16. Good job, everybody!

The Canon Media Awards are coming up again soon, which means it's also time for the usual complaints about the news media masturbating over its own awesomeness, and getting high on the smell of its own farts.

After last week's effusive praise of a few random journos, it should be extremely clear which side of the argument this blog is on – we've got to congratulate each other, because no other fucker will. After all, it's not like we can rely on the public for it – at least 95 percent of the feedback from the public received by newsrooms are moans, complaints and general shit-talking.

It gets to the point that when people are nice about any kind of media coverage, it can actually be a little unsettling, like the disconcerting amount of praise that RNZ got for its recent coverage of the Kaikoura earthquake (although the sterling work of Vicki McKay, who was in the booth when the walls were shaking shortly after midnight, particularly deserves all the praise that was shoveled her way  – listen to that moment when she is a few seconds into the shaking, and she catches her breath, and then swallows it, keeps calm and carries on – a moment all broadcast journalists aspire to).
 
According to one of the main characters in Whiplash - a movie about jazz drumming that actually manages to be tense and dramatic - the worst thing you can tell somebody is that they're doing a 'great job', under the awfully misguided belief that only great suffering creates great creativity. But it should be noted that the person who vomits this philosophy is a total fucking psychopath, and destroys a much younger person's life for the sake of a fucking drum solo. In the real world, that kind of brutal deconstruction just isn't necessary to produce great work.

There might have been plenty of old school Whiplash-type bastards in newsrooms in days gone past, but with the kind of workloads journos operate under now, and the desperate need for all parts of the newsroom to work together, they're fading away. Because if you act like an arrogant cock, you're just going to lose the respect of your staff, and word will quickly get around that you're a nightmare to work with. 

Especially when you're working in a job that is so totally in the public eye, and so completely inundated in spite. Every reporter is subjected to ignorant and nasty trash talk at some point, and it's a daily goddamn ritual for the really good reporters, (although they can rest in the knowledge they are on the right track, if they're annoying people that much).

In that kind of environment, especially with the appalling pay rates and diabolical shift work, the tiniest bit of praise can go a long fucking way.  And if nobody else is going to do it, we're going to do it ourselves, and anybody left sneering at all the self-congratulating can go get fucked.

Because the appreciation of your peers is such a sweet drink, and congratulations from people who know the unique pressures and difficulties of the modern newsrooms really do make a difference. Sometimes it's a public declaration on an anonymous blog run by a bunch of unknown shitheads, and sometimes it's a simple gesture, like the way Simon Collins personally congratulates a fellow reporter at the NZ Herald with a warm handshake for cracking a great story.  It's always nice to know you're appreciated.

Sometimes the praise can be a little peculiar - the Canons sometimes throw up strange results, and give terrible columnists undeserved kudos, or actually think a callous boofhead like Whale Oil runs the best blog in the country, but an award, or even a nomination, can mean a lot to an individual journo.

Besides, there are awards and ceremonies for every goddamn industry - even the country's hardware stores compete to be the best among their peers - so any complaints about the insular nature of journos praising journos can be easily ignored. We all like to be loved

Next: Back to moaning about the scum.

- Steve Lombard

15. More journos who get the job done

This is easy. We could do this all day long.

Daisy Hudson, Timaru Herald reporter: So good that her stories keep getting ripped off by the bigger news organisations (usually without getting the proper credit), Hudson is one of dozens of young, keen reporters at NZ's smaller newspapers, but shows us all how it is done. She gets great stories out of famously tight-lipped Timaruvians, (and puts up with some bullshit from them), finds terrific new angles on old chestnuts, and can actually say 'Timaz Hard' without sounding like a total dork, (this is a real skill.) Definitely bound for bigger things, enjoy Hudson's tales of small town shenanigans while you can.

Todd Niall, RNZ Auckland correspondent: New Zealand's greatest living media assassin, Niall's silky smooth voice, cherubic face and frankly alarming vest sweaters hide a fiercely analytic mind and the fearlessness to ask the hard questions about life in our biggest city. It's all smiles and polite talk, but if you're in local government and hiding the truth about something, Niall will get it out of you, sliding in the blade without you feeling it. Like all good hitmen, he's appropriately dispassionate, and he will take on either end of the political spectrum, and as an occasional presenter on Morning Report, stepping in for Guyon Espinier, (a slightly flashier news hitman), many of his interview subjects may have thought they were getting off lightly, only to get a journalistic bullet in the head.

Susie Nordqvist, Newshub presenter: Mediaworks has a small and hugely solid team of news presenters, fronting up on the big events, day after day, week after week, and none of them get enough credit for their fine work. Led by noted silver fox Mike McRoberts, the team of Hayes, McRae, McNeil, Shepherd, Suo, Hipkiss and Davies are all professional as hell. But Nordqvist is a brilliant back-up, stepping in to randomly present the late news, or taking on the big desk at 6pm over the shitty holiday break, while everybody else is at the beach. She has a solid reporting background, both for TV3 and print publications like the Ashburton Guardian, and she always does a terrific job fronting the news - comfortably, calmly and coolly selling the big events of the day, dealing with sudden, breaking news with apparent ease, and pronouncing the name of the latest tennis superstar from Bukfukistan perfectly. Not as easy as it looks.

Sophie Ryan, Herald online business editor: Ryan has proved to be a solid business reporter on the Herald's business website for a while now, with a particular skill for backgrounders that put everything into context, no doubt helped by working on the regular daily news beat for a number of years. Ryan might be the most one of the ridiculously upbeat journalists in the whole damn profession, but also has a keen news sense and a steely determination to get the real story. As part of a general revitalisation of the Herald's business world, which has also seen the similarly energetic Hamish Fletcher take on the main business editor role, she recently stepped up to take on the job of online business editor, and she is just the kind of keen mind to give that section of Granny's world a good kick up the arse.

Harkanwal Singh, data editor, NZ Herald: A lot of media companies like making a lot of noise about their commitment to data journalism, without really knowing what they're doing, and blunder ahead with half-arsed pie charts. But the NZ Herald is well ahead of the pack, thanks largely to the genuinely pioneering and focused efforts of Singh and his data team. His interactives and charts and figures always have a real substance to them (with the generally excellent Herald reporting team often digging up the data themselves), and can be addictive as hell when you get to really drill down into it. Numbers and charts have never looked more solid or more sexy, and the Herald's efforts in this arena are truly world-class, so it will be fascinating to see what Singh whips up next.

We could go on and on, and rave about Checkpoint producer Bridget Burke's strikingly good ability to find great talent, (John Campbell's secret weapon, beside his bottomless empathy, remains the sharp people - and women in particular - who work behind the scenes of his shows). Or praise Rob Kidd's wry and honest court stories for the Otago Daily Times, or pay genuine tribute to Henry Cooke's gargantuan efforts on Stuff's live blogs over the past few months, or respect to ace TVNZ reporter Kaitlin Ruddock's incredible ability to do a live cross with a long fringe in Wellington wind.

There are so many terrific reporters and editors and producers that we could add to this list, and if we tried a little harder, we could have avoided being so fucking Auckland-centric with our list. (It's bad enough finishing off with such effusive praise for the Herald with the last two examples, but that's what happens when you go alphabetical.) We haven't even touched on the massive pool of amazing camera-people, photographers and other visual journalists in this country, with sharp eyes from one end of the country to another. We've also ignored some brilliant freelancers, and haven't listened to the crucial regional radio people, who do an essential job.

Rest assured, there are news people at newspapers, magazines, radio stations, TV outlets and digital ventures that deserved to be just as honoured, and we just wanted to give a shout out to a small fraction of our favourites, as examples of the incredible professionalism of many modern journos, and we just hope they're not embarrassed by the adulation.  We're all taking shit from the public - and even other journos - every goddamn day, but the odd kind word never hurts.

14. Journos who get the job done

This blog has been wallowing in the misery of modern media for a while now, and in our last post, we were bloody mean about poor old Nigel Latta, who is probably trying his best. So maybe, just for once, we could try to be kind for a change, and name a small few of our favourite journos – reporters, presenters and editors who do  a bloody great job, day in and day out. They're not the loudest or the flashiest, and so don't always get the credit for the great work they do, but we love their work, and we are totally willing to sing their praises.

Miriyana Alexander, editor, Herald weekend papers: Daily newspapers are getting thinner, both literally and figuratively, but you can't beat the chunkiness of the weekend editions. Alexander brought new life to the Herald on Sunday when it was starting to get a bit stale a couple of years ago, and has brought the same vibrancy to the Saturday edition since taking that over as well in 2015, with a strong mix of dead-on spot news, long-form features and some great light fare. There is always something for everyone, and Alexander's editorial style is open to the broadest of audiences. Brunch just wouldn't taste the same without it.

Duncan Bridgeman, NBR news editor: When media careers at single organisations often last about as long as a spilled drink in a rainstorm, Bridgeman has been holding it together at the NBR for a long, long time. He's the one person who is most responsible for producing a great fuckin' business publication week after week, for the past decade. His writing doesn't dumb down the business talk, while still remaining totally accessible for a biz newbie, and he has helped hold the whole thing together as it made its faltering, and successful, steps behind a digital paywall. The most indispensable business reporter in NZ.

Hayden Donnell, Spinoff anti-sex editor: Blessed and cursed with the best deadpan face in the business, Donnell's writing style was stifled by the necessity of hard news at Newsworthy and the Herald Online, but has found full force at the slippery Spinoff. That news background gave him the skills to properly cover some of the crazy shenaigans at the Auckland council, but it's the eye for the absurd and the willingness to take the piss out of everything that is good and proper in the world that makes his writing so interesting. He's not just the country's go-to guy for ripping into the stupid shit the rich and powerful keep saying in this country, he's also a cracking songwriter as well. Why is life so hard, Hayden?

Kristin Hall, Seven Sharp reporter: It isn't always that easy to maintain your dignity when you're a reporter on one of the 7pm current affairs shows. If a producer isn't making you ride a environmentally-friendly scooter across town while wearing a Panda onesie to make some point about global warming, then you're on a show presented by loveable shitstain Mike Hosking. But Hall gets the balance exactly right – she's groovy enough to handle the inexplicably popular 'zany' segments of Seven Sharp, but tackles big topics with a kind of bemused empathy that can't be faked, is pleasantly open with her unhappiness when she doesn't get the answers that she needs, and is determined enough to stick with her questions until she gets them..

Mohamed Hassan, RNZ podcaster: An award-winning poet who has also put in the hours in some busy newsrooms, Hassan is a relatively recent addition to RNZ's burgeoning podcast team, but has already proved that he has got the goods with his Public Enemies series, which took an honest and open look at some of the prejudice and hatred that Muslims face in western society. Hassan's strengths are an obvious way with words and an unwillingness to give into po-faced judgements, tackling tricky subjects like his experiences in the customs queue with wry humour and a resigned shrug:



This is so easy. Five more on Thursday.

13. It's not about you, Nigel

Last year, walking opinion factory Nigel Latta took a few shots at the media for daring to refer to a murdered prostitute in Christchurch as a murdered prostitute in Christchurch. The media were objectifying the victim, said our Nige, and they were shaming her memory.

With a few patronising digs (including the classic 'just try, just a little bit, to think...'),  Latta laid out the case that the media were just being mean, and he backed it all up with some outrageously untrue assertions, and got eleventy-billion likes on social media, because everybody likes to be smug and think they're better than the nasty media.

But you don't look like a knight on your high horse, like you think you do. You just look like a freaking prat.
 
The first, most obvious point is that the only person who was making the claim that being a sex worker was shameful was Latta himself, drawing attention to it like a fucking prude. It's a legal profession, and the people who work in it have nothing to be ashamed of. The reporters covering the case don't have time for any puritanical judgement, they've got a 5pm deadline to meet.

The second point comes from one of Latta's blatant falsehoods, that if she was an office manager or an IT worker or a librarian, that wouldn't be part of the headline.

But if a significant amount of librarians in one town were getting assaulted and murdered in a relatively short period of time, then of course that would be the fucking angle. Christchurch has a tragic history of violence against sex workers - it's not just a one-off thing. They're obviously not safe in Canterbury, and while there is some unfortunate generalisations in lumping all of these poor victims under the same banner, it is an awful trend that needs to be examined.

Latta's sneering reached an apex of bullshit with his claim that there were loads of murders that didn't get that type of media attention, and they only paid attention this time because of the salacious aspect of the case, which is just so wrong it's mind-boggling. One of the great things about living in this shitty little country at the arse end of the planet is that murders are actually pretty rare, and they are all covered heavily, with few unsolved cases on the country's books. All these mysterious, unreported murders were just a figment of a limited imagination.

As a middle-brow expert on everything, Latta has a loyal audience who can't be bothered checking if he is actually full of bullshit or not, and it's easy to see why his tirade against the media received so many likes and support.

It's not just the obvious media bashing, which is fairly understandable, it's showing how goddamn sensitive you are. What a great fucking human being you are, because even though you don't give a fuck about the horrific fate of the poor victim, you can pretend you do with a Facebook like.

But this isn't a story about Latta's feelings, or his audiences. It's about the ongoing murders and assaults of sex workers in the city of Christchurch, and it's as simple as fucking that. Stop fucking grabbing these stories to show the world how much you care, it's not about that. It's bigger than you.

It's not always about you, Nigel, so back the fuck off.

12. CMS nightmares

The engine that keeps things chugging along behind the scenes at any media company is their Content Engagement System (CMS). It's the software that puts editorial content on a website, or in the queue for print or broadcast.

It's incredibly unsexy, and absolutely indispensable. It handles everything, and if the CMS goes down, the whole website, publication or broadcast goes down. If you're ever wondering why there has been an old breaking news banner across a website for more than three hours, or why absolutely none of the top stories in an online queue has changed in the past hour, it's probably because the CMS has shat itself, and there are a bunch of people at the other end wondering if a computer can be made to scream. (They can.)

Every media company has at least one, and they've all got deceptively charming names like Voodoo or Zen, and they do crap themselves more often than anybody would like. Many of them have been cobbled together over years, or even decades, with additions and patches stapled onto the framework of the software, built on spit and good intentions.

It's usually not even the IT dudes' fault when it all goes tits-up, even though they take the brunt of the shit for it. Considering how they are built, the fact that they don't always work is inevitable. Technology is a fucking beast like that.

And it's also because these things are expensive as fuck to build, and require significant long-term investment. For the boys in the boardroom, it's just not as exciting as grabbing the latest radio host for some dipshit column, but it's way more essential. The big media companies have invested significant cash into their CMS, but these 10-year-long projects can barely keep up with technological advances like more video and ultra-fast broadband, and the need to future-proof is an exercise in futility, because who knows where the hell we're going to be in a decade.

But a slow CMS is a slow website, and breaking news can be fucking shattered by a 20-year-old server busting a gut. A couple of years ago, Stuff did an ad campaign that suggested that if its staff didn't get breaking news up first, before all the other media organisations, they'd be chucked out the window ('Ha ha! Just joking about fucking killing you, people in our own company! But seriously...'). It was cheaper for Fairfax to put up four-storey tall banners in central Auckland proclaiming this threat, than it was to have a CMS that actually worked properly, which could have helped.

Sometimes, there can still be a delay of up to 15 minutes between something being entered into a CMS, as the system receives the information, processes it, goes away and has a cup of tea, a sneaky cigarette and a wank, has another cup of tea, gossips about the latest redundancies, has another wank, has another cup of tea, buggers about for a bit longer, and then finally puts it up on the website. This can be a very, very long 15 minutes to wait when all the shit is going down.

Companies are aware of these issues, and most of the major media companies have some sort of plans for a new CMS system, somewhere down the line. But most of us are still chugging along with these antiquated, wheezing and barely competent systems. They'll do for now, until suddenly they won't.

This might drive the end consumer crazy, but that's nothing compared to the journos at the other end, who just want to update the fucking story, and get a bloody new picture up there. Fuckin' zen, indeed.

- Katherine Grant

11. Fudge The Police

The news media and the police have always had a symbiotic relationship - with both sides getting something out of any interactions. The police can use the media to spread safety warnings, or to seek missing souls, or even, at the highest ideal, to show that justice has been done. And the media get strange and captivating stories of crime and punishment, which are still as addictive to readers now as they were in Dostoyevsky's day.

But the tone has shifted on the part of our local constables, and modern NZ police see their media colleagues more as parasites, always digging and trying to get a bit more information out of them.

Police still don't hesitate to use the media to tell the public about blocked roads, or missing kids, but they have followed the lead of general bureaucracy, and make reporters know that it's actually a privilege - not a right - to receive information from a public organisation in a free and fair society after all, and they should be thankful for what they get. Even if it's nothing.

This attitude has culminated in recent months with the New Zealand police's centralisation of their comms system, demanding reporters go only through designated hotlines, and actively blocking them from talking to the police officers who might actually have some useful information.

This has, unsurprisingly, proved a fucking disaster for journos, with an overall lack of accountability, and general frustration at the inability to get even the most basic of information, even if it's plainly important that this info gets out to the public as quickly as possible. Putting up a news story about an ongoing situation isn't just about the titillation, it's about the police's duty to share information.
 
It's especially bad on a local level, where a local cop might know exactly what the situation is, and can provide valuable information, but both sides have to spend an extra half hour going through fuck-knows-how-many intermediaries.

Even worse, there can be cases where a tiny bit of information spills out, sometimes on a release, sometimes on a goddamn tweet, but it's only enough information to raise more questions. And then police seemed surprised when they get a dozen calls at once from bemused and intrigued newsrooms, who need more that that.

A particularly pungent example of this was a police tweet that went out a year or so ago, which casually announced that several officers had been shot, but then there was nothing else. It was obviously something of concern, but it was more than half an hour before anybody even knew if these poor fuckers were even alive, or what was going on.

And sometimes, only putting out a tiny bit of information can actually do harm. An example of this was seen over this previous Christmas period, with an American motorcyclist at Mt Cook who went missing.

Half a day after the guy had been named, and a photo put out, police announced that he had been found - that's it, just found. The natural assumption was that he had been found safely, because this happens 20 times a week - police are looking for a kid or husband who hasn't been seen for a while, and they're almost always putting out an all clear soon afterwards. Any journo knows that a late afternoon release about some poor addled dear with Alzheimers wandering away from a resting home isn't worth even turning around into a story, because they will be found before they can finish the intro.

Unfortunately, police neglected to mention that the missing motorcyclist was actually found dead, an appallingly tragic outcome that could have been worth mentioning. Stories on local websites were duly updated to say he had been found, and the story had been bumped down online queues, as it was obviously a happy resolution. Otherwise they would have said something, right?

Right?

It took them 14 hours to mention this fact. The American's friends and family would have been using the vast resource of the internet to look to see what had happened to their loved one, and would only have discovered online stories saying that he had been found. And then it turns out he's actually dead. Sorry about that.

Police may argue that they were waiting to inform next of kin, but they had already revealed his name, and given everybody a photo. Just saying he had been found raised unnecessary hope that everything had been okay, and there was a fucking good chance those next of kin were going to see the online stories before anything else.

It didn't need to happen - they could have just kept their fucking mouths shut until they were fully certain of their information, and who really needed to know about it, or they could have just done the classic double-speak, of saying a body had been found in the search for the missing man, which doesn't confirm anything, but deeply indicates that things are not going to end well.

Instead, it came across as another example of NZ police deciding they knew best about the release of information, blindly following their own rules and regulations, instead of showing some fucking common sense.

Despite what your Uncle Clive reckons on Facebooks, journos do actually want to print the truth, and want the correct information, and it doesn't helped when they are blocked at the source. Police can use the news media to reduce soft speculation and create hard confirmations, and this half-arsed method of information-hoarding only creates the conditions for further misinformation and errors.

Things would work out much more nicely if everybody could work together on this, rather than resorting to bullshit power plays.

- Steve Lombard

10. The First Rule Of Journalism

“Like all ancient crafts and mysteries, journalism has its arcane laws. I'm about to tell you the secret, four-word First Rule Of Journalism. It is not, as you might have been led to believe, some righteous minglefluff such as 'Seek After The Truth' or 'Defend Our Precious Freedoms'. It is 'Fill The Fucking Space'. The ultimate point of journalism is to plug a hole on the page with whatever arseplasma you can find”.

- Malcolm Tucker

(Also, don't ever wave in public, because when the photo comes out, you'll look like a fucking Nazi. Deputy Prime Minister Paula Bennett should take note.)