128. These columns can't take any weight

Guest column by J Jonah Jameson 

Why do New Zealand columnists suck so much?

The art of writing a column was once considered a noble form. Now it’s just another branding opportunity for TV/radio talking head egos like Duncan Garner and Mike Hosking to spread their patented brands of ignorant shit.

The Kate Hawkesby/Mike Hosking hellspawn duo over at NZME sum up the worst of modern columns, usually done with a strong right-wing bent as the parent company aims for that sweet, sweet Fox News-addict demographic. In journalism on a par with a high school student’s snarky Snapchat posts, Hawkesby ranted recently about how Labour MPs didn’t dress up in tuxedos and gowns for their informal summer retreat.

At Newshub, Duncan Garner interviewed MP Chlöe Swarbick about cannabis this week and didn’t have the slightest fucking idea of what he was talking about. Dipshit Garner has a long history of this stupidity, once writing a column once about shopping at Kmart that somehow turned into a racist rant, which thankfully got pinged by the Press Council.

NZ media are obsessed with giving loudmouth radio and TV personalities columns to share crap versions of their aired rants. Transcribing a radio host’s meandering speech into a column format rarely ends well, and we genuinely feel for the junior journos who have to do it. You end up with bizarrely meandering, poorly written diatribes on the same level of quality as your Uncle Nigel’s Facebook posts about chemtrails.

A big hoo-ra was made about fossil talkback host Leighton Smith leaving Newstalk ZB last year - but no worries, the Herald quickly picked him up for a weekly column, where granddad continues his ultra-right-wing blather on issues like why climate change is a hoax.

Columnists in NZ usually fall in two camps - shallow political hot takes or pretentious lifestyle wankery.

In the latter category, Deborah Hill Cone finally yanked her own never-ending self-analysis session masquerading as a column last year. Cone would occasionally write blatantly offensive shit about Charlotte Dawson’s suicide or foment insane conspiracy theories about the PM’s partner Clarke Gayford for kicks. She also had sheer balls to show up a few weeks after she quit her column with an article in the Herald magazine Canvas about how darned bad public shaming is … you know, especially when you write shallow columns intentionally geared to generate outrage and are called on it. This was kind of like having Donald Trump write a guide about etiquette in politics.

The dregs of the columnists that plague NZ media all cover similar bases - they’re horribly full of themselves, they’ll throw out controversial hot takes in the hopes of getting clicks, and they contribute little or nothing to the public discourse. They’re about riling up the sort of people who contribute daily to Stuff comments, not engaging the rest of us who are increasingly sick of bullshit and con artists.

But who’s good? Well, there are a few left who don’t constantly scrape the bottom of the barrel. The Herald’s Brian Rudman consistently writes some of the best, most cogent takes on Auckland politics, and former Metro editor Simon Wilson is also doing a great job at the Herald writing opinionated long-form analysis.

Andrea Vance and Claire Trevett also write very solid political columns that avoid ranting. Stuff’s Sunday Star-Times has recently hired several new diverse voices for their paper and RNZ manages to thankfully avoid talking heads syndrome entirely in its opinion pieces. But the intelligent voices are constantly being drowned out by the inept baying to the crowd by the ranters and ravers, all aiming to be today’s trending topic.

The bloviating opinionators who dominate the columnist realm tend to be from one demographic - almost entirely white, mostly male, coming at you from a basis of privilege and comfort few Aucklanders really live in. (Hey, did you know Mike Hosking crashed a $140,000 car? He’s one of us!) There are pitifully few Maori columnists on the ground, or Pacific voices, and good luck finding an Asian columnist in mainstream media who represents the quarter of Aucklanders of that background.

Once upon a time, you could rely on a columnist to give you a real sense of the city they live in, of its people and quirks and ideas. Long-gone names like Herb Caen of San Francisco, Mike Royko of Chicago or Jimmy Breslin of New York pounded their beat and told stories.

There aren’t a lot of columnists like that any more - in NZ, Steve Braunias has come close with works like his great “Eating Lincoln Road” series, but columns that have a voice and a story to tell that aren’t just about raking in clicks and outrage or narcissistic blather are a dying genre.

We’re all the poorer for it, really.

127. There's always a place for the newsroom

There has recently been another huge round of lay-offs and redundancies in the US media scene, which has sparked the usual intellectual chin-stroking, and more than one suddenly-unemployed journalist writing a 'what does it all mean?' piece.

These journos might not have a job anymore, but they have sure got plenty of advice from everybody, some of whom may have even read a newspaper once. This advice ranges from the oddly offensive 'learn to code' to the more useful 'maybe we should do something about all the billionaires running these media outlets into the ground'.

But one of the worst pieces of advice seen in recent weeks - even if it was given with the best of intentions - was that maybe journos could all just work remotely now, cutting down on costs by cutting out the newsroom altogether, and just letting reporters roam free.

This might make a lot of sense on paper, but it's a terrible, terrible idea in real life. Even in this day of mass communication, a fully functioning and lively newsroom is essential for anybody trying to gather information in a timely and accurate fashion. Nothing beats it.

For starters, seconds can make a huge difference in getting up big breaking news, and it's just faster to all work out of the same office. Even with Skype and phones and Slack and emails and all that, there is still no piece of communication that is as fast as the human voice shouting across the newsroom, and nothing can convey the urgency quite like a 'Holy shit!' moment in the office.

Anybody working in breaking news knows this - digital editors are constantly eavesdropping on the chief reporter as they talk to their news staff, so they can be ready to roll when the time comes. If you're dedicated to getting information up and out into the world as quickly as possible, you have to be in the newsroom.

But it's not just the speed, it's the knowledge. Even with the active and ongoing loss of the most experienced journos, any mid-sized newsroom has decades of experience and advice, which younger journos need to see first hand, if they're going to get anywhere in this business.

And it's having another voice to listen to when you're stuck - it makes everything easier when you're surrounded by people who can actively help you out without even fucking up their own work flow. Even if it's just somebody who needs help nailing that perfect intro, and needs more general overall advice, it's good to have somebody there. And it's great to have somebody there who can catch your fuck-ups and ensure mistakes are fixed quickly, (hopefully before they go public).

To see one effect of being away from the heart of the newsroom, look at the increasing use of 'special correspondents'. The idea to let A-level journalistic talent stick around and avoid burn-out by keeping them in the company with the offer of more freedom to do the shit they really want to do.

But as noted in a recent column from Mark Jennings, while they do have more freedom to follow their noses, they are also out of the flow and out of the daily grind of daily reporting. They can miss developments or angles or whole new stories if they aren't part of the general staff, and don't always get all the nuances of long-running stories that are constantly discussed in the regular reporting and editing pool.

And finally, working in the newsroom can be really fucking enjoyable, because you're spending your day with smart, creative and funny people, which is just so much better than sitting at home, snarking away on Twitter.

Tech companies are pushing for everybody to work from home, but there is no tech that beats a group of people in the same proximity, all working to purpose. Working remotely can work for a lot of people - especially if they're choosing lifestyle over career, and are dead keen on building a life outside the main centres - but it's still a long way from beating the benefits of all being in the same room together.

- Katherine Grant

126. Paywalls and populism just don't mix

NZME are pissing into the wind if they think they can get a successful paywall up and running while still pursuing an unashamedly populist agenda, but it looks like they're going to give it a crack anyway.

It's been in the works at the company for years and years – news websites have been going for decades now, and they're still trying to figure out the best way to make money out of the fucking things. The NZ Herald has always been upfront about its plans for a premium content section that people have to pay for, but have long been shy about pulling the actual trigger.

The newspaper's fingers have already been burned by a failed paywall experiment more than a decade ago, when it discovered that nobody wanted to actually pay for opinion columns, because every arsehole has got an opinion, and there's no shortage of free ones. That didn't last very long, and the powers that be decided to chase the advertising dollar instead.

But it's not enough, not when overseas behemoths like Google and Facebook have been hoovering up all the ad money. So there has been a tonne of backroom work to set up a paywall on NZ's biggest newspaper, and it has been going on for a long time. The infrastructure was all in place as long as five years ago, before the NZME board got cold feet, and ramped up the policy of chasing audience numbers and getting them up by any means necessary, so the company would look better when they tried to sell it.

And now, with the money running out - there has been another devastating round of redundancies in recent months at NZME, with areas like the subbing and photography departments hit hard - they seem hell-bent on getting some dollars for their words. The Herald  has been on a strong recruiting drive for good business reporting talent, and have an excellent editor in Media Scrum fave Miriyana Alexander involved in their premium content section.

But it's doomed, because they've fucked the brand. That drive to get the numbers up has done terrible damage to the masthead. Chief editor Shayne Currie, who has never let us forget that he's a 100% tabloid man at heart, has managed to push the venerable Herald in the trashiest of directions, shamelessly chasing anything that gets an audience, no matter how fucked up the situation gets.

If you trying to convince people to give you actual money, you can't feed them the same trash that everybody else has. The gutting of resources at the Granny Herald means there is going to be extraordinary pressure on the great reporters still working there to produce more and more content, because they won't be able to use the same stuff their rivals are serving up for free.

The Herald brand has become so tarnished, even with the great work going on there every day, because when you go to the website and see some more poor choices as lead stories, you can see they're never going to convince the smart set to come back for their meaty fix. They'll just go elsewhere.

The only way it could really work is if the Herald gave up on the populist bullshit altogether and went full paywall, with nothing but quality product beneath it. Its numbers would plummet and there would be widespread panic at the company, but if they could ride it out and stick to their guns, they might come out ahead in the long term

If the StuffMe merger had gone ahead, that would have helped a lot – Stuff could have been the populist all-the-shit-you-need-to-know, and the Herald could have been the high-brow version, with all the best journalism in the country in one place. But that's not going to happen.  

(For the record, Media Scrum stands by its sincere belief that the StuffMe merger would have been catastrophic for local journalism, with a widespread loss of indispensable talent and an unacceptable hegemony in the country's media vision, but can still recognise that some places, like these schizophrenic websites, could have benefited)

But can't go half and half, people who love trash or worthy news don't like it, and people who hate trash or worthy news don't like it. But that's what the Herald is going for. There's still a chance they'll pull it off, especially with that level of editorial talent, but they're just as likely to get a load of piss in the face again.

- Ron Troupe

125. The roast is over

When it came to the latest regurgitation of the sorry Roastbusters saga, there can be no doubt that Newshub got totally played. Even with an experienced and respected journo running the story, they got played by a narcissistic little shit who is desperate to avoid the obscurity he so richly deserves. It happens sometimes.

After all, nobody needed to hear from the Roastbusters ever again. When the story broke a few years ago, it was genuinely newsworthy, exposing some A-grade toxic masculinity in a group of young men, who openly bragged of sexual assaults.

It got some good discussion going about the way this country raises its young men, and the way our young women are treated, and it was definitely worth covering at the time, if only because these little smirking shits and anyone who might emulate them needed to be shown that this bullshit was not acceptable, in any way.

And then, thankfully, they all faded away. Nobody needed to see those munters or their stupid videos anymore, and it was something of a relief to see them all fade away into obscurity.

But reporters who break stories like this never really let them go, and Karen Rutherford - a respected local journo who has covered a lot of good stories over the past 20 years – certainly didn't. So you can't really blame her for taking the bait when the lead Roastbuster returned with the offer of an exclusive interview.

But it was nothing but bait, because this shithead wasn't interested in putting wrongs right, he just wanted to use the one piece of notoriety he had in life to garner more fame and attention. He had a music career he was desperately trying to kickstart (a stunningly mediocre music video had received tens of hits after a year online) and was using the one thing he was known for to get back into the public consciousness.

Newshub and Rutherford, to their credit, didn't fully give their interviewee what he wanted, and his efforts to get a free intercontinental flight out of it was completely rejected. But he still got to have his say, and in a stunningly narcissistic piece of theatre, he told everybody how he had learned from his mistakes and become a better person and nobody fucking cares, dude. Once a date rapist, always a date rapist.

It was fairly painful to watch for anybody not directly involved in the case, so we can only imagine how rough it was for the victims, watching this arsehole going for some kind of public redemption he never deserved.

But Newshub couldn't resist the lure of the exclusive, and seemed a bit surprised by the extreme backlash that followed. The exclusive report was heavily promoted, and while it might have got the ratings, the organisation lost a shit-tonne of credibility as a smart news source.

It didn't take them long to realise – the news chief quickly wrote a fairly grovelling editorial on why they felt the need to go for the interview, an argument that was bought by exactly nobody. And after leading their first bulletin with a long report, the second half on the next day was relegated until after the first ad break, and angled heavily on the 'aren't you just being a dick?' side of things.

But it was all too late, and Newshub had given him the platform, and brought him back into the public sphere where he desperately wanted to be.

The only worthwhile thing to come out of the whole mess is that there has been some more good discussion on why this dude was given such an opportunity in the first place, although even that boils down to the fact that he didn't fucking deserve it.

He got what he wanted, and Newshub thought they got something out of it as well. But all it was was just another dodgy exclusive, rehashing old shit that should have stayed buried.

- Katherine Grant

(P.S. While we're here, we don't need any more stories about the bullshit whipped up by old, dumb men like Don Brash and Brian Tamaki at this time of year either, and we're not wasting another column on them. They have nothing to say and no new ideas, so we should all just ignore them until they fade away into ash, like Dracula caught out in the sun. Fuck 'em.)