Maybe, just maybe, the Sunday Star-Times has signalled the beginning of a sea change in New Zealand’s newspapers.
No, I’m not talking about its appallingly badly designed front page last weekend – I rest my case with the picture above and apologise if its visual disruption gives you a migraine. I am referring to the reset of its content to reflect the realities of where a weekly print publication should sit in the media landscape.
Editor Tracy Watkins has changed the SST in recognition of the indisputable fact that people no longer get their ‘news’ from a newspaper but through the immediacy of digital delivery.
I see all five metropolitan dailies and their Saturday offspring, plus the two Sundays, either in physical form or e-editions. Too often I open them only to find stories that I have already read, or which reiterate what I have seen elsewhere online.
Watkins maintains that the SST has changed over time to reflect changing audience habits and the impact of digital platforms. To an extent that is true, although too much of the content of its forward pages has still been news that may have been overtaken, derivative material that lacks perceived ‘freshness’, or stories that do not have a persuasive connection with readers. With commendable honesty, she acknowledged the most recent reader survey found “we lack relevance, lack balance, and we’re too expensive”.
She is moving to change that perception and the results are encouraging.
People have long expected more of their weekend newspapers than their weekday stablemates. The audience has more time to spend within the pages on Saturday and Sunday.
I was aware of that need when I was editor of the New Zealand Herald and led the redevelopment of the Saturday paper into the Weekend Herald in 1998. I wanted a paper that both explained the news to readers and challenged them.
Five years later we asked a research company to evaluate the paper. It found the Weekend Herald was good for expanding your knowledge, providing greater understanding, broadening interests, and challenging your perspective. I recall being particularly satisfied by the finding that it was a newspaper that required reader commitment and involvement: “What you put in dictates what you get out”.
Nevertheless, it too changed over the period during which I was at the editorial helm. Reader habits changed and the Weekend Herald had to change with them. Since I retired from that role it has continued to change and, while I disagree with some of the directions it has lately taken, I recognise that no publication can afford to stand still.
Tracy Watkins has recognised that same need and the result is a newspaper that helps its readers to understand the world around them by drawing on the analytical skills (as opposed to the opinions) of its journalists and contributors. Kevin Norquay, Andrea Vance, Virginia Fallon, Nikki Macdonald, and Mike White exemplify the sort of firepower that exists within our journalistic fraternity. It is pleasing to see their talents put to explanatory uses and the analysis of power.
The “powerful background brokers around the Beehive” will be a revelation to many readers. And Hanna McCallum’s review of the school cellphone ban will reassure many parents about the efficacy of the nationwide approach. Mike White’s analysis of new appointments to the Criminal Cases Review Commission canvassed opposing reactions in depth but left it to the reader to decide whether the choices were valid or not. Likewise, Nikki Macdonald’s analysis of data on emergency housing provided a context that may show the Government’s announcements on ‘improvement’ in a different light – without telling readers what they should think.
Structurally, the paper still has some way to go. It wastes too much of pages 2 and 3 on indexes – after a front page that is no more than an index anyway – and (inexplicably) a quiz and crossword that should be in its expanded puzzle section. Presumably, the page 3 editorial that announced the changes will revert to the opinion section next week. Its foreign section is too light at two pages and would be better coming in from the back of the paper, which now peters out with ‘Life’ content.
Still, it is a good start that left both my wife (former magazine editor Jenny Lynch) and I thinking we had had a satisfying and thought-provoking read.
By sheer coincidence, the changes to the SST came in a week in which I had been pondering changes to the way journalism is created and delivered.
I attended the annual conference of the Journalism Education Association of New Zealand (JEANZ) at AUT. The keynote speaker was Professor Susan Forde of Griffith University in Queensland. Her topic was alternative journalism.
I don’t particularly like the term ‘alternative journalism’. There was a time when it was synonymous with citizen or amateur reporting, sometimes linked to activism and often repudiating the news values and practices of mainstream media. Increasingly, however, it has seemed to be interchangeable with terms like ‘constructive journalism’ or ‘solutions journalism’. There is no reason why those concepts cannot be embraced by mainstream journalists. Nor should they be seen simply as ‘alternatives’.
Susan Forde believes ‘alternative journalism’ may now be an antidote for the pervasive negativity of so many news outlets, concentrating instead on conceptual, thematic reporting aimed at empowering the audience. It can do so by not only outlining problems, but seeking the solutions.
Clearly, however, the mainstream media today is awash with bad news. That is a primary cause of news avoidance, with many citing ‘anxiety’ as the reason they have turned off the news. It has also affected levels of trust.
I agree with Susan Forde that there is a real need for journalists to not only monitor society but to take a constructive approach to both their newsgathering and analysis. It is part and parcel of a sense of social responsibility that most journalists believe they have but which too often proves elusive under the pressures of today’s emotion-driven media environment.
It is almost 80 years since the U.S. Commission on Freedom of the Press formalised the concept of media social responsibility, and almost 70 years since American academic Theodore Peterson expanded on the theory in a seminal work titled Four Theories of the Press. What he said bears repeating:
Social responsibility theory accepts the role of the press in servicing the political system, in enlightening the public, in safeguarding the liberties of the individual; but it represents the opinion that the press have been deficient in performing those tasks. It accepts the role of the press in servicing the economic system, but it would not have this task take precedence over such functions as promoting the democratic process or enlightening the public. It accepts the role of the press in furnishing entertainment but with the proviso that the entertainment be ‘good’ entertainment. It accepts the need for the press as an institution to remain financially self-supporting, but if necessary it would exempt certain individual media from having to earn their way in the marketplace.
Nothing has changed: Not the tenets of social responsibility and priorities, nor the failure of media to fully meet its objectives.
I don’t expect the Sunday Star-Times to instantly become a shining symbol of social responsibility and constructive journalism but the first week of its ‘new look’ shows an increased awareness of the need to contextualise events for readers and provide a more structured approach to providing the sort of knowledge that will inform their own opinion formation. It will overcome the notion that it is too expensive if readers perceive it to be better value for money.
It is an intelligent response to changing patterns of news consumption and audience needs. In the process it is a small move away from the missteps that have dogged 21st century journalism. Much, much more is needed but anything that makes journalism more constructive is to be welcomed.