118. Pivoting your videos right up your arse

It really wasn't surprising to recently hear Facebook admit that it had wildly inflated the reach of the video content posted to its site. This is a tech company that has sucked the revenue out of the news media business, without really giving anything back, and has refused to take any responsibility for its own practices and standards. Of course they were fucking lying about their videos too.

It also wasn't a surprise because video is something that has been forced on the readership of news websites without the demand to really drive it. There were enough dumbarse futurists predicting that everything could be video-based in a few years to convince media companies to go big on it, at a time when resources were already being tightly squeezed.

And it's a big gamble that hasn't paid off for many. All that optimism about a shiny, digital video future just hasn't been matched by reality. Journalists can do things with video they can't do in any other medium, but that doesn't mean everybody wants all video, all the time.
 
Sometimes you just want to skim-read a fucking article in less than a minute, rather than have somebody spoon-feed you the words for four minutes. Sometimes you get a bit sick of endlessly telling a news website to 'never auto-play', and the loudest noise in the whole wide world is video that suddenly starts auto-playing at full volume when you're trying to get some quiet time in a quiet bathroom, and there is somebody in the stall next to you.

Power-hungry videos can also eat up a user's data and power, and when they get stuck 38 seconds into a video, they lock up everything on a device and render the technological marvel that is a modern smartphone as useful as a turd in a hurricane.

And they just require more attention from the consumer for longer - while you can flick back and forth on a regular text article between your other daily business, you have to keep your eyeballs and ears focused on a video report, which is at odds with society's ever-decreasing attention span.

Despite these shortcomings, many print, radio and TV media companies have invested heavily in this promised audience, often at the expense of "old-fashioned" shit like regular reporting on dull-but-worthy subjects - stories that might not have a sexy video angle, but are a vital part of a decent news organisation.

Some newsrooms in the US have effectively fired their entire staff to pay for a new team with a video-first direction, and now that they aren't getting the hits they hoped for, they're firing those video teams as well, leaving nothing but scorched earth and the lingering stench of over-reach.

There is no denying that there are good things about the video revolution in online news - media stand-ups have far more punch when they are live-streamed, and there is a definite audience for strong video content.

It was also the only part of the whole online business that was actually making any proper money for years, because they could put ads in the front of them; and people just like a lot of their news with moving pictures - even though many media experts often like to point out how little they watch television news, the 6pm TV bulletins still get a massive audience that their print counterparts can only dream of.

But it also takes a lot of effort to put out videos that people will actually want to watch, and so many people have been turned off by half-arsed efforts, as stretched staff do the best they can with limited resources, with news and stories that might not merit such attention.

This is why the pivot to video strategy has been such a failure, and Facebook's admission that it was juicing its numbers is going to see a lot of media companies cut back on all that effort, and any that gambled big on a video audience are going to be in big trouble. This is already happening overseas, and New Zealand is far from immune.

Facebook's ubiquity in society means it will somehow get through this whole 'spouting bullshit about its video numbers' with a minimum of fuss, but as ever, the social media giant is leaving a cratered and battered news media behind it. Someone should do a video about it.

- Katherine Grant

117. We don't know how lucky we are

While Media Scrum likes to righteously moan about the way New Zealand journalists are treated by the industry, their employers and the general public in this country, we only have to look as some recent overseas examples to see that things could be so, so much worse.

Journalists are dedicated to exposing incompetence, corruption and injustice, and the worst that can usually happen to Kiwi journos because of that is they might get some mean glances from chief doddard Winston Peters. But in some other countries around the globe, doing that kind of thing is especially courageous, because there is a good chance it could lead to a sudden and violent death.

We're not talking about the tragedy of war correspondents, killed by an indiscriminate shell or a roadside bomb, we're talking about the systematic targeting and execution of journalists for doing their fucking job. The most recent case of such awfulness is in Turkey, where journalist Jamal Khashoggi walked into a Saudi embassy to sort out some routine paperwork, and was brutally and cowardly murdered. The details of his death that have already seeped out are truly horrific, and there is the awful feeling that it's far from over.

The death of Khashoggi is going to have some huge political ramifications, especially when the Kingdom is trying to paper over the mess with complete utter bullshit, and raises important questions about the ongoing safety of reporters out in the field.

Reporters, by nature, run toward the dangerous shit when it's all going down, and while that recklessness can produce some incredible journalism, none of it is as important as that reporter's own safety. And even a story that might just be a harmless yarn about some dude who has built a personal submarine can have horrific consequences (and they are consequences that do not in any way need to be dramatised, despite the recent announcement that the terrible death of Kim Wall is going to be made into a six-part TV series).

The world's hot spots are full of people risking their actual lives to get the story out, and often losing them, which is just terrible. And even more worrying is the blind hatred seen in some of the attacks on the general media, which can lead to things like the awful shooting at the Capital Gazette  newspaper in the US, where one fucking lunatic manged to murder a bunch of people who were just trying to do their jobs.

It swiftly got buried in a mound of other mass killings in the States and, as ever, nothing was fucking done about it – that's life in modern America, where the entire country is held ransom by gun culture, which is largely just a bunch of assholes with tiny penises who get off on big bangs. But you can bet every journalist took a moment to wonder about the security in their own office, and how easily some fuckhead with a shotgun could walk in and open fire.

There can be no doubt that the dumb shitbirds who threaten to bring a gun to a newsroom, and those few idiotic enough to carry out those threats, are emboldened by the talk about the mainstream media being the enemy, and trying to destroy your way of life, talk that goes all the way up to the buffoon-in-chief in the White House.

That kind of talk means the blood of the newsroom staff of the Capital Gazette is on the President's hands, just as the blood of Jamal Khashoggi is on the Saudi government's, and if we're very, very lucky, they might actually be accountable for this shit.

But it's genuinely terrifying to see the mob cheer on the US President when he talks about how cool it was that a reporter got body slammed by a politician, and when he says that killing a journalist is probably quite bad, but that we can't let that get in the way of selling billions of dollars in murder machines to foreign regimes.

New Zealand isn't immune to this kind of shit-talk - there are a lot of local journos who will forever maintain Michael Laws is a irredeemable pile of dogshit after he once blithely suggested that somebody should take a shotgun to the offices of the Herald on Sunday. Luckily we don't have that kind of gun fetish culture in this country (despite the National party's bizarre current efforts to create one), and the HOS newsroom was left unscathed. But there are a lot of dangerous morons out there, and no newsroom anywhere is totally safe, from the smallest community newspaper to the big TV studio.

Only tyrants and psychopaths think people should be assaulted and murdered for trying to expose the truth, because the truth always needs to be exposed. Journalists have enough shit to deal with, endless having to adjust to the shifting media landscape and keep their fuckin' jobs. They don't need to worry about being physically attacked as well.

- Ron Troupe

Another break for pizza

It's been a busy fucking week, and none of the Media Scrum crew have had time to have a proper moan about things, so we're just going to go eat some pizza instead. Some of the pizza will have the finest gourmet toppings, and some of it will have pilchards and pineapple and spaghetti and whatever the hell we feel like putting on it. It's all pizza. It's all good.

Before we get stuck into that, we would just like to take a brief moment to congratulate all the New Zealand journalists who did a fucking stellar job dealing with the National Party leak stuff yesterday, which was an extraordinary event to cover, especially when Jami-Lee Ross undercut the whole thing with a string of strong tweets just minutes before Simon Bridges stepped up to the podium.

It all happened so fast, and was so well covered by all the big newsrooms. It was a fascinating and entertaining thing to watch unfold - when Ross straight up accused his boss of illegal activity, journos had to quickly make sure that Bridges got a decent right of reply at his immediate stand-up before they could republish the tweeted claims. This kind of journalistic ethics (and legal arse-covering) unfolding in real-time was brilliant to see. 

This story ain't over yet, and we can't wait to see where it goes next. We've got the pizza ready.

***

Added after today's events: Holy shit, you guys. Sometimes, this is the best work in the world. 

116. Who are Media Scrum?

Last week, Media Scrum received a direct message from a dear reader who we will call Trevor, because the name he sent it in under was the dopiest fucking pseudonym, and he's better off as a Trevor.

Trevor told us he had read several of our entries on the blog, and had come to the conclusion that we were a bunch of pinko commie scum, whose obvious left-wing bias showed how fucked the whole fake news media was, and that we don't know what the hell we're talking about and don't know anything about how the news business actually work.

Fuck off, Trev. You're only half right.

He's right about the socialist leanings, because we are vaguely communist scum, and most of the people working on the newsroom floor are too. It's not just a matter of personal ideology, it's a matter of empathy.

The key idea behind left-wing politics is that you should give a shit about your fellow human beings, and their well-being, and what happens to them, even if it's nothing to do with you personally, and that's a philosophy that you also have to follow as a reporter. The moment a reporter can't empathise with the subject and people they're covering, is the moment they become useless as a journalist, unable to ever offer anything but the most superficial of takes.

These socialist tendencies don't infect our professional lives as much as many civilians think it might do, because we're goddamn professionals, and we'll happily expose corruption and incompetence on all sides of the political spectrum. The higher up the editorial ladder you go, the more it starts to skew right, and there are Trump supporters in NZ's newsrooms, (although they usually drink alone). But in general there is more sympathy for the poor and downtrodden in this country's newsrooms than there is for maintaining the status quo of the most powerful people in society.

The simple fact is, if you do something cunt-ish, like call an 87-year-old woman a meth crook because she got caught up in that awful meth-testing scam that happened under your watch, and you adopt it as party ideology because your polling indicates your cunt-ish supporters like jerking off over tough-on-crime fantasies, don't be surprised when people call you a bunch of cunts about it. That's not media bias, that's just not being a cunt.

So we take that pinko label and fucking own it, but we do take issue with Trev's other contention, that we don't know what we're talking about, because we're fairly sure we know a shit-sight more than our mate Trevor.

Between the four of us, we are two journos who are in their second decade in the industry, one who has just started in the business, and one who is somewhere in between. There are four decades of knowledge between us, and while that only equals, say, one Rod Pascoe, it's still some significant time spent in a lot of different newsrooms.

We're all from a print background and between us we have worked at all the big newspapers, and nearly every decent regional newspaper from the Northern Advocate to the Southland Times, and have spent time in both the big TV newsrooms (although some of those experiences were a few years ago). Radio is a bit of a blind spot among us, to be honest, but we've pretty much seen it all in the past few years.

You might not agree with us - shit, we barely all agree on everything as it is, up to and including the use of the c-word earlier in this post, (and this entire post in fact, which one of us thought was way too self-reflective). But we speak from a position of experience and barely restrained outrage at what is happening to our industry.

We are still cowards, hiding behind anonymous pseudonyms from Superman comics, but that's because we like our jobs and want to keep them. Sometimes we need to slag off our own organisations, and we can't do that if the bosses and all you fuckers are watching everything we do.

Other than that, we're committed to total honesty here at Media Scrum. There is so much bullshit out there, and while we're probably responsible for our fair share of it, we're also getting a sick thrill from telling it like it is. That's what gets us through the day, and gets us through this profession.

Thanks for the feedback, Trevor. Duly noted.

- Katherine, Margaret and Steve

115. Three years in a leaky political boat

A large part of surviving in politics is about always having somebody to blame. If you fuck up, the only way you might survive is if you have somebody to take the fall for you.

So it's no wonder that politicians hate leakers, because the anonymity of the action means they have no target. Even if the information was still going to come out anyway, and it's all just a matter of inconvenient timing, political leaders love to launch inquiries that attempt to root out any traitorous insiders.

Both the Labour and National parties are on a rat hunt right now. Last week, the PM took time off from showing the world how a working mum does it to launch an investigation into how details of the confrontation that brought Meka Whaitiri down got out, while National leader Simon Bridges is still fuming about the slightly early release of his travel expenses.

It's all a sideshow, because these inquires never, ever actually find the culprit, (if they're lucky, they might come up with some suspects, but never any proof). But they do deflect the glare away from the substance of the leak. In the initial phase of the shitshow stirred up by a big leak, it doesn't matter who did it, only what the new information reveals. Everything else is posturing.

Down the line, when things have died down and everybody has examined the issues uncovered, the leaking can lead to big questions of political loyalty and party stability. But if somebody thinks it's worth leaking, usually at the risk of their own political career, finding out who it is should not be the greatest priority.

After all, moaning about it can make a situation so much worse, which Mr Bridges learned when the National Party started shaking itself to bits over his travel details. His choice of travel might not have been the greatest look, but he managed to make the stench of disloyalty smell even more pungent.

In the end, all they can really do is make snide remarks about the media itself, about how it is a moral failing to release information without going through the proper channels, which is the last refuge of people in power who find themselves in the spotlight.

***

It should be noted that this kind of discontent with the news media doing what it does isn't confined to politicians, because the country's tertiary institutions have been making a complete PR hash of things themselves in the past week.

This was less to do with somebody leaking some report or document, and more with people going to the media with something a university would have preferred to keep quiet. Fuelled by some fine work at the country's student newspapers - which shows how vital they still are in the digital age - both Otago and Victoria Universities have been struggling to contain some troubling stories.

Victoria already feels like everybody is out to get it after the weird debacle of its name change, and the vice-chancellor lashed out at RNZ last week when the public broadcaster told the story of a student who was evicted from her accommodation the day after she tried to commit suicide.

Instead of just dealing with the issue, Vic Uni went after the semantics. In an extraordinary statement from the university, which also saw it moan that RNZ 'only gave them a few hours' to reply, it spent most of its time criticising the use of the word 'evict' in headlines and intros.

It was plainly obvious that was just the uni trying to cover its legal butt, and leaning heavily on the idea that 'eviction' was a strict legal definition, but Dani the student definitely felt like she'd been evicted, and it was her story the journos were trying to tell, not the brave tertiary institution's noble fight to make sure its legal ass was watertight.

Besides, RNZ is an equal-opportunities organisation, especially when it comes to pissing off the comms departments at the country's biggest tertiary institutions – Otago University also blasted the public broadcaster after the comms team sent the wrong draft email out when it was dealing with the fallout from the proctor's fundamentally illegal confiscation of bongs from student flats, and put out a press release designed to shame the press about it, even though the final email wasn't that much fucking different.

Getting these types of accusations are nothing new for journos. It's like picking up he phone to get blasted with a legal threat from Ian Wishart, or having Winston Peters openly sneer at you in public, it's just part of the life, and a good sign you're doing a good job.

You must be doing something right.

- Margaret Tempest/ Steve Lombard