Author: Gavin Ellis

Gavin Ellis is a media consultant, commentator and researcher. He holds a doctorate in political studies. A former editor-in-chief of the New Zealand Herald, he is the author of Trust Ownership and the Future of News: Media Moguls and White Knights (London, Palgrave) and Complacent Nation (Wellington, BWB Texts). His consultancy clients include media organisations and government ministries. His Tuesday Commentary on media matters appears weekly on his site www.whiteknightnews.com

Proof our newsrooms need a ‘second pair of eyes’

Own goals by two of our top news organisations last week raised a fundamental question: What has happened to their checking processes?

Both Radio New Zealand and NZME acknowledged serious failures in their internal processes that resulted in embarrassing apologies, corrections, and take-downs.

The episodes in both newsrooms suggest the “second pair of eyes” that traditionally acted as a final check before publication no longer exists or is so over-worked in a resource-starved environment that they are looking elsewhere.

The RNZ situation is the more serious of the two episodes. It relates to the insertion of pro-Russian content into news agency stories about the invasion of Ukraine that were carried on the RNZ website. The original stories were sourced from Reuters and, in at least one case, from the BBC. By last night 16 altered stories had been found, but the audit had only scratched the surface. The apparent perpetrator has disclosed they had been carrying out such edits for the past five years.

Continue reading “Proof our newsrooms need a ‘second pair of eyes’” →

We definitely need to talk about harmful speech proposals

Efforts to make the online environment safer are laudable but thank God the latest New Zealand proposal is still only a discussion document. As the proposal stands, it could add a new volume to the already burgeoning body of work on the law of unintended consequences.

The work that has been undertaken on harmful online content has been valuable and, no doubt, there will be improvements to an environment that has been wilder than the Wild West. However, the regulation that is now in the pipeline has the potential to cause as much harm as good because its approach has been limited by a particular digital mindset.

In short, the desire to prevent the harm that is all too evident in largely unregulated social media has blinded its authors to the impact of its countermeasures in other environments. Continue reading “We definitely need to talk about harmful speech proposals” →

Awards bring out the pettiness in NZ media

There something unsavoury about self-congratulation and New Zealand media organisations are particularly prone to it.

Last week there were two significant award ceremonies, one in New York and the other in Auckland, that should have been celebrations of this country’s prowess in journalism and other media crafts.

Instead, media outlets largely celebrated their own achievements and ignored the noteworthy endeavours of others. There were exceptions and we’ll come back to those. Continue reading “Awards bring out the pettiness in NZ media” →

News deserts and how New Zealand can avoid them

I felt like the Grim Reaper when I was talking to community newspaper folk last week about news deserts.

News deserts are communities lacking a news source that provides meaningful and trustworthy local reporting on issues such as health, government and the environment. Their communities were once served by local news outlets but these have died.

The term emerged more than a decade ago and I showed the attendees at the Community Newspapers Association conference in Auckland a map of the United States where it had first been encountered. In the US, traditional owners have closed a quarter of the country’s titles – more than 2500 mastheads – since 2005. They have also divested themselves of large numbers of their regional and local titles, and new owners have undertaken massive consolidation, hollowing out local news production in the process.

The map, contained in a report last year by the Medill School of Journalism, showed that 200 counties have no local newspaper and more than 1500 have only one paper, usually a weekly and often an emaciated one. Those 1700 territories represented more than half the counties in the country. And within those counties live 70 million people. Continue reading “News deserts and how New Zealand can avoid them” →