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

147. Free footage can still come at a cost

Serious car crashes on Auckland's motorway system are, sadly, a daily occurrence. Most of them are due to the usual shit, like drivers paying too little attention and using too much speed, and sometimes they're because some dopey arsehole is trying to escape the police by going the wrong fucking way.

Sadly, this is also a frequent problem - happening at least every couple of weeks - and unless they result in some terrible tragedy, they usually don't top the TV news bulletins, or lead a website for most of the day.

Unless there is some great footage of the crash, and then all bets are off, pal.

This happened last week, with a fairly serious crash closing down a good chunk of the southern motorway for a couple of hours during a week. There weren't any serious injuries, thank goodness, but there was some spectacular video of the head-on crash. It wasn't great quality - and was obviously filmed off another screen - but it showed the full impact in unflinching detail.

The origin of the video was pretty obvious. You could clearly see it had been taken off a screen at one of the police's control rooms, a breach of the wall of silence that usually surrounds police operations. The question of how it actually got leaked to the media is a bit rougher, but once one news organisation had it, most of them gleefully slapped it up on their websites, hiding the source of it all behind the generic 'supplied' tag.

Few of the newsrooms that used the footage seemed to consider that right from the start there was something dodgy about using it. It was obviously taken by a phone camera in a secure environment and after the crash had been shared with the world multiple times, the cops unsurprisingly put out a statement saying they were looking for who was responsible for the leak (with this twist in the tale usually appearing on the same story that was still using the footage in question with blithe indifference).

In other words, it really was great video, but somebody is going to lose their fucking job over this.

On one hand, the footage did serve a public interest - it literally showed the sickening impact and effects of a crash on a motorway in a way a thousand words could never capture, and is sure to stick in drivers' minds as they fang it on the motorway, and maybe making them a bit more cautious with their motoring.

And the video wasn't gross, or gory, or anything like that. You couldn't even really make out any details of the cars involved, just their fearsome impact. Our police force likes to hold onto information as much as possible, but it's totally arguable that splashing this across the news websites did actually serve a public good.

On the other hand, the poor soul who took that video, and almost certainly didn't expect it to be snapped up so forcefully by almost every organisation in the country, is definitely losing their fucking job over this. The news media makes a great show of protecting its sources, but it won't be hard for the cops to figure out who was in that secure control room at that time, and they're up shit creek without a paddle.

And they can expect little help from the media companies that used the footage, and made money from it by slapping ads in it. They're hardly likely to share any of that revenue with the person who will be getting by without a paycheque for a while.

There were a couple of newsrooms that didn't touch it, but that was probably because they couldn't source it themselves, and still had enough self-respect not to just rip it off from a rival newsroom and claim they got it supplied like everyone else. But that restraint was more than overwhelmed by the big news websites that went hard on it, and led their site on stories related to the crash for several days (it's not like anything else was happening in Auckland last week, like, say, a huge generation-defining protest that causes severe disruption right round the corner from the country's biggest airport or something).

Which is all just a bit gross, because it wasn't a huge fucking story, it was the kind of thing that happens all the bloody time, and no amount of jaw-dropping video is going to change that fact.

It's hard enough getting vital information out of the police as it is, and this isn't going to help matters, especially when the cops are guaranteed to clamp down on the leaker, to deter a repeat performance.

All over a fucking minor car crash that looked impressive, but wasn't that important. Good job, everybody.

- Margaret Tempest

146. Rip offs and attributions: Clean your own house

News organisations have been ripping off the competition's stories for as long as journalism has ever existed, but the news media is still pretty fucking rubbish at dealing with it all.

Scoops are strange things - you want to get a story that nobody else in the world has, but you also need it to be picked up by other newsrooms, if it's ever going to have legs. Some extraordinary stories get broken every year that weirdly don't get any traction, because they're only really pumped by one organisation and nobody else really notices.

Most journos are usually quite happy for others to pick up the ball and run with it, as long as the original source gets its full attribution. You can't just say 'other media report', you have to name that place, and you should also try and throw a weblink back to the story that set everything off. It's only polite.

And for god's sake, don't put a bloody byline on there, unless you're actually contributing something substantially new to the saga.

This isn't very hard, and with newsrooms constantly trying to match everyone else's story, it's vital that you can trace it all back to the original producer, if only for issues of clarity, reducing the garbled whispers that come from endless reproduction. These rules are there for a reason and while they might be unwritten, everybody is going to remember you if you break them.

But it still isn't happening nearly as often as it does. A couple of weeks ago, one of the terrific journos at the country's biggest newspaper took a public swipe at the main opposition for failing to adhere to any of the basic rules of a matching story, and with good cause. And yet, at the same time, a different reporter at that opposition was accusing the newspaper of doing exactly the same thing.

It wasn't a case of 'whataboutism', it was just a coincidence that they both happened at the same time, but that repetition showed that it was an issue that was far from being resolved. (It was also the rare argument on social media where everyone involved had a decent point, even if - as usual - there was more hot air than action.)

Look, it's bloody easy to snipe at each other for doing something a colleague in your own newsroom is guilty of, but maybe we should be looking inside at our own actions, and focus on that, instead of spitting at the opposition. You're not going to properly influence people at other organisations - you might inspire them to do a better job of attribution, but you're just as likely to piss them off - but you can tell your colleagues two desks away from you that they should treat other people's stories the way you'd like yours to be treated.

Corporate culture absolutely frowns on ever giving your competitor any recognition, but at the very least, admitting that somebody else got the story before you did will give a moral high ground, and that kind of personal smugness always triumphs over corporate loyalty.

Besides, it's not like these corporations are ever loyal to you, as countless journos have discovered in the past decade or so, when years of long service was unceremoniously ignored and reporters dispatched from the business. Frankly, journos should be trying to keep on the good side of their counterparts at rival organisations, because you'll probably be working with them one day, and they'll always remember how you treated them.

It never takes much to properly attribute. While it's never as simple as this 600-word rant insinuates - some reporters will be chasing the exact same thing and will both have the same data, so it's not necessary to acknowledge the other work - but throwing in a link to a truly great scoop doesn't hurt anybody. 

Giving people credit where credit is properly due is always a good thing for everybody. You can throw shade at the opposition for doing that as much as you want, but you'll get more accomplished by taking care of your own house. 

- Katherine Grant

145. It's just a game, (and it's just a name)

The whole fuckin' country got very excited about the Cricket World Cup in the past week, with a fever sparked by an unexpectedly brilliant performance by the Black Caps in the semi against India, and fed by that extraordinary final. The team's performance - and especially the heart-breaking way they missed out on the world title - was proper news, leading the newspapers, websites and broadcast bulletins for several days.

There's nothing wrong with supporting your team, and getting excited about some scintillating sporting action, but there are limits to it all. After all, New Zealand seemed to have a limitless supply of grief and empathy to share in the wake of the Christchurch mosque attacks, but it swiftly ran out when people started suggesting that sport doesn't really fucking matter.

Sport certainly does matter, to a lot of people. It's very, very important to them, because they have their identity and sense of worth wrapped up in the sport they follow. It can be somebody's entire life, or just something to watch at the pub on a Saturday night, but most people are genuinely interested in the sports results to some degree.

And as we've seen in the cricket, sport is full of stories of courage and resilience and last-minute efforts, and while nerds might complain about it leading the news sometimes, the reporting on sport is a great and vital thing, offering illumination and entertainment as much as any other part of the news media.

This coverage is an essential part of the news diet, and a crucial offset to the doom and gloom of regular reporting. (If you're just consuming the court stories and road toll, you'll have a pretty fucking grim view of the world.)

And this goes right down to grass-root levels, and Stuff's fairly recent destruction of sports reporting at the district level is a goddamn tragedy, because the great story of sport is more than corporate interests and professional perfection, it's the mums and dads who are out there every bloody week to support their kids on the field, and cheer on their neighbours at representational games. They're the people that you need to be connecting with.

And ultimately, away from the individual stats and stories, sport is just a great big metaphor for everything, for humanity's struggles and the individual's opportunity to shine, of the importance of teamwork and the value of community, and all that can be genuinely inspirational stuff.

But it's still just a fucking metaphor. It's not life, and there are always more important things to be worried about.

If, say,  a sports player uses the wide platform given to them by their physical talents to spew out mental fuckheadery, with their narrow-minded ideology not even giving them the chance to see the harm they might be causing, they can expect to be called a fucking idiot, and nobody gives a flying fuck how well they run with a ball.

And if the local premier rugby team in the city where the mosque atrocities happened is named after ancient groups of Christian arseholes who specifically went out into the world to slaughter as many Muslims as possible, maybe it is worth having a goddamn discussion about that bloody name.

Anybody who wants to argue that the Crusades were hundreds of years ago, and so are not very relevant, can be ignored as a simpleton who doesn't have any sense of history or culture or society, and is actively ignoring the fact that no shithead is going to name a huge professional sports team The Nazis for at least a thousand years.

There's not much else to argue here - the Crusaders name has served the franchise well, but it's a valued history that only goes back to the start of the professional era, so there's no case for a legacy argument.

On the other hand, it's easy to argue for a name change while still supporting your local team, because it's easy to have a sense of priorities, and realise that that name now sends a horrific message to people in your own community who have been brutally attacked.

And it wouldn't diminish the legacy of a team that were one of the very best professional sports teams in the world - it won't undermine the great things achieved by men like Blackadder, McCaw, Carter, Mehrtens and so many more. Those records stand for all time, even if it's under a name that might not exist anymore

The Crusaders rugby team could had a chance to send a message to the world, that they can change with the times, even if iditotic polls argue for the status quo (the fears of the minority should never, ever be dictated by the mob), but decided to put it off with a cowardly promise to look at the issue next year. Or the next. Sometime.

(Maybe they still will, but it's as unlikely as England cricket declaring that the Black Caps should be co-champions - that might sense a message of insanely good sportmanship, which is unthinkable in today's winner-takes-all culture.)

The decision to put it off deciding on the Crusaders' future might have pleased the most pin-headed of their supporters, who can toast the move with their shit local beer, but they've shown the world that the deep and nasty racism that has always lurked in the shadow of the Port Hills hasn't gone fucking anywhere.

Just change the fucking name.  

So yeah, it's okay to cheer on the Black Caps in their improbable bid for the world championship, and okay to feel a bit robbed by that bullshit boundary rule and the fact that some batsmen are now apparently allowed to hit the ball twice, and it was worth the saturation coverage, because this country always judges ourselves by how we deal with failure.

But it's also important to remember that it really is just a bunch of grown adults chasing a ball around a field, and that while it's some heavy fucking symbolism, it's still just symbolism. Real life is always more important.

- Steve Lombard

Too fucking lazy

We're not too busy to bitch about anything this week, but we have been feeling pretty lazy about things. Normal service should resume next week. For sure.

Love,
Media Scrum