140. It all happened so fast

Things like bomb threats and weird evacuations and police call-outs are happening every day in New Zealand, and even though the vast majority turn out to be nothing, anybody working in a newsroom knows they have to keep an eye on them all.

There are legitimate questions about how to handle these things, and it's far too easy to tip over into scare-mongering. Many newsrooms have policies about reporting on strange powders and unsubstantiated bomb threats, refusing to give the story any oxygen, unless it causes massive disruption.

So, for instance, a bomb threat that forces the evacuation of a warehouse in Onehunga might not make any news bulletins, but one that shuts down several major streets in central Wellington might lead the news, even though they have the same cause, and same lack of result.

There has certainly been a lot more sensitivity around these kinds of things since the Christchurch mosque shootings. Everyone is on edge because all those worst nightmares did come true on that sunny Friday afternoon. This is why editors and reporters and producers need to keep an eye on any reports of any disturbances, and on all police call-outs and reported threats, because they might be something that needs to be reported on.

Still, at least now we know it doesn't take long to work out the difference between annoying hoax and terrible reality.

There are many lessons to be learned from the press coverage of the shootings and their aftermath, and we've still got a fucking long way to go yet. But one horrible lesson that this country's newsrooms have learned is that it when things are really bad, when the worst case scenario becomes reality, the news doesn't take long to spread.

The first reports of a disturbance at the Christchurch mosques came from vague reports of an urgent emergency in the central city, no different from the dozens and dozens of similar alarms that go out every month.

But within minutes, the first reports of shots came through. They were unsubstantiated, from locals who heard the harsh sounds of gunfire cutting through a Friday afternoon in autumn and that was the first sign that something truly horrible had happened.

And within half an hour, the real horror was evident. The day was a blur for most of us, as the scale got worse and worse, until it was confirmed, some hours later, that dozens were dead. But it only took moments for everybody to get the news that something really significant had happened.

The weeks and months since have seen many urgent incidents, reports of people seen with guns, schools and workplaces placed on lockdown, and every time there is the horrible thought that it's happening again, that some other fucking arsehole has picked up a weapon and set out to cause as much human misery as possible to innocent people.

We all think that now when the first alerts are raised, watching the news from various emergency departments coming in, and we all hope to hell that it's nothing, and that we can ignore it. But we have to start a story running, just in case the worst is happening again.

At least now we know the longer we wait, the better the chance that it's nothing, and we can bury the first urgent reports beneath other news. Because we know that if it was bad, more news would be there.

Because it happened so fast, so horribly fast.

We hope nothing like this happens in this wonderful country of ours ever again, but if it does, we know we won't have to wait long to know about it, and that speed is breaking our fucking hearts.

- Ron Troupe

139. We are not Bill Ralston

The Media Scrum crew like to act like we know everything, just like everybody else, but we're just self-aware enough to know we're still ignorant little shits a lot of the time. We're trying, honest, we're trying, but sometimes we don't realise something blindingly obvious, like the fact that somebody has already used the Media Scrum name for a column before.

We only realised this last week, when somebody told us Bill Ralston had a column of the same name a while ago, and we should have fucking known it, because it takes three seconds of googling to find out.

But we can assure you all that we're not Mr Ralston. Only one of us have ever met him before, and they were both very, very drunk. He's from a different generation of journalists than us. We didn't introduce Rant TV to NZ screens with his bits on early TV3, we didn't shape the flow of news at the national broadcaster around the turn of the century, and we didn't get chopped up into little pieces by Peter Jackson at the start of Braindead.

And we didn't greet news of another potentially painful restructure at one of the country's biggest newsrooms with a snide comment suggesting they deserve it:

Bill Ralston’s comment in an article today claiming we don’t break stories is unfair & incorrect. Newshub consistently breaks stories. MBovis spread, poor tracing & support workers quitting (picked up by Herald and RNZ) & our white supremacy series. That was just in past week.

— Michael Morrah (@MichaelMorrah) May 15, 2019

As Mr Morrah points out, the worst thing about that comment is that it's just bullshit – the TV crews at both Newshub and TVNZ both break a fucking tonne of great stories every week. They may be locked into the necessity of covering the entire day's events in between the ads, but there are people at the TV stations who are doing stories that nobody else are doing, and they often lead the news agenda with juicy shit.

And it's not wrong, it's just fucking rude. If you consider yourself a journalist, you don't trash your fellow professionals like that, because it's not very fucking professional. Experienced and knowledgeable journalists are a endangered goddamn species sometimes, but the ones that are left don't start piling on each other.

We're still a bunch of competitive fucks – there was some real emotions going on at the Voyagers in Auckland the other night – but we also have trained together, and worked together, and we know how fucking awful it can be to feel like your job is on the line. We've all been through that pain in the past decade or so, nobody is immune, and nobody is going to go on record sneering at anybody else facing that kind of uncertainty.

We hope that the Mediaworks restructure doesn't see the loss of too many bodies in the newsroom, because nobody wins that, and the TV3 crew are a fucking good bunch, and we were delighted to get rat arsed with some of them at those Voyager's the other night.

Maybe giving your rivals in other newsroom public shit about their product, and suggesting that they deserved to get fired for not living up to your own lofty standards, was something that journalists of a previous generation got off on, because they haven't got anything else to complain about.

But that's not how we do things anymore. It's not cool. It's not us. We're not Bill Ralston.

- Margaret Tempest

138. What the fuck are you talking about, your honour?

Most court decisions are straightforward and deathly dull, full of legalese nonsense and other high-faluting language. Dozens and dozens of them are made public every year, and a large proportion of them are too dry to report on, or there's just not enough news in them.

But occasionally you get one that is so weird or obtuse or willfully ignorant, it raises far more question than it settles, which is the opposite of the point. And in that regard, this one is an absolute cracker.

It's not a huge decision - it's only a couple of pages long, and it's a fairly minor matter, regarding media applications to take photos or record sound and video during the sentencing of someone for insider trading. The guilty party has since been sentenced to pay the FMA $150k and barred from acting as a director for five years, so the case has closed.

But while the case has been well and truly settled, Media Scrum remains perplexed by several things in the decision, and honestly can't tell if everyone involved is being willfully obtuse, or just plain ignorant, or just taking the piss. We're left with several questions about it, including:

* Does the judge making the decision really have no idea that Stuff's application refers to some of the country's biggest newspapers?

* Or are they trying to make some point about the need to be more specific in applications, and that every single Stuff publication - and all of its partner agencies - needs to be specifically mentioned in any further requests of this type?

* Where the shit is this vast repository of public domain images mentioned by the defendant's lawyer, which mean the "media applications serve no useful purpose"?

* And are these photos that already exist in the public domain of high enough resolution to be actually useful?

* No, seriously, what the fuck is the lawyer talking about? Finding photos of people who appear in court isn't as simple as doing a Google search and grabbing the first photo that comes up, because you'll run into a little issue called 'copyright'.  

* How does photographing somebody in the dock make them look worse than the fact they're being ordered to pay tens of thousands of dollars for extremely dodgy business practices?

* Or is it only "embarrassing, unfair, and disproportionate" to be seen in court when you're dealing with white collar crime?

* Couldn't this argument now be applied to any sentencing of any criminal in any court in New Zealand?

* Is it now "unfair" to take photos of any criminal during a court process?

* Or are we still just talking about white-collar scum?

* How the fuck does this ensure that 'justice is seen to be done', especially when you're dealing with somebody with a common name, who can now fade into the crowd of other Mark Talbots?

The Media Scrum team have more time wondering about this than the judge spent thinking about the biggest media company in the country, but frankly, your honour, we're still fucking stumped.

- Margaret Tempest

137. The great paywall experiment: Give it a bit of time

The NZ Herald, the biggest newspaper in the country, has gone ahead and put its very best content behind a paywall. It's not the first attempt at something like this in New Zealand – the NBR's firewalls have been proudly standing for years, and even the Herald had a half-hearted stab at it more than a decade ago – but it's the biggest and most comprehensive, and has thrown a huge stone in the small pond that it is the local media scene.

We weren't sure it was ever going to happen, and we truly doubt that you can truly connect with that kind of premium customer when you've been loading the site with bullshit for years, but the Media Scrum team are all 100 percent behind the move, and wish the Herald team all the very best. The populist path they were rampaging down did not have any kind of future and it's time to try something new.

Of course, it's far too early to judge it as a success or not. The stockmarket liked it, giving NZME shares a notable boost on launch day last week, but this is a long-term project, and the full effect will take some time to work out. We've all got the patience of a flea these days, and want everything now, but sometimes you have to just fucking wait to see if something is really going to work.

It could be a bit much to hope for an unambiguously bright and shiny future, where good journalism receives strong rewards and we all head off down a path into brilliance, but if we can have anything from this experiment, we hope for two things.

The first is that we really, truly hope the NZ Herald sticks to its guns, and doesn't panic. There will undoubtedly be a catastrophic drop in unique users and page views with the launch of the premium content, but the editorial team have to tough it out, and show faith in their product.

After all, it might take a while to build up the audience to a sustainable level, and that is just not going to happen overnight.

The second (possibly forlorn) hope is that we hope they don't break the reporters. The company has made some astute hires in recent months, especially in the business field, but still has a limited pool of reporters, and they need to deliver worthwhile content every single bloody day.

People like Fisher and Savage and Johnston and Nippert are the best in the business in this country, and their work should be hugely encouraged. But a news website is  ravenous beast - you can't have  a lead story up for more than couple of hours before it gets stale, and always needs something new constantly, every day, all day.

There is bound to be some enormous pressure on the editorial team to produce the goods to fill those spaces, and when you're dealing with the types of stories these stars are dealing with, it can take a while - it's another fact of the business that you can't rush this shit either.

The ideal result, of course, is that the Herald gets more subscribers, which enables it to hire more top reporters and create more content getting more subscribers, enabling them to hire more top reporters, etc etc.

But we live in the real world where the corporate branches of media companies have made no secret of where their priorities lie, and any profits from the endevor are likely to go to the company's bottom line to make it look god for investors, rather than invested back into the actual business.

Still, we can hope for the best, and it's certainly got off to a strong start, with a tonne of great editorial content already put out under the premium banner.

We just hope it lasts, because if the Herald can't make it work in this country, with the talent under its masthead, nobody will, and then we're all screwed.

- Steve Lombard

136. Mother said build a Wall

Like everybody else in society, politicians like to tell the news media how to do their jobs, without having the faintest fucking idea what that job is. Career politicians are particularly good at it, because they're always pissed off about some reporter digging into their shit and making them look bad, as if incompetence and corruption in power should be held to account or something.

In New Zealand, the King Arsehole in this respect remains deputy prime minister Winston Peters, who is bloody appalling to deal with and has some fucking weird ideas about how the media works. But last week it was MP Louisa Wall's turn to take a big bite of this particular shit sandwich, with this lovely social media post (via the brilliant @avancenz)

It was a statement of such breathtaking ignorance about how the modern media works, that it initially appeared that Ms Wall had just completely fucked up. And she had, mistaking the PM's moves to crack down on social media fuckery with regulation of the actual news media, but Ms Wall has doubled down on her comments ever since, which means she probably means it.

In that case, if Ms Wall is concerned about duty of care in the media, she can probably take a look at the entire fucking history of journalism, which has been grappling with that whole idea since the whole thing started. The news media doesn't exist in a void, it's a part of the ongoing societal conversation about these very issues, and while that sometimes leads us all down the wrong path for a while, we soon course-correct onto a road of increased fairness, openness and balance.

It certainly helped that there are formal and legal processes to ensure that the news media isn't doing any harm - there are watchdogs that consider any and all complaints about broadcasts and websites and publications, and can order corrections and retractions.

And yet, while there are tens of thousands of news stories, written, printed and broadcast every year in this tiny country, only the slightest fraction require this kind of attention. That's because even after years of cutbacks and redundancies, there are still some experienced editors who spend all fucking day thinking about the shit Ms Wall is suddenly musing about, and are trying to strike the right balance in their daily output.

They're always thinking about the standards they have to uphold, and are always very, very careful with what they put out under their banner. Anyone working in one of the big newsrooms for more than a week knows that anything legally dodgy is always, always immediately checked with the lawyers before going to print, and that's just one level of care.

The weird thing is, Ms Wall is actually making a good point about social media, which has all the editorial oversight of a graffiti scrawl wall in West Auckland - actually less, because the council are excellent at quickly covering up cocks and swear words, while Facebook misses straight-up murder videos because the overworked and underpaid moderators at a warehouse in Buttfuck Idaho are taking a smoke break.

Companies like Facebook are facing some massive issues, and one of the big problems is that it still thinks of itself as a tech company, not a media company, and seems clueless when it comes to stopping the encouragement and broadcast of massacres around the globe, and this is absolutely something that needs to be looked at closely. It's not a fucking free speech argument, it's a fucking public health issue.

It would be easy to give Ms Wall the benefit of the doubt - she's been on the right side of a lot of good arguments - and believe that she can see the difference between news media and social media, but she doesn't really seem to know what the fuck she is talking about.

Unless she really does, and 'formal recognition' comes with any kind of government oversight, in which case, she can go get fucked. That doesn't end well for anybody.

- Margaret Tempest

 *Media Scrum would also like to note that the NZ Herald has finally pulled the pin on the paywall hand grenade and lobbed it into the public arena, and we would just like to say that good journalism is always worth paying for. We bitch about the editorial judgment on show at the Granny a lot, but really do wish them the very, very best. It's just a shame you can't mix populism with a paywall.

135. The importance of switching off

Professional journalists never stop being journalists, even long after they've clocked up their regulation hours for the week. When they are at dinner parties and the cinema and the pub, they never really switch off and are always listening for some new angle, or new contact, or new story, no matter where they are. You really do have to watch what you say around them.

It's an important part of the job, seeing something and asking a question about it in your personal life can blossom into something truly worthwhile. Most decent journalism doesn't have an origin story set in an office, it's out there in Real Life.

And then there are the ongoing stories, which journalists can work on for weeks, or months, or even years, going over and over things in their heads as they try to stack something up, waiting for that vital piece of information or source that could blow the whole thing wide open. Most of the thinking about that takes place outside office too.

And yet, it's vitally important that journalists – including writers, reporters, editors, producers and visual journalists - do turn off for a while, and stop thinking about this shit, because that kind of obsession can be extremely unhealthy.

It's especially important right now, because a lot of reporters have returned to the newsroom after covering the Christchurch mosque attacks, and need to be able to step away from the things they have seen and heard in recent days. Last month's terror attacks were one of the very worst things to ever happen on our soil, and the stories have been harrowing and extremely distressful for those who had to cover them.

Many of those reporters have been taking days off, and have fled to happy places to take their minds off things, but it's also incredibly important to be able to switch off at the end of every day, and not take some of this shit home with you.

In the first few days after the attack, some people were working 18-hour days, and for their own mental health, it was vital that they took a fucking break when they finally got home. Fortunately, there are a number of simple and well-proven ways to switch off from work.

There is the obvious example of spending time with close friends and family outside journalism, and rejoicing in the simple pleasures of life outside the newsroom, without being constantly reminded of the horrific events you had to deal with on the job.

If that's not really an option, there is always the traditional journalist method of getting completely fucking wasted. This has worked for years, with a long history of drunks and addicts in NZ's press history. This still works for some people, although many of us can't be bothered dealing with the inevitable hangovers, not when the job now has multi-media demands and long shifts.

The simplest way to get away from it all is to take some solace in entertainment - binge the fuck out of some Netflix, or watch a dumb Will Ferrell movie, or go to a cheap and nasty gig, or play video games all night long, or something. We've never had more access to more entertainment than we do right now, and it can be the best and easiest way to take your mind off the job.

(It's also important that you don't choose an entertainment that will remind you of the thing you're trying to escape – a game or movie with a lot of machine gun action would not help after dealing with the awful consequences of real-life gun use.)

Most of all, if you want to get away from it all, just stay the fuck off all social media, because you'll never escape the news that way. It's surprisingly easy to switch it off for a while and you can always quickly catch up again when you're back on the clock.

As a profession, we do have to take a close look at these things, but we also have to know when to step the fuck back, or this can really have an impact on our lives, both professional and personal.

Some of us are still fucked up from covering the Christchurch earthquakes, years after the disaster, because we forgot to take time out, and that event didn't have the added horror of man's inhumanity to man. Switching off is essential, for everybody's well-being.

- Ron Troupe

134. 'You do not fuck the future, sir, the future fucks you'

It's been a hectic month, and the Media Scrum crew haven't had time to have a proper moan about anything this week. Instead, we'll just leave this message for those in the cheap seats, who still don't understand why we sometimes have to name the Christchurch terrorist:

It's surprisingly easy to write the vast majority of the stories about the appalling attack on the two mosques without ever mentioning the name of the motherfucker responsible for it. A focus on the stories of the victims and survivors, as well as the rapid-fire legislation on gun control coming down the line, and we can help ensure that the fame that the dangerous fool wants is denied as much as possible. We don't have to make a big deal out of it, we just don't need to name him.

That said, it is still very important that we name the motherfucker in any and all court stories over the next few months, for two distinct reasons.

The first is that justice must be seen to be done - especially in this case, above all other cases - and there can be no ambiguity about the legal moves at all. Leaving out the name creates wriggle room for harmful and idiotic conspiracy theories, and none of us need that shit right now. It must always be absolutely clear who is facing the full weight of the law.

The second reason is that every story that is told about this case becomes a statement of historical record, and while the archiving of digital news stories is woefully inadequate these days, some stories will survive for years and decades to come. And they will become crucial as the entire event is analysed and studied, to understand how this terrible tragedy occurred, and how we stopped it ever happening again.

It might give you all the feels to deny the killer the fame he wants, but if we're ever going to learn anything from this shit, we need to name the one responsible for it for the record.

We're sorry, but history doesn't give a fuck about your feelings.

Love,
Media Scrum