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
Last week I received an email that deeply saddened me. It was from a friend who is a very talented journalist with vast experience. He told me he felt irrelevant.
Here is a man whose range of experience exceeds my own but with whom I share a number of common traits: We are both male, Pakeha, beyond the age nominally set for retirement, and recognised for what we were rather than who we are.
In his email he told me about a recent encounter which he said “does add to my sense of irrelevance”. In spite of the fact he had not been driven by monetary reward, he “never had so much as a cup of coffee” with those to whom he had offered his services. He was ignored.
I was saddened not only because I greatly value our friendship but because he is yet another casualty of systemic ageism.
I began my reply to his email with this: “Let’s get one thing straight: You are not irrelevant, have never been irrelevant, and will not be irrelevant for as long as you draw breath.”
The irony in the lead story of last Friday’s New Zealand Herald was plain: One rich-lister was wrongly pilloried because another rich man tried to hide his wrong-doing.
Businessman and philanthropist Wayne Wright was the victim of a chatbot that proved that artificial intelligence is not always very intelligent.
Grok, the chatbot owned by Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), named Wright as the man found with 11775 objectionable files, including extreme child sexual abuse involving bestiality, pre-pubescent children and toddlers. The defendant was sentenced to two years and five months imprisonment. The court permanently suppressed the man’s name, his family’s name, and the name of his business. Grok had been asked to find his name and did so by scouring speculation on social media.
Wayne Wright was named, but he was not that man.
Understandably, Wright has now called on the offender to apply to the court to have suppression lifted. Customs is also considering an appeal against the permanent suppression. The Herald has stated categorically that Wright is not the offender but, of course, is prevented from naming the guilty man.
The episode is yet another example of the damage that may be wrought by the use of imperfect AI by unaccountable platforms, and of name suppression tarnishing the public’s perception of the courts. Continue reading “Name suppression sends wrong messages”→
I will start with a confession. I was a loyal wake-up-to-it-Monday-to-Friday fan of RNZ’s Morning Report. I no longer am.
I am not alone. Morning Report had a peak cumulative audience 10+ of 531,000 in September 2020, but today that audience stands at only 333,000 – down by more than a third. Once the undisputed leader in breakfast radio, the programme is now far outstripped by NewstalkZB’s Mike Hosking Show.
The plight of Morning Report was highlighted last week in a blunt review of RNZ National by the state-owned broadcaster’s former head of news, Richard Sutherland. The details of the review were revealed in a scoop by the New Zealand Herald’s Media Insider Shayne Currie, who obtained it under the Official Information Act.
Sutherland is a vastly experienced journalist and broadcaster whom I greatly respect. His findings are to be taken very seriously: No more so than in relation to what should be RNZ’s standout flagship programme.
Currie quoted Sutherland saying that, overall, RNZ “suffers from a lack of audience clarity, internal cohesion, and urgency”. Interviews with staff revealed “blame shifting, low ambition, and a belief that radio is in terminal decline”.
Will the problems facing New Zealand news media never cease? No sooner had they adjusted to a world ruled by ‘clicks’, than that world is faced with the prospect of ‘zero clicks’.
Not long ago, I was watching an electronic tickertape in a newsroom telling brow-beaten staff which of their stories were ‘trending’ online (and, by implication, what was too boring to justify a reporter’s attention). In another media organisation I saw similar information scrolling across the bottom of newsroom screens. ‘Clicks’ was what it was all about – analytics showing, minute-by-minute, how many people were reading respective news stories on their phones, iPads, or computers.
Some of those ‘clicks’ were directly on news media’s own websites and apps. Many more, however, were through intermediary search engines. The undisputed leader of search was Google. It even went beyond search by proactively looking for the topics that interested you and feeding relevant stories to you via Google Discover.
For some people, Discover became their only source of news. It was convenient and, because it targeted specific areas of interest, it was material they wanted to see and read. Some news media organisations saw that as a helpful way of reaching an audience and came to rely on it for ‘clicks’. A shame, of course, about all those stories that people should know about, but which sat outside their personalised search algorithms.
Then along came Generative AI and speculation that services like ChatGPT would smash Google’s dominance. The soothsays did not, however, reckon with the ingenuity and strategic skills of the people at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California. The headquarters of Google’s parent, Alphabet, went into overdrive to head off the generative AI newbies before they could establish a ruinous foothold.
The result was Google’s AI Overviews, which was rolled out to 100 countries last year.
You have probably seen the result, perhaps without realising what it was. You simply read it and thought: “Gee, that’s a useful summary”. So useful, in fact, that you didn’t bother clicking on any of the search results below it. Continue reading “Hero to zero: Google still comes out the winner”→
