortal forms. Rubbernecking is as human as breathing, and no amount of moaning ever really changes human nature.

This beautiful hypocrisy is mirrored in our consumption of news, because it's not you clicking on the bullshit, it's everybody else. All that salacious stuff about vapid celebrities, or outright property porn, that's never you.

Admit that you like the shit, or we're not going to get anywhere. Or just stop whining about it, put the fucking foot down when you go by an accident scene, and don't peek. Websites don't care why you're clicking on it, they'll count the fucking clicks anyway.

Fuck you, if you've ever been one of those fuckwits that moans that the media hasn't been doing their jobs, and are convinced that the entire media hasn't covered a certain topic, because they're too fucking lazy to spend five seconds googling, which would reveal that everybody has been covering the exact thing you're talking about. 

(In other words, yes, people are still following the long-term after-effects of the Christchurch earthquakes. Nobody has forgotten shit.)

For that matter, fuck you single sourcers, who only rely on a single newsroom for all their information, and then act all smug and shit, as if willful ignorance wasn't something to be absolutely ashamed of.

Only fuckin' idiots get all their news from one place, whether it's a single website or publication or broadcast. There is so much going on, in so many places, with so many different editorial directions, that the best way to keep on top of it all is to take on something from lots of different places.

Sticking with one source of all information means you're incredibly likely to fall for some dumbarse ideology, and will never get the full picture, especially on big, important stories.

And finally, as always, fuck you Winston Peters, just on general principle. Sometimes we think you're starting to sound pretty cool, and then you decide that the whole country should have a fucking say on female health issues. So fuck you, Mr Peters. Fuck you very much.

- Margaret Tempest/Katherine Grant

148: Ten things you didn't know about digital journalism that will shock you

Newsrooms have had a specialised digital component for more than two decades now, but they are still figuring out how to make the transition. It's a long, long process and we're probably only halfway there, but we've learned a couple of things over the years, and in the finest of all digital traditions, Media Scrum has made a shallow and questionable listicle of some of them.

1. Nobody knows anything

While analytics can be incredibly useful for figuring out what people want to read, and you can get a lot of instant, real-time information, it can often be a complete mystery why some stories outperform others. Certain types of story, especially big, meaty investigations and shocking breaking news, will always do well, but it's never as simple as that.

Stories that deserve to go far and wide just die on the vine, and idiotic filler stories that took five minutes to bash out suddenly go viral, and there isn't any rhyme or reason. You could be a digital journo for years and years, and you'll still be surprised every day by a story that doesn't get the audience it should, or spreads all around the world. All you can do is put out the best mix of news possible, and hope for the best.

 2. Digital journos might be the last subs standing

The sub-editing role is one that has been utterly annihilated by the constant restructuring that has gone on in the news media companies in recent years, because that kind of grunt work always looked so disposable. Only it turned out that they're as vital as ever, because all the newsrooms are putting out more copy that ever before on all sorts of different platforms, and it's still incredibly important that this copy is clean, readable and grammatically correct.

Digital journos do a lot of work on their own stuff, but also are the last line of defense before every piece of reporting from any newsroom goes out. They might have to take TV or radio copy and clean it up for public consumption, and that can take a lot of work to reformat and repurpose. Digital journalism might be a fancy new way of doing things, but the old-school principles of good subbing are as strong as ever in the field.     
 
3. Running a homepage is like driving a car

Homepage editors in all the big newsrooms are some of the busiest people in the office, and are flat out all day. But it's only a job that can be done by one person - trying to split that duty, or having other people ducking in to muck around with the story order never, ever works. You need one person who can keep track of everything, and might have very good reasons for not using a story at a particular time, or not leading the whole website on it.

It really is like driving a car. You can take a lot of advice, and be given directions, and even be specifically ordered to go in a certain direction, but only one person is in the driver's seat, and trying to grab the wheel from them doesn't work out for anybody.

Unfortunately, when it all crashes into the side of the road because somebody told you to lead the website with one of those fucking Air NZ safety videos, it's always the driver that takes the shit for it.

4. It is a massive amount of work

Everybody recognises the great work that by-lined journos do on a constant basis, but there is a massive amount of work going on behind the scenes to get these stories ready and readable.

Digital journos have to deal with the constant demands of breaking news, and have to keep half an eye on what competitors are up to, and be aware of the latest shit-fight on social media. If they're lucky, they might get to work on bigger, long-form and in-depth pieces, but spend most of their time on basic shit - they have to write several dozens headlines a day and spend a huge amount of time finding the right picture. They have to be across everything that's going on across the newsroom, and have to make sure all the grammar and spelling is correct. And it never, ever stops.

5. Headlines are really fuckin' hard

A quick word about headlines - a nice pun is always welcome and might get loads of attention on the Twitter, but can be rubbish for getting people to actually read the stories. It's not just a SEO thing, it's just that playing it straight will always be more intriguing than any clever wordplay.

6. Shit happens, get over it

So a typical day for a homepage editor will literally involve thousands of tiny decisions - (about 80 percent of which will be going through a stock image website and rejecting all the awful, awful options it offers ) - small decisions about headlines and wording and story placement and the importance of getting it all right.

But they're still human, and inevitably, some of these decisions will be totally, objectively wrong, or just plain fuck-ups. And if even the tiniest sliver of a proportion are the wrong call, they're really going to stand out.

Unfortunately, while most people are able to get away with their inevitable screw-ups on the job before anybody notices, a mistake on a digital story is out there for the whole fucking world to see and screen-cap, for everybody to laugh at, and then you get shitheads moaning about how everything used to be better, and that the people responsible for this mistake should lose their fuckin' job over it, as if their shit never stunk.

7. Things can be fixed easily

Fortunately, things can be fixed very quickly, and any kind of fuck up can be quickly sorted out with a few keystrokes.

But there is no longer period of time than between fixing a mistake on the homepage and the time the published change goes through. Sometimes these can take minutes, and it's one of the most unbearable parts of the job, hoping that some smartarse doesn't notice and spread it everywhere.

8. You never get bored

There are other aspects of digital journalism that make it appealing for a certain type of journo, and it's perfect for anyone that has a short attention span. You're not just working on one story all day, you might have dozens and dozens of them sliding through in the workflow, and there is never a chance to get bored. It just keeps coming.

9. You're constantly breaking new ground

And on top of that, you also get to do things that nobody has ever done before in journalism. The multi-media mix means you get to do things with videos and infographics and data journalism that are genuinely ground-breaking, and full of novelty.

It does mean you're more likely to make mistakes when you're doing this kind of pioneering work, because there is no other example to follow, but it's totally worth it to be the first to try something.

10. But it's not for everybody

There is a huge churn problem in journalism, with the pay standards and workflow pressures driving out a lot of great journos every year, and the digital crews at all the newsrooms are constantly having to get in new staff and losing irreplaceable experience and knowledge.

But that whole 'jack of all trades' thing doesn't appeal to everybody, and getting stories out incredibly fast with a minimum amount of mistakes requires a certain kind of journo. Some editorial staff thrive on this shit, but others find that pressure unbearable.

The ones that are sticking in there really are trying to do the best job they can, and could be better at blowing their own horn about it, but their queue is getting out of control, and they can't find that picture they need and they have to get on top of that right now. Maybe they'll get into that tomorrow.

- Ron Troupe / Steve Lombard