Fatal overkill

TUESDAY COMMENTARY

Kobe Bryant’s most significant appearance in New Zealand media last year was a website rebuke after he called out a member of his daughter’s basketball team for missing a game to attend a dance recital. Last week the L.A. Lakers All-star and his daughter were tragically killed in a helicopter crash and New Zealand broadcasters treated his death like the passing of a national hero. Our national hero. Continue reading “Fatal overkill” →

Christchurch mosque attacks:The media’s proximity filter

 

Research into trans-Tasman media coverage of the Christchurch mosque attacks has raised questions about how, in the internet age, editors need to take account of the fact that their content can be seen by those most closely affected by a horrifying event, and that distance no longer provides the licence it once did to publish material that is distressing to those directly involved.

Almost 300 stories published by New Zealand and Australian metropolitan newspapers in the days following the attacks, together with web-based content by television broadcasters, were analysed by Dr Gavin Ellis, an Auckland media consultant and former editor-in-chief of the New Zealand Herald, and Dr Denis Muller, a Melbourne University researcher and former associate editor of The Age. They also interviewed news executives in both countries. Continue reading “Christchurch mosque attacks:The media’s proximity filter” →

Grub Street’s signposts

Hands up if you have started to read a story in print or online and only after you have absorbed its main points did you see an acknowledgement, in the finest of fine print, that it was paid content.

Or worse, you read it right through and found, at the end, an obscure fiddly light face font disclosure that it was ‘published in conjunction with…’ Continue reading “Grub Street’s signposts” →

A rodent’s rear

The structure of our legacy news media will pre-occupy New Zealand journalists and those close to the industry in coming months, but the general public will not (to put it crudely) give a rodent’s rear.

Ownership of the country’s largest privately-owned media companies is already in play and we will know within weeks whether the Labour-led government will proceed along a path that would see public-owned Television New Zealand Radio New Zealand absorbed by a new entity. Continue reading “A rodent’s rear” →