96. There's a time and a place for hopeless optimism, but launching a paywall isn't one of them

Both of New Zealand's two biggest news websites have been openly eyeing up the opportunity to charge for their online content. With declining revenues in almost every other part of the news media, a paywall can look extraordinarily attractive, and both Stuff and the NZ Herald have made no secret of this fact.

The Herald made a weak effort to gather revenue this way when it tried to charge for its columnists a decade or so ago - and quickly discovered nobody really gave a shit about anybody's opinion that much. Since then, neither of the big boys have made any concrete moves towards properly implementing any kind of real paywall.

There has still been a lot going on behind the scenes, and Stuff and the Herald have both done a tremendous amount of work getting a paywall system set up, so it's ready to go as soon as the corporate winds change. They've actually both come pretty close to pulling the trigger on it - the Herald in particular came really, really close a couple of years ago, before the corporate masters decided they needed to be the #1 one site, and went actively hunting for clicks instead - but all the news is still free.

Still, the whispers about a possible paywall persist, especially when it can be implemented with a couple of clicks. And one of the sites is now actively considering it again and an announcement may be due later this year.

We're not judging the site for doing this - good journalism costs good money and something has to be done. Even after decades of trial and error, we're still trying to work out this whole online news thing, and still trying to work out how to make a sustainable model out of it all.

There have been innumerable examples of paywalls around the world going up and staying up - generating some kind of revenue. Even if they're porous as hell, producing a small amount of money is better than making no money at all, and there are several high profile institutions that have set up and sustained a paywall.

Hell, even closer to home, the NBR has been holding fairly steady with its paywall, and putting more and more of its content under lock and key as it seeks to maintain a solid core of loyal readers who don't mind paying for their biz news.

So nobody can blame the editors at one of the big boys of NZ news for looking at it. They've got to try something, and Media Scrum stands by its theory that we've finally reached the point where all the money and goodwill is starting to really run dry, and something us to give.

Putting up a paywall might even pay off and might turn out to be a good idea after all. What is a really, really bad idea is when unrealistic expectations are set up about it.

Online editors at the publisher kicking the tyres of a paywall have been told for several years to chase the clicks, no matter what the cost to credibility and authority (two things that could be surprisingly fucking useful when you want people to give you money for your words and pictures). Unsurprisingly, they have raised questions about what they're supposed to do when the premium content goes behind the wall - do they focus on those hits, or on spending the time making sure the premium content really does look premium.

And in a mind-numbing display of ignorance, they were told not to worry, because the numbers won't go down. Everything will be fine. This is fine.

This could happen, just like it has never happened with any other paywall that has ever gone up anywhere. Of course the numbers are going to drop, it's going to happen, and pretending that they won't is setting yourself up for massive disappointment. We're all for hopeless optimism at Media Scrum - we genuinely believe there is a lot of great stuff going on, and that journalism still has a bright future - but this is madness.

The head honchos might be saying things like this, but they've got to be realistic about it. People are going to be turned off, even if the vast majority of content remains free as fuck, because that's how human beings work - journalists, of all fucking people, should know that.

All this optimism is going to do is make people working at the online coalface feel like miserable failures, because the thing they were told wouldn't happen has happened, and it's highly likely that they're going to take the brunt of the blame for it. Corporate optimism has a habit of covering the poor fuckers on the shop floor in shit when it all goes sour. It's happened before in newsrooms around this country, and it's going to happen again, because nobody seems to have learned a fucking thing.

Good luck with the paywall, kids. Just try not to panic when it feels like the world is crashing around you.

- Katherine Lombard

95. How (not) to apologise, with Dame Denise and Killer Mike

All journalists agree – the PR industry is the dark side, and our bitter enemy in getting through to the truth. Even though many people in the PR industry are jaded journos who we're all still friends with, reporters, editors and producers just want them to get the fuck out of the way.

But they do have their uses, and Dame Denise L'Estrange-Corbet's media meltdown last week was the classic example of a situation where somebody could really, really have used some PR advice.

Madeleine Chapman nailed the story for The Spinoff, revealing that Dame Denise's World brand was making a mockery of the 'made in NZ' idea by putting it on tags on clothing that had been most definitely produced overseas. The legal technicalities behind this claim still need to be sorted out, but everybody could agree that it wasn't a good look.

But as bad as it was, it got exponentially worse when Dame Denise lost her freaking mind over the story. If she had taken five minutes to talk to somebody – anybody – with a bit of PR knowledge, they would have told her to do exactly the opposite of what she did do, because she immediately starting hooning the wrong way down an intellectual one-way street.

All she had to do was say 'shit, sorry about the confusions, but 99% of our other clothing is made in NZ, so we'll do all we can to sort the situation out, or at least make it a lot clearer. Our bad.' That's all. That's all she had to say

Instead, she totally followed the playbook of how not to handle a tricky PR situation – she lashed out at the reporter and her publisher, and latched onto tiny points about the removal of labels that nobody gave a shit about. She moaned about tall poppy syndrome, semi-accidentally called everybody in New Zealand stupid and did everything she could to paint herself as a helpless victim of outrage. And why couldn't everybody just get over it already?

Dame Denise has been brilliant talent for journalists to talk to about the state of the fashion industry in recent years, and her apparent familiarity with the media must have led her to take this path, without worrying about things like pausing to take a breath, or listening to any advice.

Instead, she has done incalculable damage to her brand – it's now going to be remembered for 'yeah, but Made In NZ was for the tag, not the clothes', not for the fact that it has been operating as a highly ethical and smart company.

The first piece of PR advice for anybody facing this kind of situation is an obvious one, so we're going to reveal it for free: It's just not that hard to say sorry. Apologise, really mean it, learn your lessons and move the fuck on, because everybody else will.

The recent case of Killer Mike's appearance on NRA TV showed us all how to do it. The brilliant rapper is riding on a modern cultural high as half of Run The Jewels, but risked agitating a metric fuck-ton of his fans by apparently going on the TV in the wake of the Parklands massacre and telling students and black people that they just needed to harden the fuck up, an attitude markedly at odds with his politically-aware lyrics.

But before anybody could burn their RTJ discs (or more likely, delete them from their device), Killer Mike put out an apology that explained that he had appeared on that show before the latest schoolyard atrocity, and he wasn't talking about the kids who had made a stand, and he stood fully behind them as a friend and ally. He explained that he had tried to engage with a viewpoint he found ideologically unsound, but he didn't use that as an excuse for the offence he may have caused, and took full responsibility for it, offering nothing but love and respect as compensation.

That's how you do it.

Some people are so abhorrent an apology just won't do – people like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein could offer up the most contrite, heartfelt and true apologies in the history of humanity, and they can still go to hell for all the shit they've caused.

But for something as seemingly trivial as a clothes tag, it really could have been handled  a lot better. As hard as it is for journos can admit, this was a case where a bit of PR truly could have helped, rather than hindered.

- Ron Troupe

Voyagers addendumb: Everyone's a winner, baby

The big media awards night of the year is kicking off in a few hours, and while it means NZ Twitter is going to be fuckin' insufferable for the next day, it's worth it. If we won't say nice things about each other, who will?

Media Scrum would like to congratulate all the winners, and all those who were nominated. It's a formidable collection of great journos - the investigative reporter category alone is filled with absolute blinding talents - and a great indication of the brilliance filling the country's newsrooms. You're all stars.

(Well, maybe not Ben Mack...)

Still, we're all about the invisible hand behind the bylines here at Media Scrum, and we'd also like to take the opportunity to thank a bunch of other people in this godforsaken industry, who are doing the job every bloody day, and won't be stepping up on no awards podium anytime soon.

These include:

* Online editors who read through and sub everything that comes through their digital desk, come up with a decent headline, find an acceptably eye-catching photo, make sure any questionable facts are sorted out, place it on a homepage, and then get told off by colleagues in their own organisation for taking so long  to copy and paste their brilliant prose.

* All the presenters and producers on the non-6pm news shows, getting entire shows out, despite being left with all the resources of a high school media class, and have to fill in when the big kids go dancing.

* Everyone who has ever had to ring around all the police and fire stations at five in the morning.

* Anybody who has had to take the handwritten notes of somebody far too important to ever touch a keyboard, and transfer it into award-winning columns which are mainly about an actress the writer really likes.

* All the subs and designers and proof readers and editors who spend all day making sure the apostrophe in "it's" is in the right place, and that it's always "more than" rather than "over".

* The social media editors who would love to come to your thing, but just need to get this tweet out, and check those comments, and figure out why everybody is saying that headline is problematic, and get that Instagram story going, and....

* Any and all autocue operators - don't worry kids, you'll be on the other side of the camera soon enough.

* Loaders.

* And above all, any poor bastard who is stuck in the newsroom tonight, doing the work, while their colleagues are out getting fucked up and patting each other on the backs. Good job, everybody. We hope you got some pizza at least.

Love, 

Media Scrum

94. Reporting on rumours and all the related bullshit

When police took the highly unusual step of addressing the Clarke Gayford rumours last week, there were, predictably, the usual moaning about the media intruding on the private life of the Prime Minister's partner. That they were stepping right over the line, by giving the noxious whispers whispers any airplay at all.

Even some senior journalists - including respected political reporter Andrea Vance - appeared disgusted by their own profession, that it had all come to this: reporting on scurrilous rumours that had absolutely no basis in fact.

But the actual stories about Clarke weren't the stories being reported, the police reaction was the story, because they very rarely take the step of confirming that somebody is clean. They've done it a couple of times in recent years, but it is highly unusual that the famously tight-lipped modern police force would take this step, and that alone was worth reporting on, because it showed how fucked-up the whole situation was.

It didn't matter what Gayford is supposed to have done, there was no way police were going to repeat the whispers publicly, and there was no way the media was going to repeat them without stacking them up. It was the police reaction that was unusual, and an easy to talk about the issue without casting any shade on Clark.

The fact is, all the big newsrooms had been hearing these stories for weeks, and had all made quiet inquiries, even though the stories had the stench of unmistakable bullshit, with details that didn't stack up to any kind of reality.  Real life is strange enough that even things that sound preposterous can turn out to be true, so it's worth checking out, and nobody was surprised when the stories about Gayford turned out to have all the substance of stale cigarette smoke.

But the rumours have kept coming in recent weeks - literally dozens and dozens of emails and sly messages have flooded into newsrooms; and reporters who find themselves suffering the misfortune of being the only journalist at the BBQ have been told they should be looking into the scoop. They were rumours that spread through book groups and gossip in the pub and posts on social media, and they were fucking everywhere.

In fact, a lot of editors were actually bloody relieved that there was some kind of official statement from the police, because that might shut some of these motherfuckers up, and they can clear out their emails and go back to working on stories about things that are actually true.

They certainly didn't need that crabby letter from a lawyer telling them not to repeat the allegations, because of course they fucking wouldn't. Even if they lacked the moral clarity on the issue - and let's face it, there are a few high-profile editors who do - no legal representative was going to say the stories would good to publish, because they were so obviously defamatory and harmful. (The lawyer who sent out this letter knew this damn well, because she was a highly experienced journo before getting into law, so either forgot everything she ever knew as a reporter, or was just making an extremely snarky point.)

All of this has happened before, and will happen again, and there will be the same wailing and gnashing of teeth about the ethics of it all. There were even worse rumours swirling about Helen Clark's husband when she was in power, and Peter wasn't no DJ. John Key's charming wife got off pretty lightly on the rumour front, but that was probably because son Max was the source of most of the talk. (Obviously, there is a scurrilous anti-DJ agenda going on here.)

The official statement last week should, of course, put all the whispers to rest, but it won't, because people are selfish arseholes who like to hear and spread gossip, and see a goddamn conspiracy everywhere - of course the police would say that, but what are they REALLY hiding? - and there are going to be more whispered stories about Clark's sordid life, like it's any of our goddamn business.

But at least the police did say it was bullshit, and if it stops even some of the clever fuckers who keep messaging us, telling us about this terrible thing they heard about the PM's man, it'll be a relief.

- Margaret Tempest

93. Kill the comments. Kill them with fire.

One of the golden rules of journalism – and there are a few – is one of the simplest: don't read the fucking comments.

The idea that anything useful can be gained from the comment sections on news websites and Facebook pages was kicked out the window a long time ago. Vain hopes that input from the general public could provide some useful new information, or an indispensable perspective on a news story, have been proven to be foolishness.

Instead, they're full of weird political perspectives and strange spam and nasty, vindictive and vitriolic rants. At least half of them will be people insulting the media company who published the story, and the other half will be insulting everybody else. Anybody who has the time to get worked up about a news story, no matter how innocuous it is, and is so willing to spew out their opinion, is someone who is not worth hearing from.

And yet, they're still there, still full of homophobic, sexist and outright misogynistic bullshit, stinking up the joint for everybody. Even though newsrooms can also be held responsible for all this shit, and have to answer to places like the Press Council when their comments are hijacked with people with an odious agenda.

There is nothing to be gained from comments, and everything to be lost. The numbing stress of moderating the comments has driven some people out of journalism altogether, and they're an increasing barrier to people in the greater public arena who aren't used to dealing with this shit.

Take the case of Lower Hutt weaver Veranoa Hetet, who had a story published by Stuff about the gorgeous Māori cloak worn by our Prime Minister in London, but last week took to Twitter to declare she would 'never ever' talk to a reporter again. Not because of anything the journalist did, but because she was shaken and appalled by the comments on the Facebook post pointing to her story:

I am reading the comments that follow the article on https://t.co/jGLWVIQmhS facebook page and crying. Some people are so nasty and have taken the article the wrong way. I'm never talking to another reporter ever. Never ever again 😢

— Veranoa Hetet (@whaeavee) April 24, 2018

And this was on a nice fucking story, about a lovely piece of ceremonial clothing worn on a state occasion, and it was still corrupted and tarnished by the comments. Ms Hetat obviously went into the story with the best of intentions, and had her entire faith in human decency pissed on by muntheads who think they are great keyboard warriors. Nothing was gained, nothing of value was added, it was all just more histrionic and unnecessary bullshit that was hijacking the narrative.

Journalists have a hard enough time convincing people to tell their story without this new barrier. Even people who only have pleasant interactions with reporters might think twice about talking to them when they can be personally attacked. Reporters have to build up a thick skin to this kind of crap, or they're never going to get anywhere in the business, but they can cut to the bone of regular civilians, and who can blame them for shying away?

Comments need to die, and to be turned off altogether. News is not a dialogue, especially when the other side is so moronic and full of hate. Surely we learned this by now. How many more stories like Ms Hetat's do we have to put up with, before media companies take the fucking hint?

The hardcore commentary class might choke on their cries of free speech, but they're free to piss off and create their own forum, and stew in the fetid and rotting filth of their outdated and harmful opinions. Nobody is stopping them. We just need to stop encouraging the fuckers.

- Margaret Tempest

92. Auckland stories are human stories too

Online news stories about traffic woes on the Auckland motorway system always rack up huge numbers, because they appeal to two very different audiences - one is the people who live outside the country's biggest city and who delight in the pain and suffering of the Auckland commuter because it shows that they're so much better people for not living there and all those bloody Jafas deserve all that misery because they're so stuck up anyway; and Aucklanders who just want to know if they're going to be late getting home to their loved ones.

The main difference between the two audiences - apart from the obvious geographical distances - is that the first group will read the stories while also denouncing Auckland as everything that is wrong with the country, and moaning that the city gets too much attention from the national media, while the other is just grateful that they've got a heads-up that three lanes are out on the Southern past Greenlane.

It's all part of a general narrative from the rest of the country that Aucklanders are a bunch of feijoa-eating, latte-sipping arrogant pricks, demanding all the attention, with an overt focus on Auckland issues in the national press that comes at the expense of everyone else in the country.

To be fair, there are loads and loads of people south of the Bombays who have no problem with the big city, but there are definitely areas around the country (especially around Canterbury) that only look at Auckland with fear and loathing. For their part, when it comes to this divide, Aucklanders don't really give a shit, and are Don Draper in this Mad Men scene, too busy dealing with their own problems to worry what the rest of the country think about them:

This urban/rural divide has been part of NZ for a long time (and with much of the rest of the country also becoming more urbanised, has never really been limited to Auckland), and it's unlikely to go away soon, and still flares up quite often.

It was there the other week when the city of sails was battered by huge winds, followed by mass power outages across the city, with all suburbs suffering some kind of loss of electricity. It affected a huge amount of people and was comprehensively covered in our national media, as it bloody well should have been.

This was, of course, greeted with the usual sneering, with Wellingtonians pointing out that the winds weren't that strong compared to what they have to put up with; and people in rural areas saying that they lose power all the time, and the media was just making a big deal out of it because it was Auckland, and there were plenty of people only too willing to spit out the usual asinine comment about the affected people needing a spoonful of cement.

But this was a fucking big story, affecting hundreds of thousands of people, and the idea that the news media was making too much of a deal about it was asinine - it was their goddamn duty to get as much facts out there as possible, and follow up on long delays in restoring power. This is part of the fucking job.

Even proud Wellingtonian John Campbell took a break from his Checkpoint show to have a mild rant about the anti-Auckland sentiment he was getting in his feedback, and he seemed genuinely appalled that some peoples' first reaction to an extreme weather event was to start sneering at the victims.

It didn't stop many - including, of course, a couple of NZ Herald columnists - from saying that Aucklanders should get out and fix their own mess instead of going on the news and moaning about it. Which is a staggeringly stupid idea, with live and exceedingly dangerous power lines down all around the city, the last thing anybody needs is Joe Fuckwit firing up the chainsaw and getting in the way - no amount of number-eight wire mentality is going to fix the power gird for a city of 1.5 million people.

(One of those columnists later went on record as saying she was just joking about it. Which is fine then. Obviously, young families with hungry babies and old folk who can barely out the front door, who were still without power after a week, would have thought it was real fucking funny.)

Even years after the Christchurch earthquakes, only a proper arsehole would go on public record to tell Cantabrians they should stop whining and harden up about their EQC repairs, and many reporters are still checking in on places like Edgecumbe to see how they're doing after devastating floods a few months back. Nobody is ignoring this shit, and nobody is going to ignore it when it happens in the big city either.

People live in Auckland for different reasons - it might be where all their family and friends are; or they might have moved there for the social and employment opportunities. But they're just like everybody else in this country, and deserve to have their story told when things get a bit shit. Especially when there are so many of them, and especially when the city is such a huge driver of cultural and economic power in this small nation.

Still, Auckland can take it, the residents of that fine city have enough to worry about with traffic and infrastructure issues to listen to the sneers coming from down south. We just want to get home on time.

- Steve Lombard

91. Who needs fake news when the real stuff is so good?

They try to hide it, but they don't always succeed. When the newsreaders on NZ's television bulletins are on air, and there has just been a piece about the latest foolishness coming out of the White House -  and it might be about a porn star, or the blatant corruption going on, or a military attack that is obviously a desperate attempt to pull attention away from all of the above - and when the report is finished and it goes back to the studio, you can sometimes see the presenters look back at you with an unmistakable 'can you believe this shit?' expression

It only ever lasts a second, but they look straight down the camera with an expression that says they can't believe what they're reading. And while they're all total pros, and they're onto the next item in the blink of an eye, the sentiment lingers.

Nobody really needs fake news when the world is more than crazy enough to fill the news bulletins. There is so much unbelievable shit going on every day without having to make up more.

If you'd gone back even a few years and told people the President of the United States would be a petulant garbage bag of a human being, and rattled off a short and abridged version of the hurricane of crap that has surrounded the office since he took power, nobody would believe it. A lot of people still don't, because they have all the news judgement of a fried oyster and can somehow ignore the mounting evidence and proper, full-scale investigations into the craziness.

But even if nothing is going on in politics, there is more than enough going on in the real world to fill the bulletins - extreme weather, massive social injustices and strange crime. Some of it can be quite concentrated in certain areas: it's a cliche in the US media that the strangest of the strange stories all come out of Florida, and every country has one district that provides some of the weirdest court stories on the planet (In New Zealand it is, of course, the West Coast. The papers there get the best shit from court.)

Some of it is too good to be true and editors need to use their experience and judgement to figure out if something stacks up. One classic example recently was the dude whose story about seagulls getting into his room and leading to him getting banned from a hotel was just so good, and quickly went viral. And while it was picked up by a lot of places, including the BBC, NPR and Stuff, a bunch of others didn't touch it, because it was just too good a story to be relying on third-hand sources from the international newswires. It certainly didn't help that the story surfaced just a couple of days after April Fools Day, when any kind of interesting news story is immediately suspicious.

Those editors who decided that story was just too good to be true rejected it with some regret, because there is a huge audience for things like this. It's part of the reason why true crime stuff does so well these days - you couldn't make up what happened in the OJ Simpson trial, if somebody wrote it as a fictional screenplay they'd be thrown out of the movie studio because  it was too far out there and much too unlikely and strange.

But it still happened. Fact is always stranger and more complicated than fiction, with unlikely twists and coincidences which don't fit into a three-act structure. Real life is incredibly interesting that way.

After all, who could predict that Mike Hosking would come out with an epic self-own last week? After moaning about the fact that the only thing stopping Auckland Transport from functioning smoothly were all the other morons on the road who couldn't drive, he then, just hours later, smashed up part of a race-car on a clear track. His utter shamelessness at these double standards was still eclipsed by the sense of the karma police coming down hard.

Anything can happen and even though newspapers still devote some space to the horoscope, nobody can predict the future. The news industry - and society as a whole - has been totally addicted to breaking news for almost all of the 21st century, after we all woke up one morning in September and saw those towers come down, and now we don't want to miss anything, and the crazier the news gets, the more it gets read by everybody.

If you're fortunate to work in the same office as some of the country's best news readers, you can hear them add their own snarky and profanity-laced annotations to the news when they're reading over their scripts before their broadcast begins, but sometimes the news is so overwhelmingly strange and unexpected, their reaction slips through onto the TV screen. It might not be totally professional, but that's when you know the news is really, really fucked up.

- Margaret Tempest