150. This scrum has collapsed

This is the final regular edition of Media Scrum. We've been doing it for a couple of years now, and it's been enormously satisfying to get some of this shit out of our systems, instead of bottling it all inside, but now we're done.

There are still things about the way the news media works, and the way it's perceived, that annoy the living shit out of us, but we have been starting to repeat ourselves quite a lot recently, and have been moaning about the same old things over and over again, so it really is time to put a pin in it and call it a day.

We've never had a huge audience for this blog and never really sought one, because it was always more about getting this out of our heads than spreading it everywhere. So we doubt these regular complaints will be missed that much, but we have appreciated all those who ever told us we had a point, or that we didn't go far enough.

(It's also ending because we're getting increasingly lazy, with one member of the Scrum abandoning us for the bright lights of London, (like they all do), and another dealing with a brand new child, and it's too much to put on the remaining two members of the team...)

We probably could have carried on with this malarkey forever, because there is always some fuckin' stupid thing being said or assumed about the news media, or something fuckin' stupid happening in the newsroom itself. There is definitely room for more moaning about the ways we produce, consume and criticise our news diet, and even though it's going to be notably quiet here next Tuesday morning, nobody here is ruling out slamming out the odd rant, when the fire takes us again.

Especially when there are still a lot of issues to deal with. A lot of great journalists are still being turfed out of the industry, and nowhere is totally safe. Some newsrooms are now operating on the smell of an oily rag, and could be one lawsuit away from total annihilation. When media companies are owned by vulture capitalists, there is no guarantee they won't be shut down tomorrow. There's renewed talk of mergers and frank discussions over how hard it is to turn a profit out of the news, and none of that is going anywhere.

There are also issues with the OIA and government obfuscation that desperately need to be dealt with, and the news media is still dealing with a massive perception problem among the general public, who sneer at the work that is produced, without ever acknowledging that they'd be fucked without someone in this crazy society of ours asking the hard questions of people in power, and exposing injustice and unfairness.

And yet....

Things might be grim, but there is still a lot of fucking amazing journalism going on, produced by multiple newsrooms. After years of redundancies and wage freezes, the ones that are left are the sharpest tools on the bench, and are producing genuinely terrific work every week.

There are a lot of great longform journalistic projects being offered up all the time, there is more breaking news than ever before, and a lot of news options. Many might moan about the good old days, but there are proper arguments that we are still living in a golden age of great content, even if the money isn't there anymore, siphoned away by tech giants and public apathy. There is a lot of good stuff out there.

And, most of all, there are good people working in journalism, putting up with bullshit from everybody from the highest-ranking politicians to the lowest munters on social media, for fuck-all pay. Sticking with the profession, even when PR and comms dangles huge pay cheques in front of them, because they love what they do, and think it's an important part of society, (or at least, more important than pushing out corporate bullshit).

Media Scrum has paid tribute to a few of these great journalists every now and then, but we all work with dozens of other wonderful journos every day. There are, unsurprisingly, still a few shitheads hanging around the newsroom, but they usually don't last that long, and the editorial staff are generally the best people we've ever worked with, in any job. Going into the newsroom is still an absolute thrill, and the people we work with are a huge part of that.

This industry of ours is going through an unprecedented period of upheaval and change, but the terrific journos in this country really do give us hope for the future. As bad as things get - and they do get pretty fucking awful sometimes - there are a lot of great people out there, doing the hard yards, getting the job done.

You don't really need us to tell you that anymore.

Love,
Media Scrum

149. Fuck you very much

Next week will be the last regular edition of Media Scrum for the foreseeable future, but before we get there, there's a couple of things we'd like to get off our chests while we've got the chance.

Firstly, and we mean this most sincerely, fuck you anti-vaxxers, and your harmful bullshit. Fuck you for spoiling conspiracy theories, which used to be fun speculation about who was on the grassy knoll, or just watching The X-Files, and is now the #1 reason for muting family members on Facebook.

You're not smarter and more informed than everybody else, just because you watched a few dumbarse Youtube videos, you're a fucking moron who is causing actual harm to people all over the world by spreading blatant misinformation, just so you can feel superior to all the other sheeples.

It's not just the fact that measles is making a comeback in a big way, it's the way fanatics use these odious theories to justify actual massacres around the world, where health workers who are only trying to make people's lives better are targeted because some violent fuckwits think it's okay. This shit has consequences, and is scientifically baseless, and if you spread it, you are actively making the world a worse place. You fucking tools.

Fuck the 24-hour news cycle, which has distorted perceptions of the news media in such an awful way. It's bad enough that we have to deal with Fox News - which has caused more nastiness in the public discourse than literally anything else on the planet, making everyone look bad by being unrelentingly awful in every way - but it's also changing the way we consume news for the worst.

These channels and stations filled the airwaves with vapid analysis and other bullshit instead of actual news, because they don't have the resources to actually gather the good shit, and now a large segment of the public can't tell the difference between facts and opinion anymore, because all this shit has been hammered into them.

Fuck you, anybody who thinks they can threaten or physically harm journalists for doing their goddamn job. Munters still send threats from comfortable anonymity, and many of them are from fuckwits who just think they're having a laugh, but it isn't very fucking funny at the other end.

If you ever threaten somebody with physical harm for writing or saying something you disagree with, you've lost any fucking argument you were trying to make. You're the fucking loser, and can fuck off and simmer in your own bile.

And while we're there, fuck the police who never do anything when reporters and camera people are shoved and attacked on the street. You see this happen every fucking week, right outside courtrooms, making a goddamn mockery of the whole idea of law and order, at the very place that has been built to uphold it. These people are doing their jobs, and the cops who stand by while they get shoved out of the way, or have their cameras snatched away, aren't doing anybody any fucking favours.  

Fuck you, rubberneckers who won't admit they are rubberneckers.

Whenever we drive by a car crash, no matter how minor it looks, we all slow down and take a look. It's only human nature. There is, of course, always a tone of resigned disgust from the police and transport authorities when the traffic builds up on the motorway because of all the rubbernecking. If only people would carry on as normal, and resist the urge to gawk at the carnage, everything would go a lot smoother.

And we all share in that disgust, especially when we're stuck in that traffic for an extra 20 minutes on the drive home from work. What sort of ghoulish creep stops to look at a crash site?

But why wouldn't you slow down for a look? Every other son of a bitch is also slowing down, and if you don't, you're going to ram into the arse of some other gawker. There's also the safety issue,and the need to keep speed down around a crash site. And because it's interesting and strange, creating an unbearable curiosity - what actually happened?

It becomes a story over the dinner table, or a reminder of the fragility of our road system, and of our own mortal forms. Rubbernecking is as human as breathing, and no amount of moaning ever really changes human nature.

This beautiful hypocrisy is mirrored in our consumption of news, because it's not you clicking on the bullshit, it's everybody else. All that salacious stuff about vapid celebrities, or outright property porn, that's never you.

Admit that you like the shit, or we're not going to get anywhere. Or just stop whining about it, put the fucking foot down when you go by an accident scene, and don't peek. Websites don't care why you're clicking on it, they'll count the fucking clicks anyway.

Fuck you, if you've ever been one of those fuckwits that moans that the media hasn't been doing their jobs, and are convinced that the entire media hasn't covered a certain topic, because they're too fucking lazy to spend five seconds googling, which would reveal that everybody has been covering the exact thing you're talking about. 

(In other words, yes, people are still following the long-term after-effects of the Christchurch earthquakes. Nobody has forgotten shit.)

For that matter, fuck you single sourcers, who only rely on a single newsroom for all their information, and then act all smug and shit, as if willful ignorance wasn't something to be absolutely ashamed of.

Only fuckin' idiots get all their news from one place, whether it's a single website or publication or broadcast. There is so much going on, in so many places, with so many different editorial directions, that the best way to keep on top of it all is to take on something from lots of different places.

Sticking with one source of all information means you're incredibly likely to fall for some dumbarse ideology, and will never get the full picture, especially on big, important stories.

And finally, as always, fuck you Winston Peters, just on general principle. Sometimes we think you're starting to sound pretty cool, and then you decide that the whole country should have a fucking say on female health issues. So fuck you, Mr Peters. Fuck you very much.

- Margaret Tempest/Katherine Grant

148: Ten things you didn't know about digital journalism that will shock you

Newsrooms have had a specialised digital component for more than two decades now, but they are still figuring out how to make the transition. It's a long, long process and we're probably only halfway there, but we've learned a couple of things over the years, and in the finest of all digital traditions, Media Scrum has made a shallow and questionable listicle of some of them.

1. Nobody knows anything

While analytics can be incredibly useful for figuring out what people want to read, and you can get a lot of instant, real-time information, it can often be a complete mystery why some stories outperform others. Certain types of story, especially big, meaty investigations and shocking breaking news, will always do well, but it's never as simple as that.

Stories that deserve to go far and wide just die on the vine, and idiotic filler stories that took five minutes to bash out suddenly go viral, and there isn't any rhyme or reason. You could be a digital journo for years and years, and you'll still be surprised every day by a story that doesn't get the audience it should, or spreads all around the world. All you can do is put out the best mix of news possible, and hope for the best.

 2. Digital journos might be the last subs standing

The sub-editing role is one that has been utterly annihilated by the constant restructuring that has gone on in the news media companies in recent years, because that kind of grunt work always looked so disposable. Only it turned out that they're as vital as ever, because all the newsrooms are putting out more copy that ever before on all sorts of different platforms, and it's still incredibly important that this copy is clean, readable and grammatically correct.

Digital journos do a lot of work on their own stuff, but also are the last line of defense before every piece of reporting from any newsroom goes out. They might have to take TV or radio copy and clean it up for public consumption, and that can take a lot of work to reformat and repurpose. Digital journalism might be a fancy new way of doing things, but the old-school principles of good subbing are as strong as ever in the field.     
 
3. Running a homepage is like driving a car

Homepage editors in all the big newsrooms are some of the busiest people in the office, and are flat out all day. But it's only a job that can be done by one person - trying to split that duty, or having other people ducking in to muck around with the story order never, ever works. You need one person who can keep track of everything, and might have very good reasons for not using a story at a particular time, or not leading the whole website on it.

It really is like driving a car. You can take a lot of advice, and be given directions, and even be specifically ordered to go in a certain direction, but only one person is in the driver's seat, and trying to grab the wheel from them doesn't work out for anybody.

Unfortunately, when it all crashes into the side of the road because somebody told you to lead the website with one of those fucking Air NZ safety videos, it's always the driver that takes the shit for it.

4. It is a massive amount of work

Everybody recognises the great work that by-lined journos do on a constant basis, but there is a massive amount of work going on behind the scenes to get these stories ready and readable.

Digital journos have to deal with the constant demands of breaking news, and have to keep half an eye on what competitors are up to, and be aware of the latest shit-fight on social media. If they're lucky, they might get to work on bigger, long-form and in-depth pieces, but spend most of their time on basic shit - they have to write several dozens headlines a day and spend a huge amount of time finding the right picture. They have to be across everything that's going on across the newsroom, and have to make sure all the grammar and spelling is correct. And it never, ever stops.

5. Headlines are really fuckin' hard

A quick word about headlines - a nice pun is always welcome and might get loads of attention on the Twitter, but can be rubbish for getting people to actually read the stories. It's not just a SEO thing, it's just that playing it straight will always be more intriguing than any clever wordplay.

6. Shit happens, get over it

So a typical day for a homepage editor will literally involve thousands of tiny decisions - (about 80 percent of which will be going through a stock image website and rejecting all the awful, awful options it offers ) - small decisions about headlines and wording and story placement and the importance of getting it all right.

But they're still human, and inevitably, some of these decisions will be totally, objectively wrong, or just plain fuck-ups. And if even the tiniest sliver of a proportion are the wrong call, they're really going to stand out.

Unfortunately, while most people are able to get away with their inevitable screw-ups on the job before anybody notices, a mistake on a digital story is out there for the whole fucking world to see and screen-cap, for everybody to laugh at, and then you get shitheads moaning about how everything used to be better, and that the people responsible for this mistake should lose their fuckin' job over it, as if their shit never stunk.

7. Things can be fixed easily

Fortunately, things can be fixed very quickly, and any kind of fuck up can be quickly sorted out with a few keystrokes.

But there is no longer period of time than between fixing a mistake on the homepage and the time the published change goes through. Sometimes these can take minutes, and it's one of the most unbearable parts of the job, hoping that some smartarse doesn't notice and spread it everywhere.

8. You never get bored

There are other aspects of digital journalism that make it appealing for a certain type of journo, and it's perfect for anyone that has a short attention span. You're not just working on one story all day, you might have dozens and dozens of them sliding through in the workflow, and there is never a chance to get bored. It just keeps coming.

9. You're constantly breaking new ground

And on top of that, you also get to do things that nobody has ever done before in journalism. The multi-media mix means you get to do things with videos and infographics and data journalism that are genuinely ground-breaking, and full of novelty.

It does mean you're more likely to make mistakes when you're doing this kind of pioneering work, because there is no other example to follow, but it's totally worth it to be the first to try something.

10. But it's not for everybody

There is a huge churn problem in journalism, with the pay standards and workflow pressures driving out a lot of great journos every year, and the digital crews at all the newsrooms are constantly having to get in new staff and losing irreplaceable experience and knowledge.

But that whole 'jack of all trades' thing doesn't appeal to everybody, and getting stories out incredibly fast with a minimum amount of mistakes requires a certain kind of journo. Some editorial staff thrive on this shit, but others find that pressure unbearable.

The ones that are sticking in there really are trying to do the best job they can, and could be better at blowing their own horn about it, but their queue is getting out of control, and they can't find that picture they need and they have to get on top of that right now. Maybe they'll get into that tomorrow.

- Ron Troupe / Steve Lombard

147. Free footage can still come at a cost

Serious car crashes on Auckland's motorway system are, sadly, a daily occurrence. Most of them are due to the usual shit, like drivers paying too little attention and using too much speed, and sometimes they're because some dopey arsehole is trying to escape the police by going the wrong fucking way.

Sadly, this is also a frequent problem - happening at least every couple of weeks - and unless they result in some terrible tragedy, they usually don't top the TV news bulletins, or lead a website for most of the day.

Unless there is some great footage of the crash, and then all bets are off, pal.

This happened last week, with a fairly serious crash closing down a good chunk of the southern motorway for a couple of hours during a week. There weren't any serious injuries, thank goodness, but there was some spectacular video of the head-on crash. It wasn't great quality - and was obviously filmed off another screen - but it showed the full impact in unflinching detail.

The origin of the video was pretty obvious. You could clearly see it had been taken off a screen at one of the police's control rooms, a breach of the wall of silence that usually surrounds police operations. The question of how it actually got leaked to the media is a bit rougher, but once one news organisation had it, most of them gleefully slapped it up on their websites, hiding the source of it all behind the generic 'supplied' tag.

Few of the newsrooms that used the footage seemed to consider that right from the start there was something dodgy about using it. It was obviously taken by a phone camera in a secure environment and after the crash had been shared with the world multiple times, the cops unsurprisingly put out a statement saying they were looking for who was responsible for the leak (with this twist in the tale usually appearing on the same story that was still using the footage in question with blithe indifference).

In other words, it really was great video, but somebody is going to lose their fucking job over this.

On one hand, the footage did serve a public interest - it literally showed the sickening impact and effects of a crash on a motorway in a way a thousand words could never capture, and is sure to stick in drivers' minds as they fang it on the motorway, and maybe making them a bit more cautious with their motoring.

And the video wasn't gross, or gory, or anything like that. You couldn't even really make out any details of the cars involved, just their fearsome impact. Our police force likes to hold onto information as much as possible, but it's totally arguable that splashing this across the news websites did actually serve a public good.

On the other hand, the poor soul who took that video, and almost certainly didn't expect it to be snapped up so forcefully by almost every organisation in the country, is definitely losing their fucking job over this. The news media makes a great show of protecting its sources, but it won't be hard for the cops to figure out who was in that secure control room at that time, and they're up shit creek without a paddle.

And they can expect little help from the media companies that used the footage, and made money from it by slapping ads in it. They're hardly likely to share any of that revenue with the person who will be getting by without a paycheque for a while.

There were a couple of newsrooms that didn't touch it, but that was probably because they couldn't source it themselves, and still had enough self-respect not to just rip it off from a rival newsroom and claim they got it supplied like everyone else. But that restraint was more than overwhelmed by the big news websites that went hard on it, and led their site on stories related to the crash for several days (it's not like anything else was happening in Auckland last week, like, say, a huge generation-defining protest that causes severe disruption right round the corner from the country's biggest airport or something).

Which is all just a bit gross, because it wasn't a huge fucking story, it was the kind of thing that happens all the bloody time, and no amount of jaw-dropping video is going to change that fact.

It's hard enough getting vital information out of the police as it is, and this isn't going to help matters, especially when the cops are guaranteed to clamp down on the leaker, to deter a repeat performance.

All over a fucking minor car crash that looked impressive, but wasn't that important. Good job, everybody.

- Margaret Tempest

146. Rip offs and attributions: Clean your own house

News organisations have been ripping off the competition's stories for as long as journalism has ever existed, but the news media is still pretty fucking rubbish at dealing with it all.

Scoops are strange things - you want to get a story that nobody else in the world has, but you also need it to be picked up by other newsrooms, if it's ever going to have legs. Some extraordinary stories get broken every year that weirdly don't get any traction, because they're only really pumped by one organisation and nobody else really notices.

Most journos are usually quite happy for others to pick up the ball and run with it, as long as the original source gets its full attribution. You can't just say 'other media report', you have to name that place, and you should also try and throw a weblink back to the story that set everything off. It's only polite.

And for god's sake, don't put a bloody byline on there, unless you're actually contributing something substantially new to the saga.

This isn't very hard, and with newsrooms constantly trying to match everyone else's story, it's vital that you can trace it all back to the original producer, if only for issues of clarity, reducing the garbled whispers that come from endless reproduction. These rules are there for a reason and while they might be unwritten, everybody is going to remember you if you break them.

But it still isn't happening nearly as often as it does. A couple of weeks ago, one of the terrific journos at the country's biggest newspaper took a public swipe at the main opposition for failing to adhere to any of the basic rules of a matching story, and with good cause. And yet, at the same time, a different reporter at that opposition was accusing the newspaper of doing exactly the same thing.

It wasn't a case of 'whataboutism', it was just a coincidence that they both happened at the same time, but that repetition showed that it was an issue that was far from being resolved. (It was also the rare argument on social media where everyone involved had a decent point, even if - as usual - there was more hot air than action.)

Look, it's bloody easy to snipe at each other for doing something a colleague in your own newsroom is guilty of, but maybe we should be looking inside at our own actions, and focus on that, instead of spitting at the opposition. You're not going to properly influence people at other organisations - you might inspire them to do a better job of attribution, but you're just as likely to piss them off - but you can tell your colleagues two desks away from you that they should treat other people's stories the way you'd like yours to be treated.

Corporate culture absolutely frowns on ever giving your competitor any recognition, but at the very least, admitting that somebody else got the story before you did will give a moral high ground, and that kind of personal smugness always triumphs over corporate loyalty.

Besides, it's not like these corporations are ever loyal to you, as countless journos have discovered in the past decade or so, when years of long service was unceremoniously ignored and reporters dispatched from the business. Frankly, journos should be trying to keep on the good side of their counterparts at rival organisations, because you'll probably be working with them one day, and they'll always remember how you treated them.

It never takes much to properly attribute. While it's never as simple as this 600-word rant insinuates - some reporters will be chasing the exact same thing and will both have the same data, so it's not necessary to acknowledge the other work - but throwing in a link to a truly great scoop doesn't hurt anybody. 

Giving people credit where credit is properly due is always a good thing for everybody. You can throw shade at the opposition for doing that as much as you want, but you'll get more accomplished by taking care of your own house. 

- Katherine Grant

145. It's just a game, (and it's just a name)

The whole fuckin' country got very excited about the Cricket World Cup in the past week, with a fever sparked by an unexpectedly brilliant performance by the Black Caps in the semi against India, and fed by that extraordinary final. The team's performance - and especially the heart-breaking way they missed out on the world title - was proper news, leading the newspapers, websites and broadcast bulletins for several days.

There's nothing wrong with supporting your team, and getting excited about some scintillating sporting action, but there are limits to it all. After all, New Zealand seemed to have a limitless supply of grief and empathy to share in the wake of the Christchurch mosque attacks, but it swiftly ran out when people started suggesting that sport doesn't really fucking matter.

Sport certainly does matter, to a lot of people. It's very, very important to them, because they have their identity and sense of worth wrapped up in the sport they follow. It can be somebody's entire life, or just something to watch at the pub on a Saturday night, but most people are genuinely interested in the sports results to some degree.

And as we've seen in the cricket, sport is full of stories of courage and resilience and last-minute efforts, and while nerds might complain about it leading the news sometimes, the reporting on sport is a great and vital thing, offering illumination and entertainment as much as any other part of the news media.

This coverage is an essential part of the news diet, and a crucial offset to the doom and gloom of regular reporting. (If you're just consuming the court stories and road toll, you'll have a pretty fucking grim view of the world.)

And this goes right down to grass-root levels, and Stuff's fairly recent destruction of sports reporting at the district level is a goddamn tragedy, because the great story of sport is more than corporate interests and professional perfection, it's the mums and dads who are out there every bloody week to support their kids on the field, and cheer on their neighbours at representational games. They're the people that you need to be connecting with.

And ultimately, away from the individual stats and stories, sport is just a great big metaphor for everything, for humanity's struggles and the individual's opportunity to shine, of the importance of teamwork and the value of community, and all that can be genuinely inspirational stuff.

But it's still just a fucking metaphor. It's not life, and there are always more important things to be worried about.

If, say,  a sports player uses the wide platform given to them by their physical talents to spew out mental fuckheadery, with their narrow-minded ideology not even giving them the chance to see the harm they might be causing, they can expect to be called a fucking idiot, and nobody gives a flying fuck how well they run with a ball.

And if the local premier rugby team in the city where the mosque atrocities happened is named after ancient groups of Christian arseholes who specifically went out into the world to slaughter as many Muslims as possible, maybe it is worth having a goddamn discussion about that bloody name.

Anybody who wants to argue that the Crusades were hundreds of years ago, and so are not very relevant, can be ignored as a simpleton who doesn't have any sense of history or culture or society, and is actively ignoring the fact that no shithead is going to name a huge professional sports team The Nazis for at least a thousand years.

There's not much else to argue here - the Crusaders name has served the franchise well, but it's a valued history that only goes back to the start of the professional era, so there's no case for a legacy argument.

On the other hand, it's easy to argue for a name change while still supporting your local team, because it's easy to have a sense of priorities, and realise that that name now sends a horrific message to people in your own community who have been brutally attacked.

And it wouldn't diminish the legacy of a team that were one of the very best professional sports teams in the world - it won't undermine the great things achieved by men like Blackadder, McCaw, Carter, Mehrtens and so many more. Those records stand for all time, even if it's under a name that might not exist anymore

The Crusaders rugby team could had a chance to send a message to the world, that they can change with the times, even if iditotic polls argue for the status quo (the fears of the minority should never, ever be dictated by the mob), but decided to put it off with a cowardly promise to look at the issue next year. Or the next. Sometime.

(Maybe they still will, but it's as unlikely as England cricket declaring that the Black Caps should be co-champions - that might sense a message of insanely good sportmanship, which is unthinkable in today's winner-takes-all culture.)

The decision to put it off deciding on the Crusaders' future might have pleased the most pin-headed of their supporters, who can toast the move with their shit local beer, but they've shown the world that the deep and nasty racism that has always lurked in the shadow of the Port Hills hasn't gone fucking anywhere.

Just change the fucking name.  

So yeah, it's okay to cheer on the Black Caps in their improbable bid for the world championship, and okay to feel a bit robbed by that bullshit boundary rule and the fact that some batsmen are now apparently allowed to hit the ball twice, and it was worth the saturation coverage, because this country always judges ourselves by how we deal with failure.

But it's also important to remember that it really is just a bunch of grown adults chasing a ball around a field, and that while it's some heavy fucking symbolism, it's still just symbolism. Real life is always more important.

- Steve Lombard

Too fucking lazy

We're not too busy to bitch about anything this week, but we have been feeling pretty lazy about things. Normal service should resume next week. For sure.

Love,
Media Scrum

Too fucking busy

We're too fucking busy to bitch about anything this week, even though there is always something worth moaning about in this hellish nightmare that we call the modern news media. Normal service should resume next week. Probably.

Love,
Media Scrum

144. Technology will not save us

The Media Scrum team are not gamblers, but if we had to place a bet on something certain at this year's Rugby World Cup, it would be that Spark is going to completely fuck up the live-streaming of it all, and there will be hell to pay.

There is no chance they are going to pull it off, and stream all the promised games with no glitches or lags or complete shutdowns. They're putting too much faith in technology and there is no way their platform is going to handle the massive surge in traffic that will come with every All Black fan in the country logging on at the same time.

Unfortunately, when the system collapses and we're all stumbling around in the digital dust afterwards, it's going to take some time to work out what actually happened and what it all means, because there just aren't enough good tech writers left in the business.

There are still some dead-set legends in technology writing in this country, who can grasp the wider issues around the tech industry, and are comfortable with all the very latest gadgets and can explain how this shit works. There are a few great tech writers on staff in the biggest newsrooms, and a few freelancers who can be relied on clear, concise and insightful copy on the latest developments in the field.

But they're mainly middle aged men, and it's hard to find people outside that social bubble. They're still out there, but they're also getting older and, crucially, are not being replaced.

The news media scene is slowly changing its demographics, and getting more diverse voices in the newsroom. It's taking a lot longer than many would like, but we're getting there. But tech journalism in New Zealand in this science fiction world of 2019 is still pretty pasty.

Again, the blokes who are working in the tech round are doing good work, but it needs new blood, like any other part of the news media, and it's just not there. It's partly a side effect of the growing lack of places to study journalism, but there is also an aching void where there used to be weekly computer and tech magazines in print in this country.

These places are where a lot of the current writers started out and learned their craft, and discovered how to write about really complicated technology issues. They've been replaced by websites that are almost entirely produced overseas, where a local tech story is something that is happening in Sydney.

And it's a damn shame these publications aren't there, and that they're not constantly pumping out tech-savvy reporters, because we live in a world where technology journalism is increasingly important. It rules our lives, and the coverage of it needs to be more than just gushing about the latest gadget from Apple, it needs to be looking at the wider implications of technological change in society and the way we deal with it – the influence of social media, the issues around cryptocurrency and the implications of tech in things like the medical field.

And we need to have people looking at the weird assumptions people make that everything will work out okay if we just rely on the technology, because tech is always fucking out, and you end up with things like the recent census, which was a total failure because the people in charge thought the whole country was on the same page when it came to using technology.

Those kind of tech blind spots are something that need to be exposed, and anybody who thinks the Rugby World Cup stream is going to work fine is staring right at that blind spot, because you can be assured it is going to collapse.

It feels like nothing changes in this country unless it fucks with our rugby, and this is something that could fuck with our rugby, and if Clive from Wainuomata misses the kick-off because of the lag from buffering, he's going to want to know what the fuck is going on. We need more people in the media who can tell him.

- Ron Troupe

143. Nobody needs a kickback to go after Pharmac

Journalists are always getting accused of getting paid by their sources, and taking kickbacks from shady corporate sponsors to spin stories certain ways. They are constantly getting messages telling them they'll say anything they're paid to say. And it happens so often, it's easy to forget our deeply fucking insulting it is.

Nobody is in news journalism for the money – if you think it's an easy way to fame and fortune, sign on up and you can wave at your peers as they sail past you on the pay scale. There are a precious few who do well out of it, and actually make a decent living from reporting and presenting the news, but they are a definite minority, (and you all know who they all are).

There is far more money in comms and PR and other media work, and anybody who sticks around the newsroom knows this.

And yet, a fucking great journalist at a public broadcaster, who has a proven track record of holding power to account, can still face accusations of being paid off by big business. It still happens a lot, and it just happened to Guyon Espiner the other week.

Espiner, after years of early morning seat-of-the-pants brilliance on Morning Report, has now moved into a role on the in-depth team at RNZ. They've set him loose on long-form stories, giving him the opportunity to spend days digging around, without having to cut things short for the next weather report.

Espiner's first effort in his new role was a multi-part look at Pharmac, the government's drug buying agency, and he delivered the goods, with four stories looking at cracks and inconsistencies in the system. He talked to patients with terminal diseases who had no hope for themselves, but wanted to ensure nobody went through the same pain they did; he talked to doctors who had to tell people they had no answer for them; and he talked to the head of Pharmac, and gave them the chance to explain how they were dealing with the issues.

And he hadn't even finished the series before the smartarses came wading in with their bullshit, taking a somewhat decent point about corporate complicity and trampling it into trash with the hooves from their high horses.

Soon after the first story, RNZ started receiving feedback from some very, very clever people, through emails and social media posts, accusing Espiner of getting paid off by big pharmaceutical companies to help shill their agenda.

There is some truth behind the bullshit - Big Pharma have a lot of money to throw around, and have discovered that a good way to get into new markets is to use the news media to highlight sob stories, and desperate pleas for last chance drugs. They've sponsored this kind of content, which tries its best to look like news, but is always obviously advertorial - it doesn't take a genius to spot the difference.

Journalists like Espiner don't give a fuck about the big business side of thing, they just want to understand how some people fall between the cracks. Nobody is asking for the kind of healthcare you see in places like the US, where people are literally dying for the price of insulin, they're just pointing out that a mega business like Pharmac will make mistakes, and it is not helping some people in incredibly desperate situations, and those are some stories worth telling.

A crusading journalist has the goal of helping ordinary folk suffering extraordinary hardship, and that goal may align with Big Pharma's bids to get their new drugs in there, but that doesn't mean they're working together. There is no goddamn collusion.

The accusations of getting paid off were bad enough, but there was also the annoyance of the comment brigade and their blithe, dumb assumptions that people working on these kinds of stories are not aware of the pharmaceutical lobby's goals and methods, like it never came up in the days and weeks Espiner and the crew at RNZ spent on it. Trust us, it comes up all the bloody time.

And frankly, just because there are these connections to the drug companies is absolutely no reason not to put Pharmac under pressure, to hold it accountable, because there are real people suffering under the current regime.

These poor sods, many with terminal diseases, just looking for something to take a bit of pain away for a while. Nobody needs to be paid off to tell these peoples' stories. They just need a bit of human fucking empathy, and somebody to tell their story, in the hope that nobody has to go through the same shit they do.  Sniping about big business and throwing around disgraceful accusations of pay offs certainly doesn't help.

Still, if that's your thing, there's more of it coming, so fill your boots, pal. The early morning RNZ show First Up is doing a video series on people who have some big questions for Pharmac. We're sure your snarky sceptisism will really fucking help them.

- Steve Lombard

142. Stamping down on journalists never works

Anyone who had any doubts that the federal fuzz's odious raid on the ABC editorial offices in Australia last week was a political hit job only has to look at the timing of the fucking thing.

It wasn't actually that surprising that the authorities went in like they did - the government and defence force across the Tasman have been frothing at a number of embarrassing leaks and disclosures that have been reported on in recent years, and have made no secret that they'd be keen to go in and find out how these scumbag journos found out about the information. Because, as always, the State is more ashamed that they got found out for doing dodgy shit, rather than any shame they feel over the actual dodgy shit.

One thing that was fairly surprising was the amount of power that the cops had when they stormed the newsroom. They had the paperwork that said they could delete and make copies of files, even if they lacked the moral authority. In the wake of their action, those lovely motherfuckers at the Australian Federal Police have not ruled out the possibility of charging individual reporters and editors, and have dropped extremely unsubtle threats of further raids.

Everything about the raids made it clear that this was not just a search for information, but a sign of unmistakable intimidation. They wanted to show the fourth estate that they could have the full weight of the law thump down on them, just for doing their goddamn jobs.

Unfortunately, another unsurprising factor was that this is all going down now, even though the stories that sparked the action were published years ago, and that reeks of political interference in the democratic process of those in power being held to account

Our Australian cousins have just had an election, and the national government is looking a stable as it gets right now (which, considering the past few years, isn't very fucking stable at all), and it's just the right time to suddenly take action that could be seen as heavy handed and petty to people considering who they will vote for.

It's highly unlikely that the Aussie PM turned around after the election and personally decided to target the media, (although not impossible), but somebody in the vast apparatus of government below him thought it was a good idea, and has kicked the whole thing off.

This is nothing short of bullying, and is mind-numbingly stupid bullying, because whatever information they get, and whatever damage they inflict on media groups with the blunt, moronic action, it is going to backfire right in their fucking faces.

Because journos love holding people in power to account, and when that power of the state is used to crack down on them, they don’t buckle, they just go harder.

And it's not just the ABC, and not just Australian journos, it fucks off everyone. There have been extremely public notes of support from other newsrooms around the world, including New Zealand, and nobody likes to see this kind of bully-boy bullshit.

This kind of action is far, far more inspiring than intimidating, because if you have a crackdown like this, you must be doing something right, and must be exposing things that powerful people do not want exposed. Bring it on.

It’s unlikely the cockwombles who authorised and carried out last week’s thuggish raids ever considered this, as their metaphorical jackboots come down on the news media. Thugs never think of shit like this, because they're too fucking stupid, and that's why they'll lose.

 - Margaret Tempest

141. Never mind about the embargo

National’s release of some Budget information before the big day last week was, to put it simply, fucking weird. The opposition didn’t get much actual mileage out of the actual data it scraped up from Treasury’s website, with all the talk soon degenerating into harsh questions about hacking and ethics and hurt feelings and all that bullshit. It was weird.

The press coverage was weird, the various fuck-ups by political and civil service figures were weird, the way so many reporters demanded answers to questions nobody cared about on their Twitter feeds was weird, and the whole distraction from the business of balancing the fucking books was really fucking weird.

It was just weird enough to be infuriating for a lot of people involved, even if the actual public reaction to it all was fairly muted. But if there is one thing we can learn from the entire schmozzle, it's that the National party has no respect for the concept of an embargo, even if everyone else does.

In general, journalists fucking hate embargoes, but they stick by them, because they are an issue of trust and fairness. You might only get the information you need if you agree to only release it at a certain time, and if you promise somebody you'll hold off to an agreed time, than you stick by that promise, damn it.

Businesses and politicians and other organisations do use embargoes for their own purposes, and sometimes that use is dodgy as hell - there was an egregious example from the Crusaders recently, where the team management used the usual embargo behind the naming of the team to demand journalists hold off on reporting comments about recent drunken behaviour of certain players, even though those comments had nothing to do with the team naming. 

But in general, journalists do their best to stick to them, and nobody want to be known as someone who can't be trusted with information before everybody else gets it. It’s a question of keeping your word, and nobody who proves to be untrustworthy with these kinds of things will ever convince sources to rely on their professional integrity.

And there are actual benefits from an embargo, they’re not just so that a newspaper can get first dibs on it in the morning, or a TV bulletin in the early evening. They also give everyone the same chance to get the story out at the same time, and that's important, because no one single voice or opinion or hot take dominates the coverage, and everyone is on the same footing, giving everybody a more balanced view of the information.

This is, of course, is what happened last week, where National splurged out a lot of information that may or may not have been accurate. While there wasn’t an official embargo on the Budget, everyone knew the information was out of bounds until 2pm Thursday, when everybody would have the same info at the same time. Except for National, who were only too happy to break that unwritten agreement, in the aim of scoring a few political points.

The Media Scrum team freely admit that we definitely skew left, but this was a baffling way to release information in any ideology. Simon Bridges and his party could have used the information they got to offer strong rebuttal to the Budget, but instead went off on in a desperate attempt to make the government look bad by highlighting an IT fuck-up, something anybody who has ever had to use computers is familiar with.

The attempts to highlight that issue ended in boring name-calling, and politicans taking offense at every fucking thing their counterparts said, and the information just didn’t matter anymore. When the Budget came out, it turned out some of it was right, and some of it was wrong, and it didn't make a fucking difference to anything when the right data all dropped two days later.

The National Party have certainly had their fair share of embargoes in place for their own events and unveilings, but why the hell should any newsroom respect that now, if they’re not going to? We might moan about the embargoes, but we stick by them, and don't trust anybody who doesn't.

- Katherine Grant

140. It all happened so fast

Things like bomb threats and weird evacuations and police call-outs are happening every day in New Zealand, and even though the vast majority turn out to be nothing, anybody working in a newsroom knows they have to keep an eye on them all.

There are legitimate questions about how to handle these things, and it's far too easy to tip over into scare-mongering. Many newsrooms have policies about reporting on strange powders and unsubstantiated bomb threats, refusing to give the story any oxygen, unless it causes massive disruption.

So, for instance, a bomb threat that forces the evacuation of a warehouse in Onehunga might not make any news bulletins, but one that shuts down several major streets in central Wellington might lead the news, even though they have the same cause, and same lack of result.

There has certainly been a lot more sensitivity around these kinds of things since the Christchurch mosque shootings. Everyone is on edge because all those worst nightmares did come true on that sunny Friday afternoon. This is why editors and reporters and producers need to keep an eye on any reports of any disturbances, and on all police call-outs and reported threats, because they might be something that needs to be reported on.

Still, at least now we know it doesn't take long to work out the difference between annoying hoax and terrible reality.

There are many lessons to be learned from the press coverage of the shootings and their aftermath, and we've still got a fucking long way to go yet. But one horrible lesson that this country's newsrooms have learned is that it when things are really bad, when the worst case scenario becomes reality, the news doesn't take long to spread.

The first reports of a disturbance at the Christchurch mosques came from vague reports of an urgent emergency in the central city, no different from the dozens and dozens of similar alarms that go out every month.

But within minutes, the first reports of shots came through. They were unsubstantiated, from locals who heard the harsh sounds of gunfire cutting through a Friday afternoon in autumn and that was the first sign that something truly horrible had happened.

And within half an hour, the real horror was evident. The day was a blur for most of us, as the scale got worse and worse, until it was confirmed, some hours later, that dozens were dead. But it only took moments for everybody to get the news that something really significant had happened.

The weeks and months since have seen many urgent incidents, reports of people seen with guns, schools and workplaces placed on lockdown, and every time there is the horrible thought that it's happening again, that some other fucking arsehole has picked up a weapon and set out to cause as much human misery as possible to innocent people.

We all think that now when the first alerts are raised, watching the news from various emergency departments coming in, and we all hope to hell that it's nothing, and that we can ignore it. But we have to start a story running, just in case the worst is happening again.

At least now we know the longer we wait, the better the chance that it's nothing, and we can bury the first urgent reports beneath other news. Because we know that if it was bad, more news would be there.

Because it happened so fast, so horribly fast.

We hope nothing like this happens in this wonderful country of ours ever again, but if it does, we know we won't have to wait long to know about it, and that speed is breaking our fucking hearts.

- Ron Troupe

139. We are not Bill Ralston

The Media Scrum crew like to act like we know everything, just like everybody else, but we're just self-aware enough to know we're still ignorant little shits a lot of the time. We're trying, honest, we're trying, but sometimes we don't realise something blindingly obvious, like the fact that somebody has already used the Media Scrum name for a column before.

We only realised this last week, when somebody told us Bill Ralston had a column of the same name a while ago, and we should have fucking known it, because it takes three seconds of googling to find out.

But we can assure you all that we're not Mr Ralston. Only one of us have ever met him before, and they were both very, very drunk. He's from a different generation of journalists than us. We didn't introduce Rant TV to NZ screens with his bits on early TV3, we didn't shape the flow of news at the national broadcaster around the turn of the century, and we didn't get chopped up into little pieces by Peter Jackson at the start of Braindead.

And we didn't greet news of another potentially painful restructure at one of the country's biggest newsrooms with a snide comment suggesting they deserve it:

Bill Ralston’s comment in an article today claiming we don’t break stories is unfair & incorrect. Newshub consistently breaks stories. MBovis spread, poor tracing & support workers quitting (picked up by Herald and RNZ) & our white supremacy series. That was just in past week.

— Michael Morrah (@MichaelMorrah) May 15, 2019

As Mr Morrah points out, the worst thing about that comment is that it's just bullshit – the TV crews at both Newshub and TVNZ both break a fucking tonne of great stories every week. They may be locked into the necessity of covering the entire day's events in between the ads, but there are people at the TV stations who are doing stories that nobody else are doing, and they often lead the news agenda with juicy shit.

And it's not wrong, it's just fucking rude. If you consider yourself a journalist, you don't trash your fellow professionals like that, because it's not very fucking professional. Experienced and knowledgeable journalists are a endangered goddamn species sometimes, but the ones that are left don't start piling on each other.

We're still a bunch of competitive fucks – there was some real emotions going on at the Voyagers in Auckland the other night – but we also have trained together, and worked together, and we know how fucking awful it can be to feel like your job is on the line. We've all been through that pain in the past decade or so, nobody is immune, and nobody is going to go on record sneering at anybody else facing that kind of uncertainty.

We hope that the Mediaworks restructure doesn't see the loss of too many bodies in the newsroom, because nobody wins that, and the TV3 crew are a fucking good bunch, and we were delighted to get rat arsed with some of them at those Voyager's the other night.

Maybe giving your rivals in other newsroom public shit about their product, and suggesting that they deserved to get fired for not living up to your own lofty standards, was something that journalists of a previous generation got off on, because they haven't got anything else to complain about.

But that's not how we do things anymore. It's not cool. It's not us. We're not Bill Ralston.

- Margaret Tempest

138. What the fuck are you talking about, your honour?

Most court decisions are straightforward and deathly dull, full of legalese nonsense and other high-faluting language. Dozens and dozens of them are made public every year, and a large proportion of them are too dry to report on, or there's just not enough news in them.

But occasionally you get one that is so weird or obtuse or willfully ignorant, it raises far more question than it settles, which is the opposite of the point. And in that regard, this one is an absolute cracker.

It's not a huge decision - it's only a couple of pages long, and it's a fairly minor matter, regarding media applications to take photos or record sound and video during the sentencing of someone for insider trading. The guilty party has since been sentenced to pay the FMA $150k and barred from acting as a director for five years, so the case has closed.

But while the case has been well and truly settled, Media Scrum remains perplexed by several things in the decision, and honestly can't tell if everyone involved is being willfully obtuse, or just plain ignorant, or just taking the piss. We're left with several questions about it, including:

* Does the judge making the decision really have no idea that Stuff's application refers to some of the country's biggest newspapers?

* Or are they trying to make some point about the need to be more specific in applications, and that every single Stuff publication - and all of its partner agencies - needs to be specifically mentioned in any further requests of this type?

* Where the shit is this vast repository of public domain images mentioned by the defendant's lawyer, which mean the "media applications serve no useful purpose"?

* And are these photos that already exist in the public domain of high enough resolution to be actually useful?

* No, seriously, what the fuck is the lawyer talking about? Finding photos of people who appear in court isn't as simple as doing a Google search and grabbing the first photo that comes up, because you'll run into a little issue called 'copyright'.  

* How does photographing somebody in the dock make them look worse than the fact they're being ordered to pay tens of thousands of dollars for extremely dodgy business practices?

* Or is it only "embarrassing, unfair, and disproportionate" to be seen in court when you're dealing with white collar crime?

* Couldn't this argument now be applied to any sentencing of any criminal in any court in New Zealand?

* Is it now "unfair" to take photos of any criminal during a court process?

* Or are we still just talking about white-collar scum?

* How the fuck does this ensure that 'justice is seen to be done', especially when you're dealing with somebody with a common name, who can now fade into the crowd of other Mark Talbots?

The Media Scrum team have more time wondering about this than the judge spent thinking about the biggest media company in the country, but frankly, your honour, we're still fucking stumped.

- Margaret Tempest

137. The great paywall experiment: Give it a bit of time

The NZ Herald, the biggest newspaper in the country, has gone ahead and put its very best content behind a paywall. It's not the first attempt at something like this in New Zealand – the NBR's firewalls have been proudly standing for years, and even the Herald had a half-hearted stab at it more than a decade ago – but it's the biggest and most comprehensive, and has thrown a huge stone in the small pond that it is the local media scene.

We weren't sure it was ever going to happen, and we truly doubt that you can truly connect with that kind of premium customer when you've been loading the site with bullshit for years, but the Media Scrum team are all 100 percent behind the move, and wish the Herald team all the very best. The populist path they were rampaging down did not have any kind of future and it's time to try something new.

Of course, it's far too early to judge it as a success or not. The stockmarket liked it, giving NZME shares a notable boost on launch day last week, but this is a long-term project, and the full effect will take some time to work out. We've all got the patience of a flea these days, and want everything now, but sometimes you have to just fucking wait to see if something is really going to work.

It could be a bit much to hope for an unambiguously bright and shiny future, where good journalism receives strong rewards and we all head off down a path into brilliance, but if we can have anything from this experiment, we hope for two things.

The first is that we really, truly hope the NZ Herald sticks to its guns, and doesn't panic. There will undoubtedly be a catastrophic drop in unique users and page views with the launch of the premium content, but the editorial team have to tough it out, and show faith in their product.

After all, it might take a while to build up the audience to a sustainable level, and that is just not going to happen overnight.

The second (possibly forlorn) hope is that we hope they don't break the reporters. The company has made some astute hires in recent months, especially in the business field, but still has a limited pool of reporters, and they need to deliver worthwhile content every single bloody day.

People like Fisher and Savage and Johnston and Nippert are the best in the business in this country, and their work should be hugely encouraged. But a news website is  ravenous beast - you can't have  a lead story up for more than couple of hours before it gets stale, and always needs something new constantly, every day, all day.

There is bound to be some enormous pressure on the editorial team to produce the goods to fill those spaces, and when you're dealing with the types of stories these stars are dealing with, it can take a while - it's another fact of the business that you can't rush this shit either.

The ideal result, of course, is that the Herald gets more subscribers, which enables it to hire more top reporters and create more content getting more subscribers, enabling them to hire more top reporters, etc etc.

But we live in the real world where the corporate branches of media companies have made no secret of where their priorities lie, and any profits from the endevor are likely to go to the company's bottom line to make it look god for investors, rather than invested back into the actual business.

Still, we can hope for the best, and it's certainly got off to a strong start, with a tonne of great editorial content already put out under the premium banner.

We just hope it lasts, because if the Herald can't make it work in this country, with the talent under its masthead, nobody will, and then we're all screwed.

- Steve Lombard

136. Mother said build a Wall

Like everybody else in society, politicians like to tell the news media how to do their jobs, without having the faintest fucking idea what that job is. Career politicians are particularly good at it, because they're always pissed off about some reporter digging into their shit and making them look bad, as if incompetence and corruption in power should be held to account or something.

In New Zealand, the King Arsehole in this respect remains deputy prime minister Winston Peters, who is bloody appalling to deal with and has some fucking weird ideas about how the media works. But last week it was MP Louisa Wall's turn to take a big bite of this particular shit sandwich, with this lovely social media post (via the brilliant @avancenz)

It was a statement of such breathtaking ignorance about how the modern media works, that it initially appeared that Ms Wall had just completely fucked up. And she had, mistaking the PM's moves to crack down on social media fuckery with regulation of the actual news media, but Ms Wall has doubled down on her comments ever since, which means she probably means it.

In that case, if Ms Wall is concerned about duty of care in the media, she can probably take a look at the entire fucking history of journalism, which has been grappling with that whole idea since the whole thing started. The news media doesn't exist in a void, it's a part of the ongoing societal conversation about these very issues, and while that sometimes leads us all down the wrong path for a while, we soon course-correct onto a road of increased fairness, openness and balance.

It certainly helped that there are formal and legal processes to ensure that the news media isn't doing any harm - there are watchdogs that consider any and all complaints about broadcasts and websites and publications, and can order corrections and retractions.

And yet, while there are tens of thousands of news stories, written, printed and broadcast every year in this tiny country, only the slightest fraction require this kind of attention. That's because even after years of cutbacks and redundancies, there are still some experienced editors who spend all fucking day thinking about the shit Ms Wall is suddenly musing about, and are trying to strike the right balance in their daily output.

They're always thinking about the standards they have to uphold, and are always very, very careful with what they put out under their banner. Anyone working in one of the big newsrooms for more than a week knows that anything legally dodgy is always, always immediately checked with the lawyers before going to print, and that's just one level of care.

The weird thing is, Ms Wall is actually making a good point about social media, which has all the editorial oversight of a graffiti scrawl wall in West Auckland - actually less, because the council are excellent at quickly covering up cocks and swear words, while Facebook misses straight-up murder videos because the overworked and underpaid moderators at a warehouse in Buttfuck Idaho are taking a smoke break.

Companies like Facebook are facing some massive issues, and one of the big problems is that it still thinks of itself as a tech company, not a media company, and seems clueless when it comes to stopping the encouragement and broadcast of massacres around the globe, and this is absolutely something that needs to be looked at closely. It's not a fucking free speech argument, it's a fucking public health issue.

It would be easy to give Ms Wall the benefit of the doubt - she's been on the right side of a lot of good arguments - and believe that she can see the difference between news media and social media, but she doesn't really seem to know what the fuck she is talking about.

Unless she really does, and 'formal recognition' comes with any kind of government oversight, in which case, she can go get fucked. That doesn't end well for anybody.

- Margaret Tempest

 *Media Scrum would also like to note that the NZ Herald has finally pulled the pin on the paywall hand grenade and lobbed it into the public arena, and we would just like to say that good journalism is always worth paying for. We bitch about the editorial judgment on show at the Granny a lot, but really do wish them the very, very best. It's just a shame you can't mix populism with a paywall.

135. The importance of switching off

Professional journalists never stop being journalists, even long after they've clocked up their regulation hours for the week. When they are at dinner parties and the cinema and the pub, they never really switch off and are always listening for some new angle, or new contact, or new story, no matter where they are. You really do have to watch what you say around them.

It's an important part of the job, seeing something and asking a question about it in your personal life can blossom into something truly worthwhile. Most decent journalism doesn't have an origin story set in an office, it's out there in Real Life.

And then there are the ongoing stories, which journalists can work on for weeks, or months, or even years, going over and over things in their heads as they try to stack something up, waiting for that vital piece of information or source that could blow the whole thing wide open. Most of the thinking about that takes place outside office too.

And yet, it's vitally important that journalists – including writers, reporters, editors, producers and visual journalists - do turn off for a while, and stop thinking about this shit, because that kind of obsession can be extremely unhealthy.

It's especially important right now, because a lot of reporters have returned to the newsroom after covering the Christchurch mosque attacks, and need to be able to step away from the things they have seen and heard in recent days. Last month's terror attacks were one of the very worst things to ever happen on our soil, and the stories have been harrowing and extremely distressful for those who had to cover them.

Many of those reporters have been taking days off, and have fled to happy places to take their minds off things, but it's also incredibly important to be able to switch off at the end of every day, and not take some of this shit home with you.

In the first few days after the attack, some people were working 18-hour days, and for their own mental health, it was vital that they took a fucking break when they finally got home. Fortunately, there are a number of simple and well-proven ways to switch off from work.

There is the obvious example of spending time with close friends and family outside journalism, and rejoicing in the simple pleasures of life outside the newsroom, without being constantly reminded of the horrific events you had to deal with on the job.

If that's not really an option, there is always the traditional journalist method of getting completely fucking wasted. This has worked for years, with a long history of drunks and addicts in NZ's press history. This still works for some people, although many of us can't be bothered dealing with the inevitable hangovers, not when the job now has multi-media demands and long shifts.

The simplest way to get away from it all is to take some solace in entertainment - binge the fuck out of some Netflix, or watch a dumb Will Ferrell movie, or go to a cheap and nasty gig, or play video games all night long, or something. We've never had more access to more entertainment than we do right now, and it can be the best and easiest way to take your mind off the job.

(It's also important that you don't choose an entertainment that will remind you of the thing you're trying to escape – a game or movie with a lot of machine gun action would not help after dealing with the awful consequences of real-life gun use.)

Most of all, if you want to get away from it all, just stay the fuck off all social media, because you'll never escape the news that way. It's surprisingly easy to switch it off for a while and you can always quickly catch up again when you're back on the clock.

As a profession, we do have to take a close look at these things, but we also have to know when to step the fuck back, or this can really have an impact on our lives, both professional and personal.

Some of us are still fucked up from covering the Christchurch earthquakes, years after the disaster, because we forgot to take time out, and that event didn't have the added horror of man's inhumanity to man. Switching off is essential, for everybody's well-being.

- Ron Troupe

134. 'You do not fuck the future, sir, the future fucks you'

It's been a hectic month, and the Media Scrum crew haven't had time to have a proper moan about anything this week. Instead, we'll just leave this message for those in the cheap seats, who still don't understand why we sometimes have to name the Christchurch terrorist:

It's surprisingly easy to write the vast majority of the stories about the appalling attack on the two mosques without ever mentioning the name of the motherfucker responsible for it. A focus on the stories of the victims and survivors, as well as the rapid-fire legislation on gun control coming down the line, and we can help ensure that the fame that the dangerous fool wants is denied as much as possible. We don't have to make a big deal out of it, we just don't need to name him.

That said, it is still very important that we name the motherfucker in any and all court stories over the next few months, for two distinct reasons.

The first is that justice must be seen to be done - especially in this case, above all other cases - and there can be no ambiguity about the legal moves at all. Leaving out the name creates wriggle room for harmful and idiotic conspiracy theories, and none of us need that shit right now. It must always be absolutely clear who is facing the full weight of the law.

The second reason is that every story that is told about this case becomes a statement of historical record, and while the archiving of digital news stories is woefully inadequate these days, some stories will survive for years and decades to come. And they will become crucial as the entire event is analysed and studied, to understand how this terrible tragedy occurred, and how we stopped it ever happening again.

It might give you all the feels to deny the killer the fame he wants, but if we're ever going to learn anything from this shit, we need to name the one responsible for it for the record.

We're sorry, but history doesn't give a fuck about your feelings.

Love,
Media Scrum

133. Putting the spotlight on yourself

If we were ever supposed to learn anything from the Watergate clusterfuck, it was that it's often not the crime that matters, it's the reaction to it. The initial misdeed might be something relatively innocuous - like someone rummaging around in a deserted office at night - but trying to cover it up or stamp the story out only made things exponentially worse for everybody involved.

This may partly explain why the current President of the US can be so openly corrupt and rotten, and still remain in power. The shallowest man to ever sit in the Oval Office is so obviously on the take from corporate and foreign interests, including several awful dictatorships, but makes no secret about it all, and relishes in the attention. It's so hard to bring down somebody with absolute no shame.

But many people in power try to hush up an embarrassing story and do it so badly, and hurt themselves so much, by putting themselves under the microscope. If you're trying to get away with something, you need to draw as little attention to yourself as possible.

In other words, don't get some journalists who are asking questions about you thrown in jail, you stupid fucking wankers.

The arrest of the Newsroom team in Fiji while they were chasing down a meaty story last week was a breathtakingly stupid move, and whatever the people who were responsible for it were thinking, it was a massive mistake.

It was a strong enough story anyway, and they were there to interview a Chinese resort developer accused of environmental desecration of an island in the Mamanucas, and Newsroom was obviously going to go big and get the word out about this story when they were ready to publish. 

But now everybody is looking at the story to see what was worth that kind of attention, and any corruption is going to be exposed. Because if you're scared enough to put people in a Fijian jail for a night, you're got something big to be ashamed of.

It's still a bit unclear who ultimately gave the order for the arrests, and the local authorities are already throwing the usual rogue patsies under the bus, but it's hard to understand what they thought they would gain from such action. Did they think that the journos involved would all be so intimidated by the arrest that they would stop digging into the story, and just go home and forget about it?

Have they.... Have they met Melanie Reid?

Even Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama- no stranger to his own huge PR blunders, and always willing to look the other way when his own critics are threatened to keep quiet - knew what a bad look this was, especially with an increasingly complex political environment in the Pacific right now, and immediately started sending out the apologies. Even Frank knows that you can't hush up professional journalists that way.

Beyond the specifics of this case, there is no self-respecting journo who is ever going to drop a story after being treated in such a heavy-handed way, and will double down on their efforts after such clumsy bullying.

To be incarcerated in such a manner is a badge of fucking honour - it means you're the best of the best, willing to give up your freedom to get at the truth, and it means the stories you are covering are big and worthy.

The Newsroom team got more than some midnight munchies form McDonalds from their night behind bars, they got the impetus and justification to follow this story through, right to the very end. And we'll all be watching them do it.

- Katherine Grant