54: Time makes fools of us all

If modern journalists are battling anything, it’s not belligerent politicians or an indifferent public, it’s time. Time is the great enemy, because there just isn’t enough of it.

Unfortunately, the main symptom of the rampant cost cutting over the past few years is that this invaluably precious time has been heavily eroded. And it’s not just on a day-to-day basis, when every minute is filled with dull, low-value tasks, as reporters file multiple versions of the same copy for multiple platforms, and rarely have time to do anything but react to the latest events in the world, without getting to dig into anything.

It’s a long-term thing as well. The war on time also means that people don’t get to do the vast amount of work that is needed to develop stories properly, with no space to build up contacts and gain the trust of story subjects. These things don’t happen overnight, or with a couple of phone calls. A decent story can literally take years, or even decades, to crack. (Ask any journo who has been in the business for 10 years or more, and they’ll admit having  at least a couple of stories simmering away in their head, waiting for the right opportunity, waiting for the right time, waiting for the right person. Just not yet. These things aren’t just forgotten.)

Even worse for those who are trying to figure out the cost-benefits of their reporters - and the time they actually spend on stories - sometimes all that time can be wasted, and never turn into anything at all. It all fades away, a vital source never loosens their lips, or a key fact is never confirmed, and there is fuck all to show for it.

But sometimes it pays off, and it can pay off big time, with surprisingly fast repercussions. The controversy over living lunchbox Todd Barclay and his inability to keep his tape recorder in his pants has been simmering away for a long while, but he was gone within days, after Melanie Reid’s fantastic expose on the Newsroom site on the ham-fisted efforts to cover up his fuck-headery.

Reid got this result because the people paying her wages gave her the time she needed to cultivate the story, and let it grow into a truly exceptional scoop that everybody else in the news media spent the next few days chasing after. It took Reid ages to get this thing together, and she had to go to Gore to do it, which is about the biggest sacrifice you could ever ask of a journalist, but Reid and her collaborators got the bloody story. After taking her time to line up the hammer, she fuckin' nailed it.

There have been questions raised about why it took so long for the story to really come out (although that did lead to the memorable sight of the Prime Minister spending an entire week refusing to admit that the only reason it wasn't acceptable anymore was because everybody knew about it now). But this kind of story can't be done in an afternoon shift.   Like anything of substance, it takes time to get a great story, and get the right result.

Of course, in this age of instant gratification, a lot of people can't wait for the fruits of these labours, and want everything done now, now, now, but life doesn't work like that, and it's childish to expect it.  Sometimes politicians and other fuckwits in power take advantage of the fact – look at how the orange buffoon in the White House is declaring that he’s innocent of any Russian connection because nothing has happened yet, even though it can takes weeks and months, or even years, to build a proper case of that magnitude.

Fortunately, there aren't too many journos in positions of power who also don’t realise the value of giving the proper time to get a story right, and while editors and producers are facing tougher and tougher hurdles in getting that time out of result-fixated management, there is still a lot of great long-term stuff going on in all the country's big newsrooms.

Unfortunately, the New Zealand media scene lost one of its great fighters in this regard recently, with the sad passing of legendary TV journo Keith Slater. Slater was famous for not putting up with any bullshit and getting to the bloody point, but was also a boss who understood the pressures of daily deadlines, while also knowing that you need to put time and resources into long-form work, or you would just be forever spinning wheels.

Slater was a terrific mentor to a significant proportion of this country's great journalists, and taught them all the little details and tricks of the trade, also showing them the importance of taking the time to get a story right. The loss of Slater is a devastating blow to NZ journalism, but we can only hope this lesson of his continues to be spread far and wide.

Doing the shit that matters requires a significant investment in time, and that will be an eternal truth in news journalism.

- Katherine Grant

53: Jaffa Lumps and the fickle nature of media distraction

When your entire brand is hurting from an overload of bad press, you need a good distraction. Some kind of new product or service, to take the heat off. It can work wonders, but it's only ever a superficial fix, and lasts as long as a melting ice cream in the summer sun.

For a recent masterclass in PR misdirection, check out last week's release of Jaffa Lumps by the Pascall confectionery company. Owner Cadbury has been fucking up its brand in NZ for years now - changing beloved recipes, dropping long-held traditional sweets and shoveling production off overseas. But none of that mattered last week when the Jaffa Lumps came out.

It's an obvious and easy product for the company to put out - fusing two delights together is the current go-to, easy idea that is being exploited all over the place, (even though it is much harder to get the right mix than it looks, as recently experienced Whittakers and their ill-fated K Bar chocolate experiment).

After dodgy ideas like mixing L&P with your Toffee Pops, combing two distinctly Kiwi products like Jaffas and Pineapple Lumps is an easy win and got lots of attention. Social media was saturated in the new sweet treats, and that got enough people talking about it for it to spill over into big media, although most of their coverage consisted of 'reviews', which saw a newsroom stuffing some into their gob and making the awesome observation that they tasted a bit like orange chocolate chip ice cream.

Cadbury must have been stoked by the immediate reaction, especially when supermarkets ran out of the new product in hours. They must have felt like they needed a break, because they've taken a hell of a hammering recently for a company that makes chocolate and lollies. A crowd-funding bid to keep the Dunedin factory going raised more than $5 million in 'fuck you, Cadbury' money in less than a week, their palm oil nightmares have literally left a bad taste in the mouth and everyone still misses those little fucking Tangy Fruit pottles.

When your target audience is using nationalistic concerns to raise money to try and take your intellectual property, seeing the new 'limited edition' Jaffa Lumps show up on breakfast TV must have been pure relief.

But there are two things to note about this approach - the first is that these things are just a distraction, and fickle as fuck, and everybody trying out a new lolly can still be still pissed that the Dunedin production is going over the Tasman. They might forget it as the silky smooth Jaffa Lumps goes down the throat, but it takes more than a neat new gimmick to overlook years of indifference and outright disdain shown by the company towards its local consumers and workforce.

The other thing worth mentioning is that the more you try to get that kind of reaction from a new product, the less successful it will be. There is a classic example in the KFC double down, the bun-less burger that caused all sorts of palpitations and worried think-pieces on the downfall of society when it was introduced a few years back.

All that hype - a lot of it generated by the biggest media companies in the country - meant the food line was a huge success. Restaurant Brands credited the product for a notable uptick in the entire company's profit at the time.

But in the media's double down hangover, there was some regret, and some small shame, about getting so excited about it. And the next time KFC came around with a crazy new product - look! it's a pie! - the response was more subdued. There was the feeling that KFC had got its fair share of free publicity, making it ultra-harder for that business to ever get close to that kind of coverage again.

These Jaffa Lumps are quite tasty - if you dig the orange chocolate chip flavour - and are a pleasant enough distraction, but they're no solution to the worries of people who have had enough of corporate indifference. The media can let the skepticism drop for a little while, but only as long as it takes to swallow a lolly

- Steve Lombard

52: Burning down the world for the LOLs

A lot of the depressing post-game analysis of the US Presidential election focused on the rise of fake news – stories that were utterly, irredeemably bullshit, but were read and apparently believed by vast amounts of arseholes.

They reinforced ideological bubbles and filled readers with a righteous sense of 'told-ya-so's, enough that they could overlook the obvious fallacies. There are complex and hidden reasons for the mass embrace of this shite, but the reasons for why people create this bullshit in the first place were depressingly simple – they did it for cash and they did it for a laugh.

There is a certain kind of person who creates fake news stories for bogus sites. Some of them were desperate teenagers in Macedonia who played the US public's anxieties like an electric harp to generate cold, hard currency, but there were also a depressing amount of them who just did it for a laugh. They just wanted to fuck with people.

And the more people who believed their crap, the funnier it got, and the actual, real world, consequences didn't matter at all to these privileged little shits. They weren't the ones who would have to suffer. Their families weren't going to be ripped apart by a cruel, callous and cowardly deportation policy, and are probably young enough that they don't have to worry about health insurance, because they think they're never going to get old and sick.

Needless to say, the vast majority of these shit-gobblers are men who are white as fuck, and while there are assholes in all races, colours and creeds, you only need to look at the genetic make-up of the chinless wonders casually fucking over their fellow man to see that it's those with a greater basic advantage of society who are most willing to kick out the ladder beneath them, because they can afford to laugh about it.
 
This kind of thinking was also completely ignored in those presidential wrap-ups.  There were all sorts of hot takes on how white folks were left disenfranchised, or how poor people turned to an orange gibbon in the vain hope he'd make their lives a bit better. But there wasn't that much talk about the significant asshole demographic, who voted for Trump because they thought he was funny, and all that sexist, homophobic and racist shit he was spouting was worth it, because it riled the squares, man.

People who didn't believe in any ideology just wanted to mess things up for everyone else, and thought it'd be hilarious to have a giant fucking oompa loompa with the nuclear codes.

And they think it's hilarious to fill the internet with fake information, bullshit data and mindbogglingly dumb opinion. Playing games with the objectivity of the media and skewing it to their own idiotic views, because it's fucking funny. They're not bound to any kind of press regulation or rules, and are desperate to bring us all down to their level.

All we can do is not listen to their joke. No polite laughter, no acknowledgement. Don't even give them the satisfaction of revealing how annoying they are, that's what they want.

It can be hard, the fake news looks a lot like the real world stuff, and that gives it credibility. But there is a hunger for real news, always be people who want the real deal. There might be massive audiences in vapid bullcrap that weighs nothing, but that just gives the real work more heft. If you're trying to build a better world, and not just burning down the old one for nihilistic kicks, you're going to need the facts.

-Ron Troupe

51. Video glitches

Video content is not just the domain of the TV channels anymore, all the major media outlets are getting into the video game, and shoving all sorts of moving pictures down the throat of the consumer, whether they like it or not.

Newshub and TVNZ both have an obviously huge reservoir of video, dating back decades, but both the Stuff and NZ Herald websites now also have substantial video teams, producing huge amounts of content every day, and getting some really nice readership numbers out of it. Even crusty old Radio NZ has started dipping its wrinkly 92-year-old toe into the vast ocean of video production, with 90 minutes of Checkpoint with pictures coming out every weekday, and all sorts of live streams and special projects, like that Ninth Floor series (which will now be played on TV3).

The allure of video content is easy to understand - good visuals can make or break a story, and there is a big audience just waiting to make some video go viral, racking up phenomenal numbers, even in a small country like NZ. It shows that a website is modern and up to date, and, most notably, they can prove incredibly valuable revenue streams, with auto-playing ads at the start of every video providing eyeball money that has migrated away from the telly.

But in the quest to get more moving pictures on their websites, many of them can overdo it, and put up video of any bloody thing, even if it really doesn't warrant it. Some sites get bogged down with endless live streams of dull press conferences that are over before they can get an audience, and don't provide any information that couldn't be summerised in a quick paragraph.

(A small aside - it's actually quite funny how reporters are learning real fast that they need to shut the hell up before a press conference starts, because those live streams can be going out before anything is actually happening, and Joe Public can hear you making daft jokes with your mates while waiting to report on a tragic event.)

Of course, the sense of video overload is not helped by the cursed autoplay function, where you drop into a story and are halfway down the page when Mike Hosking or Tony Veitch starts talking to you, and you have to scramble to shut them the fuck up before you lose any more brain cells. This is a particular pain in the arse when you're surfing the news sites late at night, and the speakers blare into life in the dark silence.

There are also some fundamental problems with the idea that everybody wants video, which is only exasperated by the autoplay malarkey. Video might seem like the easy option for lazy consumers - why waste the brainpower on actually reading a story when it can be read out to you - but it actually takes a lot longer to watch a video report than it does to read a few paragraphs, and it becomes a lot harder for a sneaky view of something while at work.

There can also be serious issues with archiving: trying to find a story on the TV networks ' websites that is older than 18 months can prove frustrating and pointless, as they're lost between website revamps, or just in the interests of clearing up some server space.

But the rush to video is unlikely to slow down anytime soon. The Herald Focus experiment has been consistently talked up by its parent company, and has won some strong awards recently, (although it should also be noted that these types of things still happen 10 minutes before they get shit-canned.)

And in this age of ubiquitous smart-phone technology, it is easy to get a lot of video from punters out there on their phone, hot from an ongoing event. leading to some remarkable imagery that can be inadvertently iconic.

These amateur videographers can also produce stuff that is barely watchable, and people still persist in filming in bloody portrait mode. But this does make the good stuff stand out, and shows that producing stuff at the level of the big TV news channels is fucking hard work, while having the tech support to make sure it doesn't go down whenever some munter clicks on it is also tough as shit.

Despite the promises of many headlines, video hasn't killed the radio star - radio without pictures remains the most robust sector of the media market. But you can expect more and more autoplaying video to shock you out of your media stupor, because it's all about keeping the eyes on the screen.

- Katherine Grant

50. The future of journalism: It's lonely here, there's no one left to torture

They keep telling us there's no future in journalism, and any young person who are considering the news media for a long-term profession is a fuckin' idiot, because everybody knows it's a career path that is bound for oblivion.

After all, there are regular polls of employment experts that smugly proclaim that news journalism has the worst prospects for the future out of all possible careers, and journalism schools are finding increasingly hard to fill classes with keen young things.

To be totally fair, this kind of pessimism is hard to avoid when there is constant talk about redundancies in the industry, and no shortage of commentators lamenting this loss (including, obviously, this very blog). It really can be as grim as it appears for many in the industry.

But even as newsrooms staff levels are slashed, there is still a huge need for new content, no matter what the format, and if there aren't going to be journalists in the future, who the hell is going to create it all? Content doesn't create itself, so there will always be opportunities and openings for journalists, even if - especially if - we don't have a fucking clue what they might look like right now.

Technology isn't going to do it. There is a huge need for a human eye overseeing the news, because computer algorithms, applications and programmes often miss the 'holy shit' moment in a story. Experiments with computer-written stories are always dry as fuck and often hilariously miss the point - the stories often forget to mention those 'holy shit' moments because the thing that humans find so interesting is something that hasn't happened before, and no piece of tech can ever expect or anticipate this kind of novelty.

So there will always be a need for people to produce the news for everybody else to consume. There are now more news sources than ever before, and even with all the dull moaning about fake news - which is a lot easier to avoid than some people like to pretend it is - there is a real thirst for information, which needs to be collected, collated and presented to the world.

There is a chance that the future will be engulfed by news generated by sentient data bots created by nerds on Vladimir Putin's payroll, but with more platforms than ever before, there will be a never-ending need for journalists to report, analyse and explain whatever the fuck is going on in this world of ours. You can't rely on your Uncle Barry to find out all the facts in this crazy universe.

When all the blood has finally been spilled in the ongoing hacking of newsroom staff, the public will still need to get their news from somewhere, and someone will have to provide it.

While things do look grim for many people who have been in the field for years, at the entry level of journalism there is an unending hunger for new talent to do local and breaking news, covering big and small issues. The surveys on employment prospects always ignore this ongoing need and desire.

Sure, journalism offers shit pay, shittier hours and dumb criticisms from people who think they know how it all works, but it can also be insanely satisfying and enjoyable, you get to work with great people, cover huge events and be enormously creative. Those employment surveys always try to tell you that you should be a chartered accountant if you want to get anywhere in life, but not everybody wants to stare at numbers all day. Some of us just want to tell stories.

Don't let anybody tell you there is no future in this business. It might not be so bright you have to wear sunglasses, but it's bright enough to walk a new path.

- Steve Lombard

Editors note: 

After 50 posts on this blog over the past few months, we're starting to repeat itself a lot, and we're also busy as fuck dealing with the actual task of working in this crazy industry. For the tens of regular readers - and the weird 30,000 hits we got from Turkey last week - this blog will continue, but will only feature new content once a week now, with something new every Tuesday morning from next week. Sorry, but it's an election year and we've got a shit-ton of work to do.