84. Only a community can save a community

When Stuff said last week it was shutting down or selling off a large number of small and localised publications, the news was depressingly predictable - the media company has made no secret of the fact that such moves were on the cards, especially with the NZME merger looking less and less likely.

It only strengthens the view here at Media Scrum that this is the year when the shit hits the fan, and this really is shit. It's shit for the journalists involved, for the regions and towns that are now facing zero local media coverage, and for the people who actually like to know what the hell is going on in their area.

Stuff has promised that nobody is really missing out on local news, because it has things like the Neighbourly social media platform, which is completely fucking useless for finding out how things went down at the local council meeting, and slightly useful for things like finding a local babysitter (provided you can find the relevant information in an ocean of spam).

Shutting down a small paper in an area that doesn't have any radio or TV reporters will inevitably lead to a complete lack of any kind of decent and relevant local news. In an era of information overload, entire communities are facing a news void.

But there is also some hope that this could help spark a revitalisation of truly local news in this country, with plenty of lessons to be learned from the past, and a few that are being taught right now.

One thing that media companies are now learning is that the business model of multi-media conglomerates, comprised of a huge number of titles and mastheads and other assets, doesn't really work out well for anybody. The small fish don't make much of an impact on the big companies and are eventually seen as nothing but a drain on the bottom line, while those in the regions found that promises of back-office savings and shared content saw them labelled with the same debt as the big boys, while their pages were soon filled with the blandest of shared stories.

So the only surprise generated by Stuff's latest move came from arseholes who expressed shock that these small towns even still had a paper, because everybody they know gets their news on their phone and who reads print anymore, anyway? (Answer: Quite a lot of people still prefer their news in paper form, instead of endless goddamn scrolling.)

If you only listened to all the talk of falling revenues and the problems of getting money out of digital operations, it would be easy to assume that local news is on the fast-track to oblivion, with nothing to replace them.

But human beings are strange creatures, and actually like to know what is going on in their immediate vicinity. They like the national and international stuff too, and they also love the trivial and silly stories, but people do actually want to know what there local authorities are up to, what local crime is happening, and when local events are being held.

Some of the success stories in local news in recent years have certainly found this out for themselves, and there are examples all over the place, of newspapers that have been bought by staff or locals, or of community trusts being set up to get the news flow going. Here in NZ, the Wairarapa Times-Age was taken back into local hands in 2016, and is chugging along nicely.

The future of local news means a rejection of the big company ethos that has infected the media industry for the past few decades, and a return to the kind of news and reporting that local communities managed to sustain for a long, long time, even with a far smaller population. The explosion in the number of newspapers in New Zealand's earliest days filled a vital gap that no social media platform can match, even if there weren't as many aspirational images of cats.

But to find out what is really going on in your community might actually require a bit of effort from that community, rather than an apathetic 'what can ya do' shrug. Whether that's something private individuals want to get involved in, or maybe even local authorities, the community needs to step up and demand local news for local people.

The news isn't dead yet. The news never dies, and sometimes it just means there are different ways to get that news to the people who need it. But for mass coverage in a particular area, you still can't beat the newspaper sitting in every mailbox.

- Ron Troupe

83. At the end of the wire

Reporters and editors at New Zealand's newswire services never really got any respect, but carried out some invaluable work and it's a genuine bummer that they have now become extinct.

Wire reporters have broken some huge fucking stories over the past century of journalism in this country, but were rarely up for the big media awards. And when they were, they were often overlooked in favour of colleagues from 'proper' publications.

They also covered a lot of basic news stories, things that the big papers and broadcasters would never get around to, due to a shortage of staff or the tyranny of distance. Wire reporters could provide useful and necessary copy on any kind of news event, no matter how big or small. For the entirety of the 20th century, wire reporters were at the scene when nobody else was, and telling stories that nobody would hear otherwise.

The slow death of the wire concept in New Zealand began when the NZ Press Association (NZPA) died in 2011. After 132 years, it was all over in a few short months, mainly because APN and Fairfax couldn't agree on some basic fundamentals behind the business, and decided they could do better with their own in-house services.

The two wire services set up by these big media companies lasted a little while, but still failed to garner much respect, even from their own executive branches. For an example of how much the corporate class at APN cared about its wire, you only have to note that when the company changed its name to NZME., nobody at the highest level had any fucking idea what the APNZ wire would be called for several weeks, until somebody just decided it would be called NZME too.

Both NZME and Fairfax's wires were eventually absorbed into their greater organisations, and don't exist as their own entities anymore (It probably didn't help that the reporters on the NZME wire just started saying they were from the Herald when they rang new contacts, so they didn't have to explain that they were actually calling from the editorial department.)

AAP's NZ Newswire (NZN) lasted a while longer, but was wrapped up with reasonably little fanfare last week. It was a shadow of what wires used to be in this country, with just a dozen staff covering things around the country, but it was still out there, supplying a large amount of copy to multiple outlets.

Now NZN is gone, and while there are legitimate questions over how much quality work it was actually producing in the past couple of years, that's 12 more decent journalists who won't be providing coverage of events throughout New Zealand, reducing the amount of overall news produced in this country. When combined with things like Fairfax's fucking idiotic idea to cut back on regional sports coverage, it means more and more events will slip through without being recorded or noticed by anybody. It all just fades away

There are still faint glimmers of the fire that once lit up the wire services, and hard-earned lessons that are being passed on. RNZ is almost turning into a defacto wire, with copy given freely to more than a dozen other outlets, including Bauer's Noted website and msn.co.nz. But the hard-working journos at NZ's public radio organisation aren't doing anything more work than they already are, and that's still the great loss of this wire.

The good folk of New Zealand's news wires will be missed, and the great and vital work they carried out will be missed even more. Wire journos saved the arses of subs desperate to fill a space and kept websites looking alive and new. Who's going to bother with things like that anymore?

- Margaret Tempest

82. What's so wrong with a 'no comment'?

After a full year of an orange shit-gibbon in the White House, spewing out hate, cruelty and stupidity, we've all started to get used to political cries of 'fake news'. In fact, it has become a useful way to spot an outright fuckwit, because only fuckwits resort to that obvious and odious meme when they see a news story they don't like.

But this dumbarse way of dealing with news you don't like has also spread to other parts of the media, and has now become a regular fixture in the worlds of sport and entertainment journalism.

Sports and entertainment reporters are regularly sneered at as not 'proper journalists' because they don't write about crime, politics or injustices, but these sections of the media are also big fat metaphors for everything, and there is a shit-tonne of money involved  in both areas.

These journalists still follow the same basic rules of news media - they try to report on events within their rounds with accuracy and knowledge, and try to stack up rumoured whispers as incontrovertible truth.

And sometimes, they'll have something juicy - something nobody else has - and it will be confirmed by trusted sources who can't go on the record. And even though there is no actual official confirmation coming, they're going to run with that story. They might have to word it very carefully, but you can bet your arse they're going to run it. It's their fucking job.

And when everyone goes to the people who can officially confirm this news after it has broken, they frequently find PR people and management representatives lashing back out at the reports, with an increasing tendency to claw away at the fake news idea.

This is where the money comes into it - there is so much capital at stake in sports and entertainment deals, nobody with any brains is going to give anything away. If, for instance, there are reports that a high-profile league player is looking at the switch to rugby, of course those representatives of that player are going to keep quiet about anything they have for the negotiations. You expect them to keep their mouth shut and get on with the job.

But an increasing number of them aren't just leaving it with the flat, classic 'no comment', they're lashing back at the reports themselves, crying out about bias and the reporter's personal agenda. It's somehow worked for the current US president and they look even tougher when they rock up to the negotiation table.

And if it turns out that a deal can be done, and the best league player in NZ ends up in an All Blacks jersey, well, the media are still going to report on it and will be too busy congratulating themselves on the scoop to really acknowledge that they'd been played again.

The most egregious example of all this in recent days is TVNZ's handling of their news show host bullshit. News sites reporting on their rivals' host issues isn't big or clever, but it gets fucking shitloads of clicks. People do actually read these stories, and more read about these shows than actually watch them.

So last year the NZ Herald figured out fairly early that it was almost certainly going to be something involving the mighty Hillary Barry and ran a story about it and TVNZ lost their fucking minds. They went full apoplectic and denied the reports with the fervor of somebody who is really trying to hide something. They even took the Herald to the goddamn Press Council over it.

The Council, in its own inimitable language, told TVNZ where to stick their complaint: 'Quite clearly the categorical denials from TVNZ have not stopped speculation within the industry, and that is what the story is reporting on.'
 
And then it turned out that the reports that Barry would team with Simon Dallow on the 6pm shift weren't right at all, so who knows why TVNZ gave up the moral high ground on the issue with its pissy complaining, instead of sticking with the 'no comment' line and winning the argument. It all didn't stop the Herald from later talking up the Barry/Wells combination om Seven Sharp, which they were dead right on.

TVNZ benefited from this kind of speculation and attention, with acres of free publicity in the nation's major media, but still went apeshit when that speculation actually happened. It might have had an impact on the overall negotiations between hosts and broadcaster, but it was all in the detail. The shows still got their hosts.

Instead, the executive branch of the state TV broadcaster tried to start up its own cries of fake news and muddy the waters of trust and authority, which is only going to come back and bite them in the arse. It can only be hoped that this kind of media in-fighting is an isolated incident, and not the new normal, but who the fuck knows anymore.

- Ron Troupe