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
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