40. We all think we're photographers now

The ongoing thinning of the ranks at news organisations has hit the picture desk particularly hard – entire teams of photographers and processors have been turfed out on their arses, leaving skeleton crews dealing with a massive workload.

And it has got massive. Even as the photography department is gutted, there is a far greater need for photographs to go with stories than ever before in the entire history of modern media. For web sites, every goddamn story needs a picture to go with it, leading to some use of stock images that is painful for all involved.

They’re not just necessary to fill the fuckin’ space, they’re also a vital component in the readership and success of a news story. Any online news editor can tell you that a story with a vibrant, interesting or crazy photo on it will always, always do better than something that has a generic stock image that has been used 27 times before. And they know that people like stories with pictures of faces on them, and they like pictures with fire and flames in them even more.

And yet, the picture desks have been decimated, if they’re lucky, and professional visual journalists are becoming more and more rare.

The chief executives and managing directors of the media companies cutting back on their picture resources have resorted to the easiest of arguments to justify it – they don’t need photographers, because everybody is a photographer now.

Everybody has a high-powered still and video camera sitting in their pocket. The explosion of the smartphone means that sort of technology is literally at our fingertips, and anybody on the scene of a developing story can snatch a snap.

This is, obviously, a great thing for newsrooms dealing with breaking news – after an initial round of stock images for a big event, there can be a deluge of photos, from both reporters who have been dispatched to cover it, and members of the general public who are willing to share their snaps with a media organisation. (Sadly, those who dream of getting rich by snapping a news event and flogging off their images will have to produce something truly outstanding to get any kind of money – almost every newsroom in New Zealand will balk at paying the average punter for any photo, unless it is incredibly good.)

But there is almost no argument that the actual quality of the image can vary wildly because, amazingly, taking great photos is a real fucking skill, and usually requires someone with expertise, experience and the proper equipment to capture the right moment.

Reporters who have been in the game for years might get an hour’s worth of photography training before being expected to get top-notch shots at every story they go to, and might be completely unable to get a photo that isn’t blurred, over-exposed or plain incomprehensible.

It’s not just a matter of creating an image that is stunning and beautiful, and capable of catching the eye when it’s floating on the sea of a major news web page, it’s a matter of capturing the right moment at the right time, in the right light.

Instead, professional news organisations are only too happy to look like foolish amateurs, with a desperate standard of ‘anything will do’. It’s another situation that is unlikely to change any time soon, when the overall feeling seems to be that anybody can take a picture good enough to share. They can't.

 -  Katherine Grant

39. We all think we're writers now

Even though the print industry is dying a long, slow death that it is even more bloody and painful than Mr Orange's gutshot bleed-out in Reservoir Dogs, and even though picture apps like Snapchat and Instagram are removing the need for anybody to actually talk to each other, we're still in a heavy text-based society.

We're messaging our nearest and dearest all day long, tweeting about our lunch, receiving and sending all sorts of emails every work day, or leaving long screeds on social media about both political and personal bullshit.

It's all good and useful and exciting and everything, and it also devalues the fuck out of the skill of actual writing, because everyone thinks they can do it now.

We all think we can string a few words together, and we forget it is a real skill that can be taught, and a skill that can actually be out of reach for many people.

It's not just the basics - not just the fact that writing clear, concise copy is absolutely essential in the modern media world - it's structuring a story, catching the attention of a reader or listener or viewer with something that is properly paced and put together.

And some people never learn. Some journos who have been in the industry for decades still have issues with little things like punctuation, grammar and putting events in the proper sequence, and produce some of the worst copy in the business, saved and cleaned up by dozens of editors over the years, because the most basic writing skills were always missing.

But there is also a feeling that telling stories through the media is not real work, a feeling that is only amplified by the general refusal to pay for news. If nobody is willing to pay for news, how can it be worth anything? The skill means nothing, especially when we can all string those few words together.

There are some media organisations which actually take advantage of this, and offer opportunities for regular folk to get their work in print by only offering little or no money, and promising that the writer will get 'exposure', because why would they have to pay somebody who actually has some writing skills, when everybody has those skills.

Still, you only have to read a few of the emails that come into newsrooms, moaning about the standard of writing and lamenting that they could do a lot better - to see the bullshit exposed for the stinky mess it is, because those emails are almost always terribly written, with gratuitous spelling mistakes and lots of fucked-up punctuation in a message that is just a few lines long (which doesn't leave much hope for anything longer than a spiteful message).

It's not just the news stories that suffer from this – all the creative disciplines suffer from it. Everybody thinks they are a better scriptwriter than the people who do the movies and TV they watch, and artists can spend their entire lives trying to convince the rest of the world, envious that they're not doing 'proper work', that their efforts have worth and value.

Putting words together ain't no thing, but putting them together in a way that makes a point, or makes a reader think about their place in the world - and doing it in a way that is even readable - is a lot fucking harder than it looks.

Everyone thinks they can do it. They can't.

- Ron Troupe

Pizza break!

It's been a rough week for the Media Scrum crew, who have all been knocked on their arse by working over Easter, moving house, and doing more of those shitty, shitty hours. So instead of some half-arsed thoughts about the deplorable state of everything, we're just going to kick back and eat some pizza.

And we going to put everything on it. It could be spaghetti, or pineapple, or little fishies, or ice cream, or coriander, or whatever the fuck we feel like putting on it. Don't let anybody ever tell you it's not a proper pizza, just because they don't like your choice of toppings. It's all proper pizza.

Like everything else in this life, pizza is always in the eye of the beholder.

-Katherine, Ron and Steve

38. An ill wind blowing

Most of New Zealand managed to dodge a meteorological bullet at the start of this long Easter weekend, with dire predictions about the devastating impact of ex-Cyclone Cook largely unfulfilled. There were fears it could be the biggest storm in fifty years, and could lead to widespread flooding and devastation, and could even see the Auckland Harbour Bridge closed down due to high winds, causing the entire Auckland traffic system to gridlock (worse than it usually does).
 
Of course, most of these worrying predictions did not come to pass. There was still some incredibly shitty weather, parts of the rain-soaked Bay of Plenty got another battering on Thursday night and some homes in Waikato were evacuated on Sunday after the local river burst its banks, but most of the country avoided the worst of it.

Naturally, it didn't take long for a plethora of brain-dead munters to blame the news media for over-reacting and hyping up the event, and for making a big deal out of nothing.

But what the fuck were the papers, websites, TV shows and radio bulletins supposed to do? Ignore the apocalyptic warnings coming from weather experts altogether? Should they have waited until there were bodies floating down Queen Street before saying anything? This kind of thinking isn't just fucking stupid, it's fucking dangerous.

After all, all news organisations have a duty to warn of potential danger, as much as report on what has happened. And if the goddamn experts are saying it's going to be bad, people need to know. If a butterfly in Dubai flapped its wings a different way, the notoriously fickle weather could have shifted slightly to the right, and there would have been cars blown off the Auckland bridge - this was worth warning people about.

Those weather experts, quite rightly, needed to be prepared for a worst case scenario. Because one day it will bloody happen, and there will be horrific carnage, and if anybody feels like they weren't duly warned, there will be justifiable hell to pay. We prepare for these things in case all the shit in the world hits a big fan, because to do otherwise would be criminally negligent.


It's also worth noting that for all the big news websites, the stories about the possible dangers led to a big spike in reader numbers, indicating that A) people actually did have a desire to know what the fuck was going on, and B) online editors were doing their fucking job, and to downplay any risks - or ignore the warnings entirely- would be a move that was both reckless and incompetent.

So all those who were weirdly disappointed that there wasn't human suffering and tragedy can shove that disappointment up their arse, while the rest of us breathe a sigh of relief. Yeah, it wasn't as bad as it could have been, so thank fuck for that.

This kind of dumb-arse thinking that only comes with hindsight is nothing new. It's behind the ongoing sneering about the Y2K bug - 17 years after the dawn of the new millennium, there are still shitheads moaning about the media over-reaction. But this totally ignores the fact that it took years of concern for tech-heads to actually do something about the problem, and if it hadn't been so incessantly highlighted, it would have been a massive fucking problem. No, there weren't planes falling out of the sky on January 1, 2000, but that was the result of years and years of effort, and the media spotlight on the issue helped avert the worst of the problem.

These legends of hindsight looked out the window on Thursday night and didn't see an almighty tempest rumbling towards them, so it's all the fucking media's fault (ignoring the huge winds and rains recorded in other areas). But the media is, quite rightly, going to ignore the shit out of them, and will continue to pump out warnings and advice. To do otherwise would just be fucking stupid.

- Ron Troupe

37. There's a human under that TV make-up

Earlier this week, Australian TV newsreader Natasha Exelby was caught by surprise when the live feed went back to the studio, and she went out on air playing around with a pen and looking bored. When she realised what was going on, she looked hilariously shocked, took a moment to compose herself, and then got on with the fucking job.

It's not a big deal in live television, this kind of thing happens all the time, and as embarrassing as it might seem for the professionals involved, it's never not funny. On-air live bloopers used to fade away into the ether, but now every live broadcast can be recorded, edited down to the purely funny shit, and shared with absolutely everybody else in the world. There are people in outer Mongolia right now who know who Natasha Exelby is.

It wasn't much of a surprise that almost everybody who saw the video thought it was hilarious as hell, because television news takes itself so seriously, and everything is so professional and direct, that when the lid is ripped off, it's always funny.

What was a little surprising was that the following reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Any kind of fuck-up by anybody in the media is usually greeted with fervent tut-tutting and moaning about a drop in standards, but almost everybody who saw this blooper was on Ms Exelby's side.

When it looked like the presenter might be losing her job over it, there was outrage, from both media colleagues and the wider public. Fellow news presenters, even from the direct competition, gave examples of their own terrible screw-ups. Even Russell Crowe chimed in to support her, and her employer rushed out to clarify that she was just being rostered off air for a while.

Usually, the sniping and sneering about some fuck-up is enough to force people out of their role, but this was the case of the exact opposite, where someone had a mortifying and embarrassing moment, and everybody wanted to keep her around.

It's so easy to think of the people professionally reading your news as total automatons, so to see someone react with a genuinely silly expression on their face is deeply humanising, and it's lovely to see there is still empathy out there for somebody in that situation.

It's so easy to forget that everybody in the media scene is an actual human being, and beneath the implacable features of the people reading the news on the telly, there are real people who are horrified, or amused, or sympathetic towards the stories they have to read out straight.

It's not just broadcast journos - reporters of all descriptions have to deal with some shit. They have to overcome horrendous feelings of intrusion to do death knocks, and hear horrific things during criminal trials that can't be shared with the rest of the world. Half a decade after the event, there are journos who are still genuinely traumatised by having to cover the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake, working on stories of grief and tragedy for months on end.

But all that needs to be suppressed for live TV, and while presenters and reporters go for the neutral tone, they don't always get there. And sometimes they're surprised by shit, and sometimes we all get to see that human beneath the make-up.

Maybe it isn't so surprising that everybody let Exelby's slip slide by, and stick up for her right to be a dork on TV. This is, after all, why we all love presenters like Hilary Barry and Judy Bailey, because they do always wear their heart on their sleeves, and while they tell the vast majority of the news with a straight face, they don't mind letting the emotion slip through. After all, they're only human.

- Katherine Grant

36: Why do we do it?

Why do journalists do what they do? Put up with the snark and the sneering; the shitty shiftwork; the lack of respect; the constant doom-talk that it's a dead industry from fucksticks who can't tell the difference between a termination and a metamorphosis; the endlessly boring accusations of bias and prejudice from shitheels who have never even talked to a journalist, let alone set foot in a newsroom; the fucking awful pay; the endless pressure to produce new, interesting and important content; the excruciatingly long hours.

Why do we do it?

We do it because it's fun, and even though you can spend hours and hours of your life waiting for a contact to ring back, or for a media release to come out, it's never boring. There is always something new to follow up, some lead to chase, some breaking news to get your head around. There really are such things as a slow news day, but the whole day can suddenly turn around on a sudden, unexpected story, and that unpredictability makes every shift an adventure.

We do it for the people we work with, who are some of the smartest, funniest, wittiest and most empathetic people we have ever had the pleasure to know. Journalism still attracts a lot of pure dickheads, but most of them don't last long, because the ability to get along with other people - to make small talk, and feel concern, and get the best out of them - is a vital part of being a journalist. Joe Dipstick might think we're all a bunch of grasping, greedy, arrogant pricks, but media people are generally quite brilliant to work with.

We do it for the noblest of reasons - to seek out injustice and expose it, to find that truth in the white noise of culture and bring it to light. Shining that spotlight on corruption, or on something in our society that desperately needs to be fixed. It takes so long, and often involves a huge amount of dead ends, and things can get tragically missed or overlooked for ages, but sometimes, just sometimes, we get a result.

And yeah, we do it for the recognition, that thrill of your name at the top of a strong story, or in a list of nominees for an award from your peers. It helps us connect with the world, and become part of the national discourse, and makes us feel a little less alone in this cold, cold universe.

We do it because we're nosy as hell, and want to know things before other people do, and still get a cheap thrill out of telling people interesting information they were not aware of, living on the sheer pleasure of spreading the news. We are curious motherfuckers, and we want to know stuff, and when we find out cool shit, we make sure everybody else knows about it too.

We do it because, for a lot of us, we're totally fucking useless at anything else, but we can do journalism. What the fuck else are we going to do?

We do it for the interviews - the ability to talk to people we'd never talk to otherwise, with that constant challenge of expectations and new revelations. Sometimes we get to talk to our heroes and idols, and while that can be disappointing when you are interviewing your favourite author and he uses the word 'cuck' without any irony or sarcasm, it can also be just magic to talk to somebody you've wanted to meet your whole life.

We do it because somebody has to. Might as well be us.

- Steve Lombard / Katherine Grant

35: Loading up the Canons

It's easy to sneer at the Canon Media Awards, especially when the journalists you like don't win (or aren't even nominated), and that columnist you hate picks up award after award.

And yeah, there are always some weird omissions, or baffling rewards. And yeah, sometimes the annual awards can be a venue for some stunning displays of hypocrisy, (a particularly wimpy and whiny member of the Media Scrum team still moans about being traumatised by his last visit to the awards, and the vast and terrible amount of bullshit he had to scoff that night).

But fuck it, it's also a cracker of a night, because unless you're a totally miserable git like our Steve, it's a chance for journalists to celebrate their profession, and meet up with old mates, and get totally fucking rotten on the ample mounts of booze. No other fucker ever has a nice word to say about the media, but they can't stop us saying good things about ourselves.

So while any accusations that the awards are a total circle-jerk certainly have a basis in truth, every goddamn industry likes to celebrate itself, and recognise its achievements, and pay tribute to the best.

And there is some astonishing talent in the nominees announced this week – articles and series that were genuinely cutting-edge journalism, papers that have proven their worth in a multi-media world over and over again, and websites that are invaluable sources of breaking news, analysis and context.

They are stories that have exposed injustice, and unfairness, and demanded accountability. They're stories about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. They're stories about huge, important world events, and about small, devastating personal impacts. And they're stories with some fucking great photographs.

There are, of course, the usual puzzling omissions in this year's Canons, but if anything, the number of nominees could be doubled for almost every category, and there wouldn't be a noticeable drop in overall quality. Even as the industry has been systemically decimated over the past few years, there is still a huge amount of great journalism out there, and more every day.

We could write post after post about how much good reporting is going out there – and we certainly haven't been shy about saying it in the past – but if you want a good primer for just some of the brilliant work of the past year, just look at the Canon list.

Everybody in the Media Scrum team – including the wimp who gets queasy at the thought of attending another ceremony – wants to congratulate all the nominees in all the categories. Even if they don't win the actual prizes, their contributions to the big, messy and beautiful media scene in the country over the past year deserve to be recognised, and it's good to see that they have been.

-Katherine Grant

34: The strange nature of scoops

A good scoop is everything. Journalists have to get their thrills where they can in this cold, cold world, and breaking a big story that nobody else has got beats any adrenalin rush in the world.

It's exclusive content, it says 'you have to come to us to get the full story', and it generates revenue and kudos. A reporter who can produce regular, strong scoops never has to look far for work in this business, because everybody wants a bit of that.

It can still be hard in this age of decimated newsrooms, where everybody is busy enough just covering the big stories of the day to even think about following up their own stuff, but there is still plenty out there.

The big papers, like the NZ Herald, the Dom Post, the Press and the ODT produce exclusive stories every day, and have investigative teams that are producing great and important work that nobody else is even thinking about on a regular basis.  Radio NZ has a bunch of fine reporters who get new content for Morning Report and Checkpoint day after day. Every now and then, the current affairs magazines take a break from telling baby boomers how they are going to die to produce pieces that everybody else is suddenly struggling to follow up on. Even the daily news TV shows squeeze in the odd good scoop  - reporters like Michael Morrah at TV3 are producing tonnes of great exclusives all the damn time.

But now that everything is shared and embedded and ripped off, it can be hard to hold onto that exclusivity for long, and the most important scoops do get taken over by other organisations.

At first , there are the straight rip-offs, or, as they are technically termed - 'a matcher', where a big story broken by a single organisation is reported by everybody else, with all the grace and ethics of a pair of seagulls fighting over a tossed kebab.

There are still a number of unspoken rules that are still quite clear - if it's all coming from one place, you should always, always attribute that source, and it's only polite to throw them a link in any web story, even if they are vile competitors. Do not just copy and paste somebody else's work - that's straight-up plagiarism - but if you can't confirm your own facts, summarise the other story, with the explicit implication that the full story will be found at the original source.

Then, a really big story will gain legs, and keep going on its own. Nobody forgets where it started, but there will be more reaction, more analysis, more taking the whole thing forward.

Losing control of a story to everybody isn't necessarily a bad thing, the big stories do need to spread around, and even the biggest media organisation can see interest flag and die if nobody else ever picks it up. And some of these exclusive stories require real societal change that is far bigger than any one organisation, and become part of the overall media sphere in order to get a result.

In recent weeks, there have been a couple of fine examples of this. The latest Hager/Stephenson book has already spawned a small tsunami of he said/he said at our highest levels of government, while the Newsroom website has started off with a couple of crackers - on the truthiness of free range eggs and more dodgy goings-on at Gloriavale.

These stories started from a single place, but have now spread to all parts of the media landscape, too big for a couple of books authors or a keen young organisation. Again, nobody forgets where they started, but holding onto an actual scoop is an exercise in futility. Set them free and let them fly.

- Katherine Grant