110. Greg

Greg Boyed's death has left a hole in the world that can not be easily filled. The TVNZ broadcaster was a rock-solid professional, a genuinely fun person to work with and an exceptionally enthusiastic musician. There were have been many tributes to the man from colleagues and politicians that speak to this truth, (even if some of them were from people who actively screwed him over).

It's an awful reminder that there is a person beneath the make-up, reading you the TV news every day. No matter how much they keep it smooth on camera, they have the same fears and worries as anybody else. Their feelings are buried for the neutral tones of a broadcast, but they're still there, and sometimes they get too much.

Many newsrooms across the country have people who worked with Greg during his long media career, and were left genuinely shocked and saddened by the news. Especially at TVNZ's mothership headquarters in Auckland, where that sad day's presenters did an incredible job talking about their workmate's passing. God knows how they kept it all together, but Greg surely would have been proud.

109. Sunday morning coming down

The news can be hugely inconvenient sometimes, and doesn't just stop when the working week is done. There are still radio bulletins every hour, and television broadcasts every day, and websites all the damn time, and they all need to be filled with the latest news and events.

Journalists are used to working weird hours for significant portions of their career - the inability to get steady hours that offer someone an actual social life is still one of the major reasons people fall out of the industry altogether - and a lot of them are working in the stuffy newsroom and out in the freezing field every weekend, when everybody else gets to take a break.

To be fair, newsrooms run on a skeleton staff most weekends, and there are still plenty of opportunities to spend time with loved friends and family. There is just the bare minimum of bodies to keep things ticking along.

Most big newsrooms will also stockpile stories that can hold for the weekend, if they have something decent that didn't need to run straight away. (Light-hearted news stories are even more essential than ever, because most of the spot news over a weekend will be about death and despair on our roads, in our rivers, and down our farms.)

Those who are on the roster for the weekend shift will still be busy as hell, because there is absolutely nobody else to pick up the slack. This kind of weekend work does suit some people, who enjoy the relatively quiet and the weird autonomy they have when all the managers are away. And if something truly huge comes along, everyone important will throw everything aside to get into the office and help out, friends and families be damned.

This does happen fairly regularly, but for the most part, weekends are the dullest and driest of shifts, which is why online editors love weekends when the All Blacks are playing, because that gives them something to lead the website with, when everything else is held for the more lucrative weekday shows or Sunday papers.
 
And it's not just the big boys in black, sports news in general gets more of a run, because there is nothing else. Why not give some time to the Warriors, or the Black Sticks or any other sporting team, there isn't much else going on.

In fact, it is one of the great mysteries as to why more PR merchants don't take advantage of this fact - newsrooms are swamped with press releases and media opportunities all through the week, but a decent piece of news can get buried in that Monday to Friday pile.

On the weekend, something with a bit of meat to it stands a much better chance of being picked up, even with the skeleton staff factor, and even though the mass audiences are always smaller on the weekend, there is still an audience. And because all the journos are looking at what their rivals are doing, if it gets picked up by one news outlet, that vastly increases the chances of it getting picked up somewhere else.

Q+A - one of TVNZ's most high-profile current affairs shows - recently moved to a prime time-ish spot later on a Sunday evening, and while that's a good slot to get a larger audience, it's also weirdly reduced the show's influence on the greater media circle, because of the weekend factor.

Make no mistake, this is a great move for the show, and its producers and presenters, giving them more exposure, away from the graveyard area of Sunday morning. Despite some occasional bright spots from the likes of the 20/20 team, there has been a dearth of intelligent current affairs in the evening, and there is some room for some good solid analysis and debate in between all the murder mysteries and reality shows.

But Q+A has also broken some notable political stories in the past couple of weeks that took several days before everybody else noticed. There might be more people watching at that hour, but their stories are less likely to get picked up by the greater media scene.

When it was on in Sunday morning, editors and producers desperate to fill space would find a golden quote or two in Q+A's interviews and stories, and it would get picked up by all sorts of outlets, with all the proper attribution to the source. Nobody really liked to make too big a deal about it, because it is a rival's work, but it helped fill a gap.

But with Q+A now wrapping up reasonably late on a Sunday night, there just isn't any need to pick up the rival's lead and run with it. The digital or broadcast or print teams will be focused on having something juicy of their own for the crucial Monday morning shift, and unlikely to have the time or manpower to follow up Jessica Mutch's latest interview with the Housing Minister.

Getting a decent exclusive is always fun, but this isn't just a case of media outlets ripping each other off, it's a case of TVNZ giving up a tiny part of its ambitions to set the national news agenda. By the time the end credits roll, the online and broadcast audiences are evaporating. The weekend is over. What's next?

 - Katherine Grant

108. How journalists can learn to stop worrying and love Twitter

It might talk a loud game, but Twitter is still a fairly niche medium - the web traffic that comes from a retweet is usually nothing compared to a Facebook post, and all the cool kids have long moved on to Instagram and beyond. But it's one of the loudest, because there is so much shouting going on.

And a lot of that shouting is helping to create a cesspool of bad thought on the website. Unless your feed is heavily curated, it will soon be full of all the worst ideas mankind has to offer. No wonder racists like it so fucking much.

But it can also be an invaluable source of information. When breaking news happens, it can be incredibly useful - any journo who needs to keep on top of the breaking stuff can find out what's going on, just minutes after it has happened, almost anywhere in the world

It's all about getting the right story from the people on the scene, and it's also used by emergency services to release the very latest information - overworked comms staff often direct inquiring journos to an official feed, telling them that's the first place any new developments will be revealed.

There are some large downsides to all this. For starters, any information from Twitter - even if it does come from a fairly official account - must still always be taken with a huge amount of salt. More than one news editor has been fooled by a photo that is too good to be true, like a shark in a shopping mall, and volcanic and earthquake damage can turn out to be from years ago.

Twitter also becomes almost totally useless when a truly huge world event happens, because the entire medium gets swamped with useless hot takes and snarky comments, and it can take forever to dig through it for the gold. And when things have moved on a little, Twitter's penchant towards throwing up things that happened eight or 20 hours ago means something can look like a new development, when it is actually well out of date.

But even if they have to be incredibly careful, journos can also get a lot out of this weird medium of communication. There is the obvious self-promotional element, where reporters can highlight things they have worked on, get instant feedback and get follow-ups from it all. (They can also be subjected to a shitshow of bullshit from the general public, particularly if it's a female reporter, who take way more shit from social media than their male counterparts, and the block function suddenly becomes your best friend.)

It can also be used to get things through, especially to online editors. Reporters at the scene are expected to do all sorts of stuff, including video and photos but now, they don't have to fuck about with FTP transfers or anything like that, they can just throw it up on their twitter feed, which will be followed back in the office.

Reporters still have to be careful what they put up on their feed, and even with all the 'tweets represent a personal view' disclaimers, one ill-thought out statement can literally end your whole fucking career.

The main purpose of Twitter appears to be giving millions the ability to say ‘I told you so’ in the most irritating way possible, and you've got to keep an eye out for the fucking fascists, but the platform can still be used to great advantage. At least until everybody moves onto the next thing.

- Ron Troupe

107. Hate speech isn't the same as free speech

Journalists often don't get a lot of choice about the stories they cover and the people they interview. They get the directive from their boss or their boss' boss, and they do what they're bloody well told, because that's how the whole chain of command thing works. They do the fucking story and try to do the best job they can, even if they hate what they're doing.

So you can bet there were plenty involved in the production of news stories about noted fuckheads Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux in this past week who wished they didn't give them such a prominent platform. It still happened.

Despite spirited defences from excellent journalists like Miriama Kamo and Patrick Gower, these racist arseholes didn't have anything interesting to say, and were just not worth talking to. That's what they want, and nobody is under any obligation to provide it to them.

It was worth covering their visit to Aotearoa and the hilariously futile attempts to get a fuckin' hall to speak in, especially after they'd happily spouted deplorable nonsense in a similar event across the Tasman. The protests and venue shutdowns and fall-out were all informative and fascinating, and if there is one thing you can take from the whole mess, is that this country dealt with the situation reasonably well.

But even as they and their fascist ideals were heartily rejected by greater society, the dopey pair still got some air time on the country's biggest news bulletins, and still got to play the victim. They still got to bring up their usual bullshit talking points in 20-minute profiles, smugly throwing out arguments that had been thoroughly dismissed hundreds of fucking years ago.

But these motherfuckers are just so dumb. They're the type of person who pretends to be a hot fan and comments on their own videos, but forgets to change the fucking username. They're so fucking dumb they squirm out of the woodwork with ideas that are abhorrent to the vast majority of society and are actually shocked when they have to face some gosh-darned consequences for their actions.

They're so fucking dumb, they don't realise that history is going to look back on them as intellectually-stunted aberrations in the story of human development, blaming all their woes on other people because they don't have the guts or smarts to look in a goddamn mirror.

They just don't have anything worthwhile to say, and don't deserve the attention, even if you're obviously criticising their beliefs and everything they stand for. They are spouting hate speech by any objective measure, they shouldn't get any exposure.

A group of Free Speech arseholes - who were weirdly silent on issues like Odd Future coming into NZ, or Tiki Taane getting arrested for singing Fuck The Police at his own gig - have taken offence at the idea that white people aren't getting much of a say in modern society and attracted the usual batch of scarecrows to speak up. You've almost got to admire their gall, using one of liberal ideology's own great sacred cows against them, and claiming their rights to express themselves were being shut down, but they really weren't helping.

Because nobody is shutting these arseholes up, they have still have their own social media outlets to hook an audience of idiots on their philosophical snake oil. Everyone knows who they are, and the dickheads who think they have some kind of insane point on multiculturalism and the treatment of indigenous populations are not being blocked from those moronic views.

In this case, because everything is fucked now, it was capitalism that came to the rescue. No venue could host these dickheads without taking a significant financial hit, with an astronomical loss of goodwill from a free-spending youth demographic, and that was just bad business. It's always funny as hell to see hardcore capitalists realise the free market doesn't always do what they want, and it's also heartening to see people stand up for their beliefs, even if its something as obvious as 'racist shitheads can get fucked'.

It does matter how much media exposure is given to these objectively toxic and dumbarse ideas, and it is arguable that there was far too much. Half the Media Scrum team thought we shouldn't do anything at all about this duo here, just because we're sick of the arguments (and once again for the record, according to our learned opinion, there isn't even any argument because this is 100% hate speech, and will be treated as such).

But the other half were more passionate about laying into these shitbirds one more time, before they fuck off out of our collective consciousness for good, so here we are. Let's just hope we're all done now.

Fuck those fools. Let's move onto the next item.

- Margaret Tempest