114. How to be a professional

If you thought all journos acted like the reporters depicted in TV shows like Sharp Objects, you would wonder how they would have the time to get anything done, when they're constantly wrestling with professional dilemmas. They just so busy, sleeping with every source, or drinking themselves into oblivion every night, or contaminating legal cases with naive blundering, or blowing deadlines, or handing in awful, awful copy that wouldn't get past the first sub.

This kind of depiction pisses a lot of news media people off, especially female reporters and presenters who already have genuine concerns about having to deal with fucking idiots trying to slut-shame them. But they're still there – every reporter in every movie has to be a callous arsehole who just wants the story, or is just irredeemably damaged in some way.

There are people in the news industry who do behave unprofessionally and somehow get away with it – and somehow often rise to the top of the managerial pile - but most people who constantly sleep with sources, or blow through deadlines in a drunken haze, don't tend to last very long in a business where your reputation is everything.

Fortunately, being a professional is very easy for the vast majority of reporters, especially in this country, because it's not hard to do the right thing. Reporters might meet people on the job and get closer with them, but don't fall into bed with every goddamn person they meet, and most keep any hidden addictions well out of the newsroom.

There are still professional dilemmas that news reporters, editors and producers face every single day: questions of ethics and balance that must be confronted, and truths that must be exposed, no matter what the cost.

But really, the hardest time to be a professional journalist is when you meet somebody you really admire, and have to stop yourself from gushing all over them.

One of the great unexpected thrills of a job in the news media is that you often get to meet your personal heroes. Journalists always gravitate towards the things they truly give a shit about, and you might suddenly find yourself talking to a politician or actor or musician or writer who has created work that has profoundly moved you, and then have to talk to them as a pro. That's harder than it looks, but that's the job.

And sometimes it can be incredibly difficult to stop yourself from asking from an autograph or even – sadly – a selfie. Sometimes the PR people make it clear that that's not on, which is fine, but sometimes you have to give it a go, even then. Because you know you will just never forgive yourself if you don't let them know how much of a hero they are. After you've asked all the proper questions, of course.

(It should be noted that younger journos – including one member of the Media Scrum crew – have far less of a problem of getting the phone out for a quick shot. Culture and society changes, and it's a journalist's job to change with it.)

It can also go the other way, and you have to stay professional when you have to work with somebody you personally loathe.

Another Media Scrummer had this experience recently, when she was introduced to a leading radio personality during her day job, and hate to bite back the urge to tell him he was an odious influence on the national discourse, cheapening the overall debate with his mind-numbingly tedious perspective, which always hits out at the poor and oppressed in favour of the status quo, and he'll be forgotten 10 seconds after he signs off for the last time.

Instead she just said 'Nice to meet you, Mr Hosking,' and got on with the job. She assures you all that while this might be the coward's approach, it was also the polite and professional way of going about things.

Those kind of dilemmas are far, far more common than the type seen on Sharp Objects. They don't make great television, but they're still a daily hill to climb.

- Steve Lombard

113. This cartooning is serious business

Working for a big newspaper certainly has its benefits – you get to work on the very biggest stories and are part of a team big enough to set the news agenda for the entire country. But it also means your reporting can be forever tainted by the other things that go out under the same masthead as you. It means all the good journalism at the NZ Herald is infected by the rancid reckons of the Newstalk ZB radio jocks when they share the same homepage, and it means reporters out in the field for the ODT have to justify some dumbarse cartoons drawn by somebody they may never have met.

The editorial cartoon has a long history of walking the line between provocation and unacceptable offensiveness, and often falls right over the edge. It happened twice on the same bloody day last week, when an Australian newspaper and the Otago Daily Times both published cartoons that were downright racist.

The Australian situation was by far the worst example, with the Herald Sun doubling down on its stupidity and bleating that its depiction of tennis star Serena William's on-court meltdown was not anything special, because they exaggerated the features of everybody, apparently trying to prove this odious point by reprinting the offensive cartoon alongside other caricatures.

Their argument that the cartoon was fine if you ignored all the sociological and historical context behind that kind of depiction was downright fucking bizarre, because the whole fucking point of editorial cartoons is that they acknowledge the sociological and historical perspectives of any subject they tackle. And anybody who defends that depiction needs to open a fucking history book to see how people of African descent have been portrayed and treated in the past, and how the Herald Sun's cartoon comes after centuries of disgusting propaganda.

Meanwhile, not to be outdone on stupidity, the Otago Daily Times published a cartoon that implied that learning te reo Māori would make kids dumber.

Leaving aside the fact that numerous studies show that learning any language makes you smarter rather than stupider, it was blatant dog-whistling during te reo week, and reeked of a fear that white people might be forced to learn something they don't want to learn. It didn't make any grand point, or continue the debate, it just threw some more unwanted dumb into the mix.

Individual cartoonists go over the line, and may not have the proper perspective. Most get it right, and realise that punching down just makes you look like a fucking jerk, not a truth-teller. There are many good artists out there who figured this out long ago, such as the NZ Herald's Rod Emmerson (who also happens to be one of the very best caricaturists in the entire global industry) but even the best sometimes step right over the racism line, even without realising it.

(Although it was pretty disappointing to see Emmerson on the TV news blaming the Twitter mob for all the fuss over the Herald Sun, as if you need to be a regular tweeter to recognise racism when you see it.)

But the most disappointing thing about these stupid cartoons isn't just that these artists had a brain fart (and some of them have a lot), it's that these cartoons then go through multiple editorial eyes before getting on the page, and they all thought this was fine. Even though you can bet there are many, many people in the newsrooms who thought those cartoons were just as bone-stupid as everybody else did, the ones who had the power to send the dumbarse idea for a cartoon back to the artist all thought it was acceptable.

Cartoons should be provocative, and can be used to expose abuses of power, incompetence and sheer evil. Artists like the legendary David Low took principled stands that history has rewarded. But the type of cartoons seen last week will go down on the wrong side of history and more people in the newsroom need to be aware of this, not just the reporters who are surprised to see their stories alongside it.

- Ron Troupe

112. Even more journos who get the job done

As tough as the news industry gets - and sometimes it gets damn tough - there are still a hell of a lot of great journalists doing the hard yards every day in the local media scene. A lot of them don't get the credit they always deserve, and Media Scrum is delighted to highlight some of them every now and again.

Here are six more of the best...

***

Rhonwyn Newson
Former Rodney Times editor
Regional and suburban newspapers never get the respect they deserve, even when they're helping to prop up nationwide media outlets. After a stint as a NZ Herald home page editor just before it all turned to crap, Newson and her excellent, tiny team at the Rodney Times broke a huge amount of good local stories that have been picked up and led the whole Stuff site. There are still some brilliant journos doing fantastic work in these tiny offices, and the Rodney area has been well served in this regard. Her replacement - Newson is now the new online features editor at Newshub - has a high standard to live up to.

Eloise Gibson
Newsroom reporter
Sometimes it's awkward for everybody, but nobody should be afraid of going after sacred cows. Gibson's spotlight on Ray Avery for the Newsroom site has been a brilliant example of this. Sir Ray has certainly done his fair share of good deeds, but that doesn't make anyone immune from close examination when there are serious questions to be asked. His attempt to silence Gibson using the Harmful Digital Comms Act should be dismissed for the harmful bullshit it is, and won't silence the reporter. She isn't finished with this story by a long way - there are a lot more slightly unpleasant questions that have to be asked, and a journo who isn't afraid to ask them.

Kimberlee Downs
1News' voice in Australia
Working as an overseas correspondent for a TV network is a sweet gig, but it is also a buttload of hard work, because you have to cover everything in a giant country. TVNZ's Downes is covering all of Australia, dealing with politics and disasters and crime and scandal and everything else under the hot Aussie sun. But Downes goes above and beyond all that with some terrific sports reporting, and looks just as comfortable talking about the footy as she does talking about the new PM - a vitally important role in that sports-fanatical country across the Tasman.

Bridget Burke
Checkpoint's secret weapon
RNZ's Checkpoint programme is going through some massive changes soon, with John Campbell packing up his shit this week and heading down the road to TVNZ, while head producer Pip Keane is heading up the executive ladder. But the show must go on, and they're still in good hands as long as Burke is manning a producing desk for the essential drive-time programme. Ask anyone in the RNZ office who have seen her in action: the former stuntwoman is absolutely the best in the business at getting the essential interview for JC to get his teeth into. She gets people like Matt Lauer when all anybody was talking about was access through his Hunter Valley property, and never relies on the same old rent-a-quote faces. CP will be a very different show with Lisa Owen in charge, but with Burke in the engine room, quality will remain high.

Alex Braae
Spinoff news curator
There is so much shit going on in the world, it's hard to keep track of all the news. And when homepage editors at the big news sites are forced to highlight blatant clickbait at the expense of worthy work, some actual decent curating is so important, and so helpful. Braae's putting together of The Bulletin email for The Spinoff is the best news curation in the country, with a strong mix of the worthy and interesting, and highlighting some incredibly important issues that have already been pushed down the page of other sites for fatuous celebrity bollocks. Braae makes it look easy, but it's a real skill pulling this kind of thing together. If it was that easy, everybody would be doing it.

The Stuff Circuit team
The whole bloody lot of them
It's impossible to pick any one member of the Stuff Circuit crew to highlight, because investigative journalism is a huge team effort, and this particular team are all knocking it out of the park, in both reporting and presentation. They're producing so much great material in all sorts of formats, and are clearly the best investigation team in the country, presenting stories that are so much more than the true crime exposes that everybody else is doing.They're definitely leading the way, and we should all be happy to follow.

- Katherine Grant / Margaret Tempest / Steve Lombard

111. News in briefs

There is so much happening every week in the news media industry - even in the tiny cesspool of the New Zealand scene - that we just don't have time to stop and really consider all these changes and developments, and to properly discuss the full ramifications of the changes in the way we produce and consume our news.

Some weeks there is just so much shit going on, all we can do is pause for a brief moment, and maybe point and laugh for a little bit, before moving the fuck on.

This has been one of those weeks.

***

This is not business as usual

While Media Scrum has gone on record with that claim that staff churn in the big newsrooms is just part of the game and and no big deal, sometimes the quality of a newsroom can be deeply affected by the loss of key reporters and editors, and that's exactly what's happening to the NBR at the moment.

It was bad enough that the business publisher lost tech writer Chris Keall – who had been entrenched there for years – to the NZ Herald, but when NZME doubled down and poached news editor Duncan Bridgeman as well, that's not good news for anybody at NBR Towers.

There are still some fine reporters left at NBR, but Bridgeman – another Media Scrum fave – has been keeping that whole thing ticking over for years now. The two journos also have an extraordinary amount of experience covering business and tech stories, with an insane amount of great contacts and sources that will be a huge hit for the overall quality of the NBR's website and newspaper.

Their reasons for moving on are their own. Maybe they just got a bit concerned by the way publisher Todd Scott is trying to burn the whole world down on Twitter, or maybe the Herald just offered up enough cash, but it doesn't really matter. It will be fascinating to see how NBR gets along without them, but it could be catastrophic if it can't.

***

It's not a game of two halves

But the NZ Herald has a finite budget, and a few high-profile poachings have to be balanced out somewhere, and it's probably no coincidence that not long after the hirings from the NBR were announced, the Herald revealed it was cutting its sports team by a quarter.

Sports reporters have been in the gun lately, with Stuff also gutting its regional sports coverage, and its truly unfortunate that it's coming at a time when there are actually a lot of important stories coming out of the sports world - not just results, but big questions over the huge businesses behind the on-field action, and the vital exposure of all the corruption, graft and incompetence that always comes with it.

But while there are still some great reporters looking at these issues, they're being squeezed out by dull banter and boorish analysis of the stuff that gets the clicks – which means just the big sports, with the smallest token efforts made to talk about the other sports that hundreds of thousands of people in this country give a damn about.

And even the big sports will have fuck-all coverage at a level people can actually engage with. The All Blacks are always going to get loads of attention, but it's not like the good people of Timaru have stopped giving a shit about their South Canterbury rugby team, even if the local paper isn't going to all the games anymore.

There are good things happening in sports journalism – the media's sudden determination to cover the Black Ferns without patronsing the shit out of them is undoubtedly a positive move – but if the big boys are going to go home with their ball, somebody might need to make their own game.

***

There is no exclusive

So last week one of the big news media organisations breaks a story about a dodgy political text, without ever actually seeing that text, and it sets that day's news agenda, with everybody following it up, and then the political editor at a rival organisation reveals they got sent the text ages ago, but did nothing public with it because there were mental health concerns and they were just appalled and disgusted that this was out in the open now, but they got their own back with an exclusive story about the inquiry into the whole thing being called off, which was an exclusive for literally less than three minutes before everybody else got the same news, and we all end the day on the same page.

Oh, and it turns out that one of the media organisations that ripped off the original story was allowed to do so, because it had a content sharing agreement, so that was fine, but what wasn't fine was that they had kept the EXCLUSIVE in their headline, so it looked like they had broken the whole story, and it stayed like that for more than an hour before they quietly removed it.

Sometimes we can't believe this shit is free.

- Margaret Tempest / Steve Lombard