33: Die, author, die

If you're an aspiring journalist, sending in examples of your work to a potential employer, you really need to offer up more than first-person pieces that don't say anything except how windswept and interesting you are, because everybody else is already doing that.

Trying to stand out in the crowd with some kind of wacky 7000-word 'I ate nothing but raw honey for a month and look what happened to me' think-piece is guaranteed to sink you with all the rest, who are all doing the exact same shit. They can be funny, and detailed, and even moving, but news organisations are already full of opinions, what they need are writers who can keep themselves out of the story and just tell it straight.

This is not just a generational thing - the young reporters only have these resumes full of 'look at me, look at me' pieces because they haven't had a chance to work in an environment that offers anything else. There are just as many similar pieces from Generation X and baby boomer writers, who are also keen to step out from behind the byline and let us know how they feel about absolutely everything.


A lot of the first-person pieces come with the very best of intentions - there are always a lot of 'how it felt to cover' columns after any major event like an earthquake or fire or other natural disaster, and they can be illuminating, but can also get stuck in cloying sentimentality, or desperate attempts to be profound.

And some people really do find it cathartic to express what is happening in their lives through the medium of the mass media, and we can't hold that against them, even if we can't always understand what they are getting out of it.

There are even places where the first-person wankathon has a vital place. The travel section of the newspaper depends on personal experience, and a bit of context can help with basic criticism and reviews.
So these things can be interesting. But they can also be cynical attempts to build a brand in a media world, as the loudest and most boorish voices always seem to fall on their feet, while competent, industrious professionals do the actual work, don't give a shit about the recognition, and are overlooked.

Maybe it's an old-fashioned conceit that the author of a story with any kind of news substance should stay right the fuck out, and let the facts, and people involved, speak for themselves. No feels, no personal emotions, or you're no better than the master banter artists on the telly.

It's social media and blog culture seeping through into news. Nobody actually reads blogs anymore - and yeah, we get the fuckin' irony here - but nobody needs to read them because all that personal bullshit is in the paper, and on the TV and radio news shows.

You can still raise awareness of issues without getting directly involved - journalism is all about finding the right person to talk to for a story. Instead, the weekend supplements are full of more and more stories from writers  about the pains of a family member, or how it feels to lose someone you love.

And while they are sometimes beautifully written, they can never escape that waft of narcissism and over-familiarity. The writer is not your mate, and you don't have to care about their sad, contemplative or wacky adventures.

- Ron Troupe

32. They took her job

There is an ongoing joke in South Park, where the worst thing that can happen in the eyes of the white trash on the show is when somebody 'took his job'! There ain't nuthin' worse than that, and it sparks an involuntary squawking reaction, when those characters on the show learn that somebody has been fired.

Losing your job is a terrible thing, and can totally fuck up your life. Nobody likes it when factories are closed down, or businesses go bust, and hard workin' folk are kicked out on their arse. Unless they're fucking journalists, of course. Fuck those guys.

Oh sure, there are plenty of furrowed brows when there are mass layoffs at the biggest media organisations, (although several TVNZ reporters had to go on Twitter last week and remind some smartarses that they are making fun of actual people whose lives have been turned upside down by the latest round of redundancies), but if you read too many comments or tweets or other unasked-for bollocks, people should be fired all the fucking time, for the smallest of reasons.

Leave a typo on a headline for 30 seconds, and someone will tell you that you should be fucking fired. Misspell a name, and someone will tell you that you should be fucking fired. Write a story criticising anything, and someone will tell you that you should be fucking fired.

It's not confined to just journos, of course. Any kind of job that is even partly in the public eye is up for that kind of scrutiny – sportspeople, politicians and big business leaders are always fending off that kind of criticism. They all, of course, get paid significantly more than reporters, and always have some kind of golden parachute, because they have jobs that factor that risk of instant dismissal into their remuneration packages, while journos are kicked out on their arse, and have to instantly scramble about for another low-paying gig.

But heckling for some journo's head after they have made a genuine mistake is both mean and counter-productive, because human beings make mistakes. It's what we do, and it's the ability to  learn from mistakes that makes us better human beings. If you keep fucking up, then you're a lost cause, but you'll never get anywhere in this life without making some kind of embarrassing and shameful screw-up.

This was seen last year, when a TV3 journo lost her job after making an awful mistake at a Reserve Bank lock-up. She was duly humiliated by her peers after messing up decades of trust between the Reserve Bank and the wider media, but she wasn't given a chance to learn anything, because she was shit-canned from her job, even though there were plenty of more experienced hands through which that information leaked out.

Nobody learned anything. Nobody ever fucking learns anything on a scorched earth policy.

There will never be an infallible system, thick futurists predict a time when it's all aggregated by automatic systems, but technology isn't going to save journalism, because it can't learn from its fuck-ups like human beings can. Consistent incompetence should never be acceptable, but we've got to give people the chance to make their own mistakes.

- Katherine Grant

31: "It's not that big": A story of the Twitter

In the immediate aftermath of the tragic and horrific earthquake that hit Christchurch one Tuesday lunchtime in February 2011, nobody outside the quake zone had any idea of how bad it really was. Within minutes there was talk of massive damage, and terrible loss of life, and entire buildings that had collapsed in on themselves, but nothing was confirmed.

If, in those first few minutes, you went to Twitter and did a simple search of quake-related terms, there was, as always, plenty of whispers and misinformation. A lot of the Christchurch mobile and internet network crashed, and the locals were too fucking busy making sure their fucking loved ones were okay to tweet their feelings about it.

So one of the very first tweets made about the Christchurch earthquake was from some numb-nuts well outside the stricken area, who had to get in first and make the stunningly thick and crass observation that the magnitude of the earthquake "wasn't that big", and Christchurch should harden up.

This tweet was written and sent out into the world at the same time that people were being slowly crushed to death in the CTV building, and as hundreds of people across the city were still to find out that their loved ones weren't coming home again.

That tweet was quickly swept away in a tide of digital history, lost beneath thousands and thousands of tweets full news and information about the quake, and pleas for help and good wishes. But some of us still remember that early tweet, and we hope the dude who wrote it still remembers. (and yeah, we're not naming him here, mainly because we've totally forgotten his name, but of course it was a fucking guy.)

We hope this quick tweeter has gone to bed every night in the six years since, thinking about how much he regrets making that post, and what a fucking tool he looked like for saying something so monumentally dumb. We hope he still cringes at the memory, and lives with the certainty that just because you can say something first, doesn't mean you fucking have to, and maybe you should hold off with your brilliant fucking observation, before you ram your foot into your mouth and suck on the heel.

He probably doesn't. He probably hasn't ever given it a second thought. But we can hope.

Twitter remains an invaluable news-gathering source, a useful method of direct communication, a haven for top pun-work, and a useful glimpse into the head of your favourite people.

But after six years, it's still also full of the kind of casual insensitivity of that first earthquake tweet, and this could be seen even today with the awful attack in Westminster, after which twitter was flooded with accusations, paranoia and sheer bullshit. 

And that still makes Twitter the lowest form of media expression. Where goes Twitter, so goes society, but we don't have to fucking like it.

- Steve Lombard

30: It's the hours, it's always the hours

Journalists don't get into it for the money - even before revenue streams started drying up faster than your mum, it's never been a highly-paid profession. There are a few at the top of the media pyramid who do very nicely indeed, but even some of the most glamorous and dashing reporters in the country still have to take the fuckin' bus to work.

And that's okay - we all got into this business knowing this fact, and if it really does bother you, there is always work in PR or comms, where they'll pay you loads to hate yourself.

Instead, you can work for shit money in a profession that is, in general, loathed by the public who consume it, and that lack of financial remuneration is nicely balanced out by all the hate tweets and moans about your work.

Still, money is definitely one of the main  reasons for the profession's deplorable employee retention rate - a journalism class of 30 students will be usually have no more than three or four of them still working in the news media a few years later - but it's not the only reason.

It's the hours. It's the awful, awful shift work, that destroys any kind of decent social or family life.

There are a lot of regular nine-to-five jobs in the news media - if you're not dealing with daily, breaking journalism, you can pick your hours to suit. Freelancers set their own working routine, it's easier for magazine journalists to be working when everybody else is working, and business journos, in general, get to do business hours.

But the news isn't always that convenient, and happens at the strangest times, so news reporters have to do some weird fucking hours, to fully cover the day. So do sports and entertainment journos, doing a job that looks light and easy, but is far from a cushy gig, requiring coverage of games and events that run long into the night.

There are some good things about shift work - if you're in the big cities, you get to avoid the traffic that clogs the roads; if you're starting at some ungodly hour of the morning, you get the afternoon to yourself; and weird hours do often work for a lot of young parents who can use early or late shifts to save costs on child care, make a little scratch and interact with other adults.

But it also fucks you up. In a surprising twist, journalists are human beings who actually like spending time with their loved ones, not having to work weekends, or sticking around the TV studio until after midnight because the Monday Night movie ran long, or getting up at a time when all the cool party kids are heading home for the night.

They're working through holidays, and while the rest of the world sleeps, and get bored on their days off on a weekday, because everybody else is doing normal hours.

And it's not just working unusual days or starting at awful times, it's being shifted around all over the day - many of the reporters in the big newsrooms barely do the same shifts every day of the week, let alone every month.They're starting at 5am one morning, and then working on the late shift until midnight the next day (or, even worse, vice versa).

And all this doesn't just mess up your social and family life, it fuzzes up the brain. For a job that requires 100% brainpower, it's no wonder dodgy copy and inappropriate headlines are slipping through to the final product when the head feels like it's full of cotton wool.

Journalists aren't the only poor souls who have to get up and go to work at abnormal hours, and thankfully, they're not working with lethal machinery. But their work is extremely public, and judged by everybody else, who probably got a decent night's sleep last night. That horrible typo you laughed at online yesterday was probably written by some poor fucker who legitimately doesn't know what fucking day it is.

No wonder so many journos ditch the profession, and the promise of regular, normal hours. Some reporters are still doing these goddamn shifts after three decades in a newsroom, so it's not like they're about to change anytime soon.

You can always spot the new person on the comms team, when it's someone who has just finally given up their dream of working in proper journalism. They're always a bit wistful, but also calm as fuck, and not just because they got an instant pay-rise of more than 50% by switching professions.

They're calm because they're not sitting in a newsroom on a Saturday night, waiting for a police release to come through, or for a rugby result. They're with the friends, families and other loved ones. Like a proper person.

- Steve Lombard

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29. Battered by all the banter

There is still good, strong and watchable TV journalism in this country, but it's expensive as fuck. Getting reporters and camera-people to the scene, getting the pictures, looking professional, giving them the time to really dig into a story – that shit all costs serious money, and ain’t getting any cheaper.

Banter, however, is free, and cheap laughs can be seen as a viable alternative to grim and depressing news from reality. Having the hosts of your news shows talk shit for a while, and commenting on the news of the day, and offering up their very own hot takes, is the easiest form of TV journalism there is, and you don’t have to send anybody out into the field for it, it can all be done from the comfort of the studio.

Okay, technically speaking, having the hosts of a news show banter among themselves does cost money, because the ability to appear on television without looking like a total spaz-cock is actually a skill you have to pay proper money for. Joe Fuckstick, sitting at home, might think it looks easy, but that's because these people are paid to make it look easy.

But as more and more news time on our biggest networks is sucked into banter, it all gets a bit fucking tiring, with desperate attempts to gather LOLs and likes, rather than inform, and the more you let the TV show hosts ramble on, the more likely something will go viral.

Good banter still has a place, it's still infinitely preferable to dead air, and there is always a place for it – live cricket commentary desperately needs good banter artists to keep things moving during five days of slow, turgid results. And Paul Holmes used to spout all sorts of shit before his current affairs show wrapped up, and for all his faults, he was a fucking master at filling in the time when the show unexpectedly ran 60 seconds early.

But instead of informing the audience of what is actually happening, things like the Breakfast shows and the 7pm current affairs shows give almost equal time to the reckons and feels of the hosts as they do to the story they're talking about, and that can get mighty oppressive.

The regular news shows at 6pm and later in the day are fairly banter-free – there might be a few seconds in the handover to the sports or weather crew, or the quick remark about some brave penguins or something similarly soft, but they're onto the next item quick smart. Single-host shows - like the late night shows, TVNZ's lunch bulletin, Prime's 5.30pm hit and the forthcoming 4pm daily bulletin on Three that is starting next week - are the best for straight-up news injections.

Which is only right and proper – you don’t need to know what Mike McRoberts thinks about that last story. He's unlikely to have something radically new to say, and his opinions on the stories he presents is, frankly, none of your fucking business.

But there is so much of it now on the television. Radio was lost to the banter battle a long time ago, many commercial radio slots - especially in the morning - are nothing more than mad opinioning, but more and more TV is becoming a banter factory.

It's especially disappointing when there are often actual news stories on these shows. The 7pm crews have some pretty fucking dedicated reporters, editors, producers and camerapeople doing the hard yards, but their stories aren’t often much longer than a regular news report, before slamming back to the studio for the latest 'well, actually' from Mike or Kanoa.

It's easy when you've got the right personalities around the desk (even if it can fucking hard to get that right mix in the first place), but making the stars more important than the news also exposes a lack of depth, the search for laughs and all that endless fucking cross promotion can feel forced and be tiring as hell, for everybody involved.

We just see so much time going into laughs and opinions, and no time for the exposing of truth and injustice. Politicians are grilled for a matter of seconds and coverage of the big news events doesn't go much further than the surface facts, before it shoots back to the studio and some more talk.

We're not at the stage of the 24-hour overseas news channels, which have refined banter and bullshit to artistically gross levels, with the reliance of idiot pundits exposing all the worst the media has to offer the world, but we're going that way. Unless we shut up and listen for a change.

- Katherine Grant

28. It's tougher than it looks on the TV

Talking and walking is one of the easiest things in the world. Talking and walking when hundreds of thousands of people are watching you is one of the hardest, because everybody is fucking looking at you and all your tiny tics.

There are plenty of shitlickers out there who always sneer at TV journalists and presenters, amazed that they get paid to stand still and talk into a camera. Anybody could do that, they will boorishly explain, usually at great length.

These idiots can fuck right off. TV reporters have nice smiles, great coats and lovely hair, but they're still tough sons of bitches. They face pressures that are unique even in the media world, and are still producing outstanding content every single day.

TV journos are sent out to do a live cross in fucking gales whenever shit weather hits the country (possibly the worst job in all of journalism), they have to stick their cameras in the face of everybody they talk to, and they have to find hours of b-roll to fill their reports. They also have to take shit from gutless wonders who criticise their appearance from the anonymous safety of their sticky keyboards.

And when they do come up with a corker of a report, nobody fucking notices, and are more likely to complain that a reporter's jacket is ugly, or they didn't pronounce a place name properly, or that they are speaking, god forbid, in their own accent. And if they make any kind of mistake during a live broadcast, everybody is going to see it, especially when there are plenty of arseholes willing to record and share their shameful fuck-ups with the rest of the world on YouTube for cheap LOLs.

Or you could do something great, and everybody will be distracted by something else going on in the company, because everybody likes to gossip about the people they see on teevee. Look at the fantastic series on violent crime that Lisa Owen did last year, which came out the same week Mediaworks lost Barry and Weldon. There was tonnes of talk about what Hillary would do next, but nobody talked about the actual journalism that was going on.

And god help you if you're a young, keen reporter with good teeth and blond hair – you'll automatically be labelled a bimbo, no matter how good your stories are. People will constantly tell you not to judge a book by its cover, but it's okay to judge a reporter by their jacket.

There are still definite issues with TV news, such as a propensity for unnecessary live crosses, the inability to really cover much more than the day's biggest stories, and the usual penny-pinching and newsroom-shrinking. They can also annoy the piss out of their colleagues in other media, with their devotion for getting the perfect shot on camera often getting in the fucking way of everybody else.

But even though they have been cut back to bare bones, the teams at TVNZ, TV3, Prime and the local regional stations are putting in some long fucking hours every day to produce a huge amount of new content, and still finding an audience.

The audience is being chipped away slowly, but not as fast as the print readership is falling. Print journos sometimes sneer at their televisual counterparts as superficial and pushy, but they could learn some lessons from behind the forced smiles.

- Katherine Grant

27: Behind the byline

Considering they are just a few letters at the top of a news story, bylines can be a surprisingly complex affair.

It's easy enough to earn a byline. Rewriting a press release or dashing out a few lines for some breaking news isn't enough, but you just have to produce something new – create something. Talk to somebody, or analyse some data for a new conclusion, and you get to see your name in print or light.

Journalism is not a highly paid profession, and it ain't getting any fucking better anytime soon, so getting a bit of credit is always welcome. It can make you feel like it's all fucking worthwhile, and all your friends and family can see it.

At their best, the byline becomes something of a brand, and a mark of quality. Produce enough good work, and people will recognise it, and look for more of it under that name. The byline assures the consumer that this is something that is worth a bit of attention.

But they also don't tell the whole story, and there is a strange responsibility that comes with the credit. The name at the top is the one who takes all the blame for everything to do with a printed or online story, even if their story has been considerably rewritten by editors, or given a headline and photo that have absolutely nothing to do with the writer. A dozen people could get their hands on the story, and only one gets the blame.

It also goes the other way - reporters regularly get credit for something that was completely missing from the original copy. A good sub or editor may completely restructure a story, give it a new intro, or even re-angle the whole thing, without any input from the credited person. The behind-the-scenes folk aren't in it for the glory, but it can still hurt when everyone on Twitter congratulates somebody else for their brilliant headline.

The other big issue behind the byline is that they are so easy to fuck up, especially when online editors can clone a previous story on the same subject, without checking to make sure it's the right person. Or a story that has been continually updated during the day might still bear the original writer's name, even if nothing is left of their work. It's easy enough to fix, but also unfortunately easy enough to fuck up in the first place.

So journos take the credit and the blame, and the byline is usually fully deserved and recognised. But like so much in life, they don't always tell the whole fucking truth.

- Ron Troupe

26. A (very) brief guide to common errors

When it comes to learning a lesson on style, punctuation or grammar, there is nothing better than a crusty old sub-editor barking across a crowded newsroom and humiliating a reporter because they keep putting the comma in the wrong fucking place. Deep, cringing embarrassment always works!

Unfortunately, the targeted destruction of the sub-editing class by news media management - who somehow couldn't see the value in making sure everything they printed was actually correct - means there are a lot less subs to moan about this shit.

As a result, there are more and more tiny little errors creeping through. Not big, factual mistakes, just small errors of language, grammar and punctuation. Here are 11 examples, which you'll be seeing more and more of in the future, as those crusties fade away:

(Note: this mainly applies to print and web journalism, where all you've got are the printed words. Nobody in broadcast journalism needs to give a fuck about where the apostrophe will go when it's only going to be spoken out loud. There will also be differences in pure style between newsrooms - on whether there is a capital G in Government, or on honorifics - and every single place has a different way of doing the percentage sign - in one it'll be %, in another it'll be per cent, and a third will be percent. Nobody ever agrees on this.)

It's its, not it's: A wayward apostrophe in a three-letter word is one of the most common little errors you'll see. The clumsy, confusing and contradictory rules of English language mean the apostrophe only goes between the T and the S when you are shortening 'it is'. It's not the possessive - ie 'the company found that it's products was killing all the ducks' is wrong, wrong, wrong. It's the same deal for 'let's' and other smooshed-together small words - if the sentence makes no sense when you substitute 'it is' for 'it's' as you read it, you're on the wrong path, pal.

An amount is never 'over', it's 'more than': There are not 'over 100 shitgibbons pooping into their hats', there are always 'more than 100 shitgibbons pooping into their hats'. Even though the usual rule of written news is that one word is always better than two, 'over' should always be turned into 'more than'.

There is no ten, and no 9: All numbers up to 10 are written out as words, everything 10 or more is in numerals. Small exceptions include when you're writing up small numbers with decimal points, or - for some reason - when talking about a child's age (they're always a '7-year-old').

Approximately isn't around, it's about: If there isn't an exact number of something, there aren't 'around 5000 dildos', because that means there are a hell of a lot of dildos lying around you. There are, of course, 'about 5000 dildos'.

You can't collide with a stationery object: Two things have to be in motion for a collision, so a car can't collide with a tree, unless the tree is being blown across the road, or is a fuckin' Triffid.

Every paragraph of speech doesn't need speech marks at the end of it: If there are multiple paragraphs of spoken text in a row in a story, there is no need to put speech marks at the end of any paragraph, except the first one. It all just flows. After the it's debacle, probably the most common little error seen on the big news websites.

Sewage passes through sewerage: This one is always easy to remember, because the little shit goes through the big pipe.

It didn't happen in the last year, it was the past: Saying 'the US has made some shitty decisions in electing their highest officials in the last year' is incorrect, because that implies that 2016 was the last year ever. It should be 'the US has made some shitty decisions in electing their highest officials in the past year' Then again, that demented piss-weasel in the White House is probably going to kill us all, so maybe that one is technically correct.

A comma in thousands: Any number under ten thousand doesn't have a comma, so you don't get things like '7,543'. After 10,000, go crazy.

You can't be killed after the fact: Headlines that tell you somebody has been killed after a gardening accident should be saying they were 'killed in the accident', or 'died after the accident'. Killing is in the now, you die afterwards.

Is it less than, or fewer?: Fuck, we always get this one wrong too, (and we're also screwed on the differences between affect and effect), and we can't find a sub to ask, so figure it out for yourself. Ask Stannis Baratheon, Lord of the Stormlands and the rightful heir to the Iron Throne of Westeros. Stannis knows the score.

- Steve Lombard / Ron Troupe

25: Position matters

As much fun as it is to news-shame, (and we all like to fucking do it), most news editors still have to offer up something they might personally turn their nose at. But unless they are ordered to by the powers-that-be, they don't have to make them the fucking lead story.

In this wonderful age of information overload, a lot of people now get their news through social media feeds, so only get to see the news stories that Facebook's faceless algorithms decide are worth seeing, or what their twitter-mates tell them to read and watch.

But there is still a place for the home page, and front page, and broadcasted bulletins, because that's where you find all the latest news, and it's got a bit of everything - local and global stories, and serious and silly yarns - and things you didn't even know you wanted.

News outlets are curators - distilling thousands of news stories that come down the wires, and from within their own newsroom, every day down to a few dozen, picking and choosing only the most interesting and most important, and putting them on their websites and pages and shows. 

And just like a goddamn Jane Austen novel, position matters. There still needs to be a lead story. It's obviously the first story chronologically on a TV or radio bulletin, or the big-ass story on the top left of the newspaper or web page (because people in western cultures always start reading from the top left).

News audiences have been properly trained to know the lead story is the most important news of the day - no matter what, that's the thing they need to know from the day's events.

That's why the lead story should always be the most important. It's what matters, it's the biggest story around right now, and while there is room for a bit of trash in the mix, you don't lead on it, for fuck's sake, because then you're saying that the nonsense is more important than the worthy work.

Stuff muddy the waters nicely with their big fuckin' picture on the left of the page, which is the lead story when there is a big enough event (with a great photo), but is often a haven for the most obvious of click-bait, with the site insisting that the secondary story at the top of the actual main story list is the real lead. But nobody is ever buying that.

Those Bachelor stories that are soon coming our way are harmless fun, but harmless fun is never the biggest story of the day. It remains to be seen if the NZ Herald and Stuff will go crazy and give millions of dollars in free PR to Mediaworks this upcoming season by putting this drivel in their most precious digital real estate, but it's likely they will.

The problem is, those stories get just as many fucking clicks when they are three or four stories down (especially when that kind of story has traffic that is 90 percent driven by social). They don't need to be the lead to do well, and it just harms the brand, trashing hard-fought reputations that have been slowly built up over decades.

Just following the numbers, and the mad whims of the general public, to decide what goes in the lead spot gets us all nowhere fast. There have got to be some goddamn standards set, and the lead story shouldn't be easy trash. Position matters, it's important, and it's being pissed away.

 - Steve Lombard