122. Advertising keeps the lights on, but stays out of the newsroom

Almost every decent newsroom is attached in some way to an advertising department. The only one that avoids some kind of symbiotic/parasitic relationship is good old public radio broadcasting, which doesn't even have a marketing department to talk up its own deeds.

But that's the exception, not the rule. As the advertising department likes to constantly point out, it's the ads that pay the bills. Their end product would be nothing but letterbox filler without the editorial content to attract an audience, but the ad crew will never let you forget who ultimately pays everybody's wages and keeps the lights on.

Still, while they usually share the same roof, the editorial and advertising teams are fiercely independent. Editors don't tell sales managers how to sell their space, and nobody from advertising can come onto the newsroom floor and dictate how the news is going to be presented to the world, even if it makes a client look bad.

The two departments might come together for special projects, and there may be some crossover in the worlds of advertorials and B2B publications, but in general the two departments in all good and proper media companies remain strongly separated.

Unfortunately, the news media is fucking awful at advertising this independence, because there are some gross misconceptions about the influence advertisers have on the final news presentation.

In an excellent recent Twitter thread recently, Washington Post reporter Laura Helmuth revealed how smart, sharp and educated people who were inquisitive and had read newspapers their whole lives still had some incredibly firm and incredibly wrong ideas about the way the news media worked, and the first question went straight to the relationship between advertisers and editorial.

Helmuth rightly pointed out that the news crew had no idea what ads were being sold, and the advertising people didn't know what stories were appearing. Anything else and all your credibility goes right out the window, and nobody will ever take you seriously if you show how far you're willing to bend over and take it from corporate interests.

Any decent newsroom would be appalled to have their conduct dictated by the ads that were being sold. It's just not acceptable. A newsroom has got to have some goddamn ethics, or it's just a mouthpiece for the rich and powerful and the masthead becomes worthless.

Many, many journalists take this very seriously. Media Scrum has personally seen people from the advertising department literally marched off the newsroom floor when somebody tried to complain that a web story cast a bad light on a company that spent a lot of advertising dollars. They didn't last a minute.

There are, as always, annoying exceptions to this moral position, because reality is more awkward and complicated than it looks from up on a high horse. There is the aforementioned advertorial, which is usually 100% produced in the advertising department (unless an editorial writer needs to score some quick cash by bashing out some anonymous copy after work). It is also a bit harder to argue that some columnists have been fully detached by advertising on an issue, but that's because columns are pure opinion, and every piece of advertising ever created is all about influencing somebody's opinion on something.

And there are straight up newsrooms who follow their masters call explicitly, no matter how ideologically dodgy they get, and nobody should ever take anything they say seriously.

In fact, the only time advertising can really be weaponized against editorial in a morally justifiable way is if the editorial content is so odious, so full of hatred and bullshit, that a consumer boycott of advertisers brings about change.

This isn't a matter of free speech, or shutting down balance - nobody needs a media outlet telling us that pedophilia and murder is a-okay, and nobody needs anybody espousing views that are unmistakably Nazi (hot tip for the easily confused, if you're reading or listening to something that is saying Nazi things and saying that those Nazi things are worthwhile, you're reading or listening to fucking Nazis, and fuck those guys always.) Despite bleating about freedom of speech, this is just capitalism at full force, with society dictating that this shit is not acceptable, and does not have a God-given right to be supported by any advertising dollars

But that's the extreme end of the scale, and most of that scale is full of newsrooms who want nothing to do with the advertising side of things, as long as they get their pay every week.
 
Of course, this is a time when most of the advertising money that has kept the business chugging along has vanished in the slow plod towards digital news content, swallowed up by the gaping maws of Google and Facebook. Who can keep the lights on when the classified ads have all shifted to TradeMe?

But that's a problem for the folk in those advertising and marketing departments. The newsrooms can only do what they always do, and try and create the best content they can. RNZ might be the only place don't have to deal with the demands to get an audience to keep the dollars rolling in, but every serious newsroom just needs to keep that fair distance away from the money.

- Ron Troupe

121. Excuse us

Don't be this guy.

The news media industry in this country is being increasingly squeezed into oblivion, but there is still one thing that will always have currency, no matter how much the news is devalued, and that is showing some professional goddamn courtesy towards your fellow journos.

It’s only common courtesy, but it can mean the world to your fellow professionals, and those that show a lack of it are frequently ostracised right out of the business. Even as we’re all scrambling for exclusives and scoops, we don’t do it by shitting on the people in the same race as us, because then we all end up covered in it.

There are two excellent examples of professional courtesy in this business that can be seen every day. One of them takes place out in the field, and the other is confined to the office, but a bit of basic politeness in both is essential for the well-being of all journos in this country.

The first is out in the real scrum, at a media stand-up or press conference, where a number of reporters and visual journalists are trying to get the full story from a spokesperson or politician or emergency services representative. These things can get pretty fucking crowded, especially when everybody is covering a big story, and they can take place in a confined area, when everybody needs good audio or visuals.

Fortunately, there are unwritten rules about dealing with these scrums - everyone should get the same chance to ask their questions, and shouting over somebody who has already got well into their question is highly dubious. Everyone involved also needs to be aware of everyone else's line of sight, and has to ensure they aren't blocking anybody else off from getting an important shot.

Anybody who breaks these rules will get some sour looks from other reporters on the spot, and justifiably so. If we didn't follow these rules, it would be anarchy at the stand-up, and nobody would get anything useful because it would all get wiped out by everyone trying to fuck up everybody else's day.

The only one who really gets away with overpowering a press conference in this country is the mighty John Campbell – even reporters from his own newsroom can dread seeing him rock up at a news conference, because he’s going to run right over everybody, and soak up a lot of the question time, especially when the group who have called the conference have made it clear it’s a strictly limited amount of access. Campbell gets away with it because he’s just a genuinely lovely human being, and we all know he’s probably working on some transcendent piece of journalism. So we usually just let him do his thing, but that’s rare, and anybody else who hogs all the questions, or fucks up someone else’s audio cut or photo, is not going to be popular.

At least in cases like this, the aggrieved journos get to make some splendid stink-eye at the other reporters who are fucking up their day, but there are also some unprofessional shenanigans going on back in the office, where online editors are actively encouraged to rip off (or “match”) their rivals’ big stories, and to give the original source as little credit as humanly possible.

The strange nature of scoops has been discussed here before, and there is the paradox of wanting to be the first and only one to break a big story, but also needing everybody else to pick up the ball and run with it if you ever want to see your story grow.

But sometimes, one news outlet gets a brilliant interview, or a particularly juicy OIA request comes back, or they just do the hard fucking yards and pull together a great story through sheer hard work, and nobody else can match the story without giving the first newsroom to break the story the full credit.

To be fair, some media outlets in this country are great at giving the full credit, and don’t hesitate to throw a link to the original yarn, even if it’s at a hated competitor.

But other places seem to have an online policy of giving as little credit as possible, and can frequently be seen ripping off a story word for word, with barely a mention of where the story originated. An official response to a story can be used as a way of getting around the credit, but it is still a shitty thing to do.

This is far more passive-aggressive than a shuffling for position at a press conference, but it’s no less annoying, and just plain rude. Some places, like the Newsroom website, have broken a lot of great stories in the past year, and they have often been denied the credit they deserve from other organisations (which have far, far more reporting resources than the young media outfit).

This is an industry where your reputation is everything, and a lack of professional courtesy - whether it’s bad behaviour in the scrum, or failing to properly credit great work – will be duly noted by everybody. There are only so many newsrooms in this country, and that kind of dick behaviour isn't going to get anybody very far.

We're all in this together, and sometimes that means stepping back and letting someone else take the lead for a while. It's only polite, and journos should help show the world it could use a bit more politeness.

- Katherine Grant

120. Your community can get stuffed

Stuff's decision to gut its suburban newspapers in Auckland is both predictable as hell and stupid as fuck – the company has shown over and over again that it has absolutely no interest in servicing the needs of locals, and is only interested in a national audience. Even if going hyper-local is the only way to keep these kind of things alive, Stuff is abandoning the communities that have kept them going for decades, and blindly relying on a dubious low-staff, high-social media strategy.

The company was always going to use the merger bid with NZME as an excuse to cut staff, and now that the merger has now been apparently taken out behind the chemical sheds and shot, the carnage has begun in earnest. NZME has decimated its sports teams in recent weeks, and Stuff told its staff last week that 19 journalist jobs were on the chopping block at the suburban papers dotted around the country's largest city.

Stuff will, of course, argue right now that it's only a proposal and that it hasn't actually slashed its staff numbers yet, but it's the kind of proposal that is a proposal in name only, and it's highly unlikely that anything major is going to change with the plan. A lot of talented journos are going to lose their jobs.

But nobody, including those unfortunate reporters who will now be scrambling for any kind of work, can really be surprised by all this. The corporate body of the media giant have shown no interest in the suburban papers for years, and have steadily cut resources. The papers, which actually managed to generate decent revenue during all these cutbacks, wasn't sexy enough for the big boys on the board, who were infatuated with a digital future.

But as predictable as this news is, it's still a little surprising that it also manages to be so, so stupid in so many ways.

For starters there is the hegemony of product between all the surviving newspapers under the new plan. It will see journalists working at a centralised headquarters, producing content that can be easily shared across region, filling the space between the ads with the same shit that everybody else has. The same stories will be subbed the same way, while going out to different audiences, ignoring the possibility that things that are vitally important in Waitekere don't seem very relevant to the people of Onehunga.

Stuff has already moved in this direction – the Southland Times and the Christchurch Press should not have the same fucking front page, right down to the banners, but that's happening quite regularly now.

It's also stupid because community papers are a vital stepping stone for many, many young reporters – half the news media scene in Auckland started out on the the suburbans, and half of them seemed to be editor of the Central Leader at some point. The gutting of these papers takes away some incredibly important entry points into the industry - something that, as we've only just said, is awful for everybody - and doesn't provide the raw recruits with the opportunities to learn their craft. If they fuck up a story about the local garden society, they learn not to make that kind of error again before moving onto bigger outlets.

The company is already making a big deal out of the fact that it's hiring a tiny handful of senior reporters to fill these papers, but this is another aspect that doesn't seem very smart at all, because you've got to wonder what sort of senior journo is going to want to work in that kind of churnalism environment.

The biggest issue, of course, is that these media companies are just not going be in the community they profess to serve. As noted by former Rodney Times editor and Media Scrum fave Rhonwyn Newson, you're going to lose all the quirky, cool stories that do grab a national audience, while still serving local needs, but also the stories about local roads and infrastructure that local readers are genuinely interested in.

Instead, there is a heavy implication that journos will spend a lot of their time trawling through social media for local stories, which is a horrifically dumb idea. You're not going to get proper news from  Neighbourly, which is already choked with your racist neighbours and dumbarses moaning about vaccinations and other vacuous bullshit.

Neighbourly is good if you want to find a new babysitter, or need to know the best place to get a haircut in your area, but it's not a news source, it's a community notice board. Nobody uncovers corruption or incompetence in society's power structures by reading the noticeboard at your local supermarket, and they don't get it from badly researched and ignorant social media posts.

This latest move proves that Stuff is straight-up giving up on the communities it professes to serve. There is a huge difference between local and national news, just as there is between national and international. There can be crossover, but they have different needs and different audiences and different goals, and you can smash them together without having a significant impact on the end product.

Right now, there is a street-level audience that is being extremely poorly served by the big news media companies. Stuff needs to stop pretending they give a shit, and sell – or just give – their titles back to the community. This is easy to say, and harder to do, but there does need to be some robust discussion about the possibilities of local trusts and government help. We need to talk about this more, if we ever want to be a real community.

- Margaret Tempest

119. Where have all the kids gone?

The entire news media has had a severe dose of the existential shits for years now. It has spent all of the 21st century dealing with the fallout from consumer apathy, political fuckery, corporate incompetence and the entire concept of the internet. The industry remains in a huge state of flux, with no guarantees that there will even be a news business in the future, or at least one that is recognisable to current eyes.

But there is an increasingly dire trend right at the start of the business, where raw recruits are fed into the media meat grinder – there just are not enough of them coming into the business, and this will have long-term repercussions for the quality of the media product in this country.

There used to be loads of different journalism courses in New Zealand that were dotted up and down the country, and now there are only three – and even they are struggling to fill smaller classes.

The reasons for this are fairly obvious. Everybody - including the media - talks about how the news industry is a dying business, with little hope of a long-term career. You can't blame guidance counsellors and teachers for not pointing young people looking for a career in that direction.

The general growing distrust in the media also doesn't help, and neither do journalists themselves, and they way they frequently talk about the shit pay, terrible hours and little things like death threats (something Media Scrum is certainly guilty of, like the bunch of fucking hypocrites we are.) None of that would sound very promising to anybody interested in it as a career.

But the industry is not dying as fast as those fuckers say, and there remains a crucial need to create news content for the country's bulletins, publications and websites, and there are still plenty of entry-level jobs out there for somebody with the proper qualification and training.

Newsrooms need a constant stream of keen young staff to keep things going. They're an essential ingredient, as much as the crusty old court reporter who knows all the lawyers' names. You need the enthusiasm and drive and ambition of young reporters, or you're a dying newsroom.

But there is also the issue of the quality – when there are way more candidates for positions on a j-school course than are available, then you just get the smartest and sharpest, but if you're forced to take everybody, you're going to end up with people who might not be ready for the stress and demands of modern reporting.

As it is, j-school classes always suffer a loss of up to a quarter of students throughout a full-time course, with people who find they are unsuited to things like the disciplines of deadlines and concise writing, or are just plain useless at getting information from people. If tutors are forced to take anybody they can, just to keep their budgets, there are only going to be bigger levels of drop-outs, especially when they are thrown into their first actual job and have to hit the streets.

There is no easy answer to the dwindling supply of young, keen reporters, Maybe we just need to get back to those guidance counselors and teachers who have read too many Facebook articles about the death of news, and let them know that no matter how the industry changes, there will always be a need for people to create the content (even if social media sites tend to reap the rewards by ripping that content off).

As much as Media Scrum likes to turn this blog into a bitchfest about the state of the industry, we all fucking love being journalists, and wouldn't swap it for any corporate gig in the world. We get to be endlessly creative every day, and occasionally meet some of our heroes. There are always going to be a need for editors and writers to create content to fill society's never-ending hunger for the latest news, and we feel privileged to feed that hunger.

And as much as we moan about the conditions, we're still here, and have no plans to abandon the profession for the dark side of PR and comms, and we can only hope that more young talent is found, cultivated and given the opportunity to join us.

As a profession, maybe we should try a bit harder to talk about these kinds of benefits, before we lose all the qualifications and skills we barely have now.

- Steve Lombard