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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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