Early in 2017 a People’s Commission toured New Zealand seeking views on the future of public broadcasting and media. It visited six cities seeking the views of the public and media experts in a series of workshops. The project’s website is http://www.makeourmediabetter.org.nz Below is my submission to the Auckland workshop, in which I answer the five questions posed by the commission…and suggest a sixth. Continue reading “Public Broadcasting and Media”
Category: Presentations
FILL THE GAP: Will PR plug the holes in our news media?
Prepared for delivery at the 2015 Public Relations Institute of New Zealand “Mind the Gap” Conference in Wellington 21 May 2015
Gaps can be many things: opportunities, openings, unfinished business, omissions, insufficiences…and something through which you can fall. Whatever the definition, gaps attract us. Have you ever had that fleeting moment of madness when you want to put your foot into the space between platform and train in spite of the warning to Mind the Gap? Continue reading “FILL THE GAP: Will PR plug the holes in our news media?”
Recalibrating News Media ownership
A paper presented at the Political Economy of Communication conference AUT University 15-16 September 2011. Published in Australian Journal of Communication 38(3) 2011.
Evolution has been at work in the complex world of news media since the first ‘news letters’ appeared in the middle of the seventeenth century. Content, appearance, scale, delivery and ownership have changed as a direct response to social, political, technological and economic development. Within the liberal model of media systems (Hallin & Mancini 2004, 198-248) there have been periodic recalibrations – significant structural changes – that have altered the role that news media have played. They have fostered ‘golden ages’ and eroded them, they have created and shifted power, and they have made fortunes and lost them. These fluctuations can be seen as manifestations of the techno-economic paradigms postulated by long wave economic theorist Carlota Perez (2002), whose mapping of financial bubbles and crises has revealed a repeated pattern that explains the interaction of technology and finance over the past 240 years. Continue reading “Recalibrating News Media ownership”
No-one died covering celebrity news
The UNESCO World Press Freedom Day address
AUT University 6 May 2014
[This address was published in Pacific Journalism Review 20(2) Nov. 2014]
Note: Click on images to enlarge
Let me begin by putting New Zealand domestic journalism in context. None of the 11 journalists and three citizen journalists killed so far this year, according to Reporters Without Borders, died in New Zealand. None of the 165 journalists and 165 Internet citizens languishing in gaol is in a New Zealand prison. The greatest risk a journalist faces in New Zealand is an invasion of her workplace privacy[1] (Andrea Vance) or his reputation being called into question by a state agency[2] (Jon Stephenson). Unless you are a journalist working on [the consumer affairs tv show] Fair Go you are unlikely to be dealt a bloody nose. Continue reading “No-one died covering celebrity news”