132. Thanks for your feedback

There's this really great thing in a national crisis where large and small newsrooms get bombarded with messages second-guessing everything they're producing, and offering up obvious leads, and delivering a massive case of what-aboutism, in the most massively passively-aggressive way. And when we say it's really great, we mean it's a enormous pain in the arse.

It's not as bad as some of the outright racist and hateful bullshit that some reporters - mainly women, funnily enough - have been getting in their emails, they're more notes from people on their high horse about the issue, and even though they've never set foot in a newsroom before, they're convinced every journo in the country is doing it wrong, and they just want the media to know exactly how they feel about it.

So after innumerable phone calls and emails - and even a fax or two! A fucking fax! - we figured we'd offer up 10 easy answers for dumbarse questions. Anybody who picks up the main phone line in the newsroom and gets stuck with Clive from Gisborne and his racist, moronic ideas is welcome to use any of them:

1. Yes, we have thought about the way our newsroom is handling the naming of the motherfucker responsible for the Christchurch terror attacks, and it's a complex issue that requires some strong consideration, and it's going to take some time, as is the judicial case against him.

2. Yes, we did hear what the Prime Minister said about not naming the gunman.

3. Yes, we do still think he's a terrorist, but he's also a gunman, an attacker, a killer and a shooter. And those words just fit better in tight headline space.

4.  No, person on the street with a common-sense perspective, we're not going to put you on air because you have to tell the world that it's all the Jews' fault.

5. Yes, we did hear what the Prime Minister said about not naming the attacker.

6.  Yes, we've heard about the slaughter of Christians in Africa and we do think it's an appalling loss of life, but it didn't take place in a cultural vacuum of good versus evil, but in a hugely complex environment that is dealing with huge resource exhaustion.

7. Yes, we've heard about the slaughter of Muslims in Africa and we do think it's an appalling loss of life, but it didn't take place in a cultural vacuum of good versus evil, but in a hugely complex environment that is dealing with huge resource exhaustion.

8. No, it's not censorship by taking away a platform to spew out harmful ideas. Go start your own fucking website if it's that important.

9.  Yes, we did hear what the Prime Minister said about not naming the killer.

10. No, we don't need another link to the fucking video.

Thank you for your feedback. Now please fuck off.

- Margaret Tempest

131. This is no courtroom drama

As the gears of justice grind slowly towards crushing the motherfucker responsible for the Christchurch terror attacks into legal paste, there has been some concern that the same motherfucker might use the judicial process as a bullhorn for his bullshit philosophy.

These concerns have some merit, purely on the historical level. Mass murderers in other countries have used their court appearances to spew forth their awful rhetoric, and there is no absolute guarantee we'll be able to stop the same thing happening here.

But maybe we shouldn't worry too much, because the chances of the motherfucker's manifesto grabbing headlines are actually slim. Even if he drags out the whole process in an effort to get his word out there, that doesn't mean anybody has to use it. Nobody has to listen to this shit, or his idiotic justification for shooting 4-year-old girls, because there isn't any.

There are three clear reasons why we can avoid it - one is incredibly practical, another is a purely legal matter, and the third is a case of basic morality.

In the first case, something that it's always worth remembering about court coverage is that you can't cover everything that happens.  Court proceedings might take up hours and hours of the day, and that has to be condensed into a 450-word article, or a three-minute piece to camera on the news. Court reporters are constantly ignoring the vast majority of it all, just to get down the biggest, most noteworthy facts. For a play by play description, you'd need the full court transcription, and reporters are not transcribers, they use knowledge, skill and experience to give everyone a fair picture of what is going down.

So even if the motherfucker gets a chance to get up on his pathetic little pulpit, nobody has to listen to it, except for the poor bastards in the room. He could rant for hours, and everyone can go home and just say 'he ranted for hours' without ever having to give any details.

After all, there will be more than enough to report in the case without throwing all that unnecessary detail into the mix.

Besides, the second reason is that there is already legal moves to stop the shit-memes contained within the killer's manifesto from spreading. Distributing the contents of the manifesto is now illegal, and saying it was used in court is no goddamn excuse.

The third reason - and the biggest one, even more so than any threat of legal action - is that reporters and editors are human beings too, and can make moral decision all on their own, and the vast majority would have no interest in spreading these odious and harmful ideas. Despite what your Uncle Fred says on the Facebook, journalists are actually trying to make the world a better place, and spreading white supremacist ideas is hardly going to help with that.

No reporter would ever want to be seen condoning these ideas, or even offering up the possibility that they're worth considering. Because they just aren't. There's no fucking two sides to this fucking story.

And we're all on board with this, and while preliminary discussion between the media companies on covering the case has already begun, the whole damn nation is already down with this. Anybody who did publish these would be rightfully slammed by society and absolutely shamed.

New Zealand, as a country, has already shown that it thoroughly and completely rejects this ideology. It's not acceptable, and everyone is happy to see it stamped out. (well, the straight-up racists aren't, but nobody gives a flying fuck what they think right now.)

We're all New Zealand journos on this blog, and we can't promise that overseas outlets won't hold up these standards. They don't give a fuck about what the average NZer thinks about their coverage, they're just after global reach. And as those asshats at Sky News Australia proved, there is almost nothing they won't throw up on screen.

But we're not going to do that. This motherfucker can get his day in court before he is shoved away in a hole somewhere and forgotten, where his notoriety can fade and piss away. But we're not going to give him a megaphone for his poisonous ideals.

We can't ignore this shit, and the thinking behind this attack must be properly studied and analysed. But there is no place for any courtroom grandstanding here, let's just get on with it and move the fuck on.

- Katherine Grant

Dealing with this horror

Five days after the worst terror attack in this country’s short history, and we’re all still struggling to fully process the enormity of this despicable and cowardly violence. All Media Scrum can offer at this time is our love and respect for all the journalists who have been covering this story with compassion and empathy and kindness, getting all the necessary details without trampling over the wounded victims and their families. We hope you’re all taking care of yourselves.

But all those broadcast hosts and column writers who have happily stoked feelings of fear and loathing towards our Muslim brothers and sisters, using years and years of casual Islamophobia to build an atmosphere of fake outage - and are now trying to look like they cared about them all along - can truly get fucked. They can wipe old tweets and articles from the internet as much as they like, but we’re never forgetting that shit.

130. All the best stories come out of the courtroom

There was more talk recently - sparked by the usual Spinoff post - about whether it's necessary to go to journalism school before becoming a reporter, or whether you can just learn everything you need to know on the job.

Media Scrum is a big fan of J-schools - if only because we like to work with people who can do shorthand and know how the fucking apostrophe in "it's" works - and we are dismayed by the continued dismantling of this country's journalism courses. But we still know loads of great journos who never had any real professional training, and still do a stellar job on a daily basis.

As far as we're concerned, there is a simple answer to determine if somebody is a proper journo or not - if you've ever covered a court case from start to finish for a publication or broadcast, you're a real reporter.

Court reporting is a vital skill for young journalists. You can learn so much, because you have to do so much, and you have to get it right. It can incredibly stressful, vitally important and deeply tedious, all at the same time.

The most important thing you learn is that you have to be 110% accurate, or you're in big fucking trouble. Everything has to be checked and confirmed before it goes out into the world, and there is no room for any kind of error. All the facts have to be in place, and the journalist has to be sure they're not breaking any court orders, or they could be facing criminal charges of their own.

So sitting there on the press desk, you have to learn how the name suppression goes, and learn to bite back your own disgust when justice isn't served, and just follow the goddamn rules. Anyone who can't hack that won't be a journo for long.

Every reporter should do some kind of court reporting, at least for a while. It makes them better at their job, in almost every way. It's not just the discipline of the legal rules, it's figuring out how to tell a story that doesn't favour one side of the argument over the other, and keeping some balance in their reporting, even when one side might have spent all day making their argument.

Still, while there are some incredibly knowledgeable and experienced court reporters still pounding that beat every day, it also a job that most people shouldn't do forever, because they do get jaded and incredibly cynical about the whole process, and can't see things with the objective eye needed for court reporting.

And you can't do it forever because you have to sit there and listen and watch some awful, terrible things. Every detail is brought out and pored over in the courtroom, and a reporter can end up seeing some graphic images, and hear details of awful, violent assaults. Far too much for the delicate sensibilities of the general public, and so hours of testimony just has to be reduced to 'and then the thing happened', but it can still get stuck in a dark place inside your head.

(It's a relief to note that media companies are starting to get their head around the idea that some of the shit their reporting staff are exposed to can actually be mentally harmful, because that's a conversation we need to be having.) 

It's just fucking hard work, covering the court beat, but also gives us so many good stories. Crazy tales about outlandish events, and stories of courage and bravery and justice finally served. It's all there in open court, for all the world to see.

Which is why it's such a fucking tragedy that so many great stories do slip through the net. There is an important principle in the modern legal system - justice must be done, but it must also be seen to have been done. It's one of the fundamental purposes for the entire journalism business - reassuring the world that there are rules in our society and people will get punished if they break them. (This is an idea that can often be difficult to explain to many court clerks, who appear astounded that free information should be free.)

But justice isn't seen to be done as much as it really should, and things do slip through the cracks. Daily newspapers that used to sit on on list days and get everything, finding weird little gems and human interest stuff among the endless drink driving and pissing in shop doorway charges, but now they're only there for the really big stuff.

The handful of dedicated court reporters left in this country are racing from one job to another, and it's impossible to keep on top of everything that is going on in somewhere like Auckland, with multiple courtrooms across the city.

With newsrooms losing more and more staff at multiple companies, this isn't likely to change anytime soon, but we're all missing out when the press bench is left empty. Justice might be done, but who would know anymore?

- Steve Lombard

129. Cops with guns: What does indefinite mean anyway?

The scariest thing about the Wellington Paranormal TV show wasn't the zombies or vampires or ghosts or anything like that – they were laughably and gloriously pathetic – but how well it captured the culture and mindset of the NZ police force in the 21st century.

The show-makers got that wide-eyed cultural sensitivity and the strict adherence to the rules (to the point of absurdity). They got the cops' desperate efforts to keep any useful information away from the general public, and they got the fact that they're just a bit fucking useless sometimes.

The police comms team deal with a lot of shit, and often have to handle ongoing stressful situations where information is constantly in a state of flux, and has to be absolutely verified before sharing with the public.

But they are still sometimes completely fucking useless, and it's been getting worse for quite some time. And sometimes they just seem determined to make things difficult for themselves. They don't need anybody's help to look like a dickhead.

There is an ongoing issue with the police sending out painfully thin statements, which often don't feature essential information like What, Where and When (the Why and How can wait for later). Comms teams have told newsrooms that they often don't have the information to share, but putting out the briefest of information just sends everyone in the country scurrying for more, and the only thing you can expect from putting out a statement like that is that every bloody newsroom in the country is going to be clogging your phone line, all desperate for something – anything – more to the story. It's just making more work for themselves.

And sometimes, the force's desperate desire to keep any information to itself manages to just create another shit-show, and they did exactly that last week.

They obviously weren't ready for the backlash when Canterbury police casually mentioned that they would be walking around town with firearms now, and would be for the indefinite future, a timeframe that was just vague enough to be super-fucking-alarming.

New Zealanders pride themselves on the fact that we're not Americans, and we're mostly grateful as fuck that we don't share our Trans-Pacific's cousins' desperate hard-on for guns. For such a rural-driven society, we just don't have a gun culture, and don't really want one.

And we're just a little bit proud that the local cops are on the beat without having to get totally tooled up. We might not be able to leave everything unlocked anymore, but we also don't need the police blasting away on our city streets.

Somehow, it took the local police in Christchurch a day to realise that there was a big goddamn difference between “indefinite” and “until we catch this particular guy we're after”, because they forgot to mention that latter fact in the first place. It might not have been quite so alarming if they'd bothered to share all the facts with the public.

And now it's started the usual interminable debate about arming our police, and you can expect some deeply serious arguments about the possibility for months to come.

Maybe that was the cops' goal all along, to get us talking like this, but it really feels like they just forgot to bring all the information they should have, and are now waving us away from the bonfire of debate they've igniting, and failing to assure us all that there is nothing to see here.

- Margaret Tempest

128. These columns can't take any weight

Guest column by J Jonah Jameson 

Why do New Zealand columnists suck so much?

The art of writing a column was once considered a noble form. Now it’s just another branding opportunity for TV/radio talking head egos like Duncan Garner and Mike Hosking to spread their patented brands of ignorant shit.

The Kate Hawkesby/Mike Hosking hellspawn duo over at NZME sum up the worst of modern columns, usually done with a strong right-wing bent as the parent company aims for that sweet, sweet Fox News-addict demographic. In journalism on a par with a high school student’s snarky Snapchat posts, Hawkesby ranted recently about how Labour MPs didn’t dress up in tuxedos and gowns for their informal summer retreat.

At Newshub, Duncan Garner interviewed MP Chlöe Swarbick about cannabis this week and didn’t have the slightest fucking idea of what he was talking about. Dipshit Garner has a long history of this stupidity, once writing a column once about shopping at Kmart that somehow turned into a racist rant, which thankfully got pinged by the Press Council.

NZ media are obsessed with giving loudmouth radio and TV personalities columns to share crap versions of their aired rants. Transcribing a radio host’s meandering speech into a column format rarely ends well, and we genuinely feel for the junior journos who have to do it. You end up with bizarrely meandering, poorly written diatribes on the same level of quality as your Uncle Nigel’s Facebook posts about chemtrails.

A big hoo-ra was made about fossil talkback host Leighton Smith leaving Newstalk ZB last year - but no worries, the Herald quickly picked him up for a weekly column, where granddad continues his ultra-right-wing blather on issues like why climate change is a hoax.

Columnists in NZ usually fall in two camps - shallow political hot takes or pretentious lifestyle wankery.

In the latter category, Deborah Hill Cone finally yanked her own never-ending self-analysis session masquerading as a column last year. Cone would occasionally write blatantly offensive shit about Charlotte Dawson’s suicide or foment insane conspiracy theories about the PM’s partner Clarke Gayford for kicks. She also had sheer balls to show up a few weeks after she quit her column with an article in the Herald magazine Canvas about how darned bad public shaming is … you know, especially when you write shallow columns intentionally geared to generate outrage and are called on it. This was kind of like having Donald Trump write a guide about etiquette in politics.

The dregs of the columnists that plague NZ media all cover similar bases - they’re horribly full of themselves, they’ll throw out controversial hot takes in the hopes of getting clicks, and they contribute little or nothing to the public discourse. They’re about riling up the sort of people who contribute daily to Stuff comments, not engaging the rest of us who are increasingly sick of bullshit and con artists.

But who’s good? Well, there are a few left who don’t constantly scrape the bottom of the barrel. The Herald’s Brian Rudman consistently writes some of the best, most cogent takes on Auckland politics, and former Metro editor Simon Wilson is also doing a great job at the Herald writing opinionated long-form analysis.

Andrea Vance and Claire Trevett also write very solid political columns that avoid ranting. Stuff’s Sunday Star-Times has recently hired several new diverse voices for their paper and RNZ manages to thankfully avoid talking heads syndrome entirely in its opinion pieces. But the intelligent voices are constantly being drowned out by the inept baying to the crowd by the ranters and ravers, all aiming to be today’s trending topic.

The bloviating opinionators who dominate the columnist realm tend to be from one demographic - almost entirely white, mostly male, coming at you from a basis of privilege and comfort few Aucklanders really live in. (Hey, did you know Mike Hosking crashed a $140,000 car? He’s one of us!) There are pitifully few Maori columnists on the ground, or Pacific voices, and good luck finding an Asian columnist in mainstream media who represents the quarter of Aucklanders of that background.

Once upon a time, you could rely on a columnist to give you a real sense of the city they live in, of its people and quirks and ideas. Long-gone names like Herb Caen of San Francisco, Mike Royko of Chicago or Jimmy Breslin of New York pounded their beat and told stories.

There aren’t a lot of columnists like that any more - in NZ, Steve Braunias has come close with works like his great “Eating Lincoln Road” series, but columns that have a voice and a story to tell that aren’t just about raking in clicks and outrage or narcissistic blather are a dying genre.

We’re all the poorer for it, really.

127. There's always a place for the newsroom

There has recently been another huge round of lay-offs and redundancies in the US media scene, which has sparked the usual intellectual chin-stroking, and more than one suddenly-unemployed journalist writing a 'what does it all mean?' piece.

These journos might not have a job anymore, but they have sure got plenty of advice from everybody, some of whom may have even read a newspaper once. This advice ranges from the oddly offensive 'learn to code' to the more useful 'maybe we should do something about all the billionaires running these media outlets into the ground'.

But one of the worst pieces of advice seen in recent weeks - even if it was given with the best of intentions - was that maybe journos could all just work remotely now, cutting down on costs by cutting out the newsroom altogether, and just letting reporters roam free.

This might make a lot of sense on paper, but it's a terrible, terrible idea in real life. Even in this day of mass communication, a fully functioning and lively newsroom is essential for anybody trying to gather information in a timely and accurate fashion. Nothing beats it.

For starters, seconds can make a huge difference in getting up big breaking news, and it's just faster to all work out of the same office. Even with Skype and phones and Slack and emails and all that, there is still no piece of communication that is as fast as the human voice shouting across the newsroom, and nothing can convey the urgency quite like a 'Holy shit!' moment in the office.

Anybody working in breaking news knows this - digital editors are constantly eavesdropping on the chief reporter as they talk to their news staff, so they can be ready to roll when the time comes. If you're dedicated to getting information up and out into the world as quickly as possible, you have to be in the newsroom.

But it's not just the speed, it's the knowledge. Even with the active and ongoing loss of the most experienced journos, any mid-sized newsroom has decades of experience and advice, which younger journos need to see first hand, if they're going to get anywhere in this business.

And it's having another voice to listen to when you're stuck - it makes everything easier when you're surrounded by people who can actively help you out without even fucking up their own work flow. Even if it's just somebody who needs help nailing that perfect intro, and needs more general overall advice, it's good to have somebody there. And it's great to have somebody there who can catch your fuck-ups and ensure mistakes are fixed quickly, (hopefully before they go public).

To see one effect of being away from the heart of the newsroom, look at the increasing use of 'special correspondents'. The idea to let A-level journalistic talent stick around and avoid burn-out by keeping them in the company with the offer of more freedom to do the shit they really want to do.

But as noted in a recent column from Mark Jennings, while they do have more freedom to follow their noses, they are also out of the flow and out of the daily grind of daily reporting. They can miss developments or angles or whole new stories if they aren't part of the general staff, and don't always get all the nuances of long-running stories that are constantly discussed in the regular reporting and editing pool.

And finally, working in the newsroom can be really fucking enjoyable, because you're spending your day with smart, creative and funny people, which is just so much better than sitting at home, snarking away on Twitter.

Tech companies are pushing for everybody to work from home, but there is no tech that beats a group of people in the same proximity, all working to purpose. Working remotely can work for a lot of people - especially if they're choosing lifestyle over career, and are dead keen on building a life outside the main centres - but it's still a long way from beating the benefits of all being in the same room together.

- Katherine Grant