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