NZME’s ‘news that resonates’ sets off bad vibrations

LSD and LCD are not so far apart. Each in its own way is a drug.

The former is lysergic acid diethylamide, a powerful hallucinogenic. The latter is an abbreviation for liquid crystal display ­– the technology that dominates your addictive television, computer and cellphone screens. It also stands for Lowest Common Denominator, an equally powerful narcotic.

Announcements last week by NZME have raised fears that the Lowest Common Denominator is going to dominate the New Zealand Herald’s online presence and, inevitably, inject even more populism into the pages of a newspaper that once stood proudly on its news values.

In January, NZME signalled planned staff cuts. Last week the realities of that plan were revealed. Thirty editorial jobs will go, including people I think it can ill afford to lose. They include political editor Claire Trevett, deputy business editor Grant Bradley, senior sports reporter Chris Rattue, science writer Jamie Morton, investigative reporter Nicholas Jones, and several other key staff.

Some, no doubt, will step willingly off the treadmill and into a more leisurely lifestyle. Others will have had enough of the stress of uncertain futures. Nonetheless, the Herald will be poorer for their going.

While the loss of good, dedicated journalists was sad in itself, I was saddened further by the company’s statement of its future strategy. Through its Media Insider Shayne Currie, the company stated that in future there would be “a stronger focus on ensuring the newsroom is focused on journalism and other content that resonates with audiences, including subscribers”.

Let me translate that: “We will give the audience what they want”.

Let me further explain: “We will be driven entirely by our online analytics – more clicks mean more of the same”.

It already happens. Like a number of other news outlets, the Herald relies on ‘recommender systems’ to choose many of the stories at the top of its home page. In fact, only three or four out of the 14-story matrix will have been chosen directly by an editor. Other priority choices are determined by an algorithm.

Recommender systems can allow the algorithm to be constructed in such a way that certain news values and priorities prevail. In other words, the same values applied by editors can – in theory – be encoded into the instructions. I say ‘in theory’ because the normative values of public interest, for example, are both dynamic and circumstantial. Scandinavian media have done signification work to embed journalistic values in their algorithms, but that work is ongoing.

If strong emphasis is given to stories that they say “resonates with audiences” (big words for ‘get more clicks’), it will almost certainly be at the expense of some of those normative values.

Overall, the declining news values will be also reflected in the company’s intention of “doing fewer – but more engaging – stories”.

There are times when ‘what the audience wants’ is transcended by ‘what the audience needs’. In other words, some stories have a level of significance that means they must be put prominently in the public domain whether or not they fit a pre-ordained set of audience preferences. They are published to alert the public to matters that have a bearing on their lives or to which they should be aware as members of civil society.

 Allowing algorithms to give greatest emphasis to audience resonance, at the very least relegates such stories. Over times, such an emphasis could mean they are no longer pursued or written.

What message are we to already take from the reduction in political, business, scientific, and investigative resources by the Herald?

Despite its attempt to dress itself in virtuous clothes, I read the NZME strategy as simply an appeal to the Lowest Common Denominator. In mathematics, LCD is an attempt to find essential relationships, but it has a coarser meaning when it comes to media. It is no more than a concentration on those things that attract the greatest number of eyeballs. Invariably, that means an appeal to emotional triggers. These are the switches that are easiest to flick because they are moved by base instincts.

I was moved to use the phrase Lowest Common Denominator by two pieces in last weekend’s Sunday Star-Times.

The first was a column by Peter Dunne on the state of political debate in which he alluded to a Monty Python sketch that attacked the lowest common denominator approach to resolving complex issues. In it, the existence of God was decided in a wrestling match. Dunne said that, sadly, it’s the same approach we are taking to complex political issues today.

The second was an analysis by Kevin Norquay of the relative positions of settled science and unsubstantiated beliefs. It was a chilling explanation of how lack of consequences and failure to seek coherent explanations allowed influencers and conspiracists to proliferate. It also explained how the pace of modern life is such that we take shortcuts. I believe that, for many, that includes not thinking too hard about the media they consume.

Sadly, there is nothing new in that. Forty years ago, Neil Postman wrote the seminal book Amusing Ourselves to Death. In it, he warned of the effect of entertaining television on public discourse and reminded us of Aldous Huxley’s warnings in Brave New World of a society distracted by trivia and superficial pleasure. Digital media have multiplied those dangers a hundred-fold…a thousand-fold.

At a time when news media should be acting as a bulwark against amusing ourselves to death, the country’s largest newspaper seems to be headed in the opposite direction.

There will be those who think I am being supremely arrogant and presumptive in believing that journalists have a responsibility to put need-to-know well ahead of want-to-know. This is, after all, an age awash with information and people can find anything they need, reducing journalism to a niche occupation.

I reject that proposition, although I acknowledge that – through digital technology – journalists and their audiences should have a more engaged relationship than was possible in the analogue era. That engagement should give media organisations a broader understanding of the needs of society, not simply what pushes its buttons.

There is also an urgent need to engage with those who are no longer their audiences. The 2024 report by AUT’s JMaD group on Trust in Media found that three quarters of those surveyed said they actively avoided the news to some extent. They cited negativity and bias as principal reasons. These occasionally, sometimes, and often missing members of the news audience are less likely to influence the algorithmic outcomes of news selection than the serial clickers. In fact, their reasons for avoiding the news are likely to be perpetuated as preference is given to the doom-scrollers and to those whose worldview is met by the current offering.

If I have it wrong and NZME intends to pursue, produce, and disseminate journalism that meets the normative values of journalism to inform and educate (we’ll take entertain as a given) it will need to prove it. That will be achieved by transparency – both internal and external – over the composition of its algorithms. It will need to demonstrate what is driving its story selections and priorities. We have yet to see evidence of that.

While I was writing this column, I kept flicking to the top of the Herald website’s homepage. A majority of stories contained emotional triggers. There were all the hallmarks of give-them-what-they-want: ‘Them’ being the Lowest Common Denominator.