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
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