Aristotle may have warned us that one swallow does not make spring, but Matthew Hooton’s first-week-in-the-chair decision to reinstate daily editorials in The Post is a welcome portent of things to come.
So, too, is his decision to establish an Editorial Leadership Team to “guide the daily leaders on the issues that matter to New Zealand and New Zealanders”. In other words, Hooton has sent the strongest signal that the daily editorial will not be simply a re-masted version of his now-discontinued opinion column in the New Zealand Herald.
Announcing the move last week, The Post said Hooton will chair the team along with associate editor Luke Malpass and national affairs editor Andrea Vance. The other members of the team suggest the spectrum of editorial subjects will be wide-reaching. Its full membership includes chief arts correspondent André Chumko, political editor Henry Cooke, Auckland business editor Dita De Boni, assistant editor Kelly Dennett, chief sport news director Mark Geenty, chief Wellington news director Marc Greenhill and Auckland editor Amelia Wade. Others will contribute as required on specialised topics.
The first editorial, published yesterday, was a well-researched and well-articulated critique of failed government projects – large-ticket items that had produced little or nothing in spite of having public money thrown at them. The peg on which it was hung was the outrageous immigration facial recognition software scandal now subject to an enquiry by the State Services Commissioner.
The leader was measured but pulled no punches: “…failure has ceased to be an exception. It has become a governing philosophy. That is a far graver scandal than any single abandoned project.”
It was prominently displayed across the top half of a page and was attributed to “The Post Editorial Leaders Team”. The aim is to produce editorials based on team consensus but Hooton has taken the highly unusual step of allowing dissenting members of the team to disassociate themselves publicly from the collective point of view.
One assumes such disclosures will be rare and that editorial meetings will be robust discussions that do, in fact, end with consensus. It remains to be seen whether this becomes a device by which Hooton himself can signal disagreement with the ‘party line’. It is far more likely, however, that he will use his powers of argument and persuasion to move the consensus to a point where he accepts it.
While I applaud such transparency, it is important that a list of dissenters does not become a regular feature of the editorials. They will lose their impact. If the team cannot agree among themselves, why should readers give weight to what The Post says?
I chaired some very robust leader conferences as an editor and I miss the cut and thrust of those discussions. So I would love to be a fly on the wall when the Post’s Editorial Leaders Team debates contentious issues. I don’t know all of the team members but those I do know are not shrinking violets. And that is encouraging. The result will be editorials that have been put to the test.
Hooton’s decision to reinstate daily editorials is consistent with his view that The Post, and his other charge the Sunday Star Times, should be platforms to debate ideas. The role of the editorial is to provide a point of view which readers may use to help form their own opinions. It should not tell people what to think, but what to think about.
He used his first signed editorial in the most recent Sunday Star Times to focus attention on what he identified as the six crises affecting New Zealand: The productivity crisis, the fiscal crisis, the entrenched-poverty crisis, the race-relations crisis, the climate adaptation crisis and the infrastructure crisis. He did not dictate what should be done to fix each of those crises but he signalled to readers that, under his direction, the papers would get them debating the issues.
Newspaper editorial once carried enormous power. The Times of London became known as The Thunderer in the 1830s because of the strength and effect of its leader columns. Its editorials were described as ‘ten-pounders’ after the artillery pieces of the day. The storied editor and owner of The Guardian, C.P. Scott saw the editorial as the prime purpose of his newspaper’s existence. In his famous essay marking its centennial he wrote of the newspaper as an instrument of government playing on the minds and consciences of men (sic), and the leader column was central to that role.
However, a successor to the editorship, Alan Rusbridger, had a survey conducted in 2000, and found that less than 10 per cent of readers were interested in the paper’s editorials. In his autobiography Breaking News he wrote:
“But they were (we thought) essential to defining the paper’s values and in asserting our influence on the corridors of power. Sometimes a sentence or two would be read out on radio in the morning, signalling ‘the Guardian view’. We would, in defiance of our readers’ apparent indifference, carry on publishing editorials.”
And it continues to do so.
However, in a world awash with two-a-penny opinions by anyone who can turn on a digital device, the newspaper editorial has become devalued – even by some editors.
When he became an editor, an old friend (for whom I have the utmost professional regard as a journalist) decided to run editorials only when he thought them necessary. I disagreed then with his stance and I disagree now. However, he was not alone. Stuff turned editorials into a flick-a-switch feature that was sometimes there and sometimes not.
NZME has taken a different stance, ‘sharing’ editorials among its titles. The result must puzzle readers as much as it deeply distresses me. The New Zealand Herald which previously placed great store by its editorials and the intellectual strength of leader writers like John Roughan, now runs editorials that by origin and quality are provincial. Yesterday, for example, it ran an editorial on record bull sales on the East Coast. The leader obviously originated at Hawkes Bay Today and ran in five of NZME’s six regional dailies as well as the Herald. The relevance to most Herald readers would be negligible (and that’s being generous).
The editorial discounters are wrong and Matthew Hooton is right. He has recognised that a newspaper like The Post is ideally positioned to provide considered opinion – based on fact and research – that rises above the digital commentariat and social media miasma. The paper’s editorials can provide a trustworthy foundation on which readers can build their own opinions. Those readers do not have to agree with The Post. Its editorials will have served their purpose if they simply get people thinking about a certain topic and contributing to the debate.
They will also, as Rusbridger noted in relation to The Guardian, serve to articulate The Post’s values. From what he has said so far, Hooton sees the voicing of those values as central to the newspapers success as is abiding by them. As people struggle to make sense of the world while overwhelmed by dubious information, values-based opinion – fixed in the same place every day – is becoming increasingly important.
Don’t under-estimate the power of articulated values. One of my most prized possession is an A4 piece of photocopy paper. It was one of a limited edition of 10,000 distributed on 11 October 1977 by the New Zealand Herald when industrial action prevented the printing of the newspaper. Under the Herald masthead is an editorial headed ‘The Silent Printing Press’. It was, I believe, the only signed editorial ever written by my mentor John Hardingham.
It did not offer the proprietor’s view on the printers’ strike, nor argue the pros and cons of industrial action. Instead the editorial invited those who managed to read a copy of “this poor sheet” to spare a thought for the fragility of freedom of expression. That freedom of expression includes a right to receive the sort of considered opinions that editorials can provide and which are in short supply in this muddled world.