Tag: Herald on Sunday

Picture captions: A small start to big problems

I had some sympathy for the New Zealand Herald yesterday when it issued an abject apology on behalf of its sister Sunday publication over a mis-identified image. I’ve been there, and experienced the gutting feeling it leaves.

I have even greater sympathy, of course, for the innocent party who was the victim of the mistake. I won’t repeat the nature of the error because that would be rubbing salt into the wound.

I had hoped my own experience with misidentification would still stand as an object lesson, but I suppose 25 years is a long time for anything to stay lodged in collective memory.

However, it is fresh in mine. It happened when the Weekend Herald ran a front page story about a leader of the Headhunters Gang but carried the wrong picture. The image was of a community worker whose only connection with the gang leader was as a community carer for his mother.

I had been mortified, right from the moment I received a Saturday morning phone call that began with the words “um, we have a problem.” As editor, it was my problem even though the error had not been mine. And, yes, it felt a bit like being in mission control when Apollo 13 reported an oxygen tank explosion.

It was a costly mistake, but I like to think some good came out of it. That is because the man who was incorrectly identified was Ricky Houghton. He would go on to earn nationwide praise and recognition as a rangatira and social advocate who ran a not-for-profit housing service that provided homes for hundreds of Northland families.

The qualities recalled by many at the time of his death in 2022 were also evident in how he handled the situation our mistake had placed him in. He was dignified, fair-minded, and accepted our offer of financial compensation. His attitude made an awful situation a little more bearable. Our paths crossed years after the mistake, and he was gracious when he recalled events.

My misidentification experience was not unique. My predecessor carried the can when a caption writer wrongly identified a woman as the Governor-General’s wife. And, in a mistake with chilling parallels to my Headhunter saga, a colleague’s wrong use of a name turned a fine upstanding member of the judiciary into a minor rip-off merchant.

Yesterday’s apology was a stark reminder that the identification of subjects in images requires not only diligence but processes to check for accuracy. It is not only a reminder for the Herald but for all news media. First, like all unintentional errors, there but for the grace of God go they. Secondly, in an era of fragmented processes across a range of media inputs and outputs, mistakes are easier to make and less likely to undergo rigorous multi-level checking in depleted newsrooms. Too much can go wrong. Continue reading “Picture captions: A small start to big problems” →

Proof our newsrooms need a ‘second pair of eyes’

Own goals by two of our top news organisations last week raised a fundamental question: What has happened to their checking processes?

Both Radio New Zealand and NZME acknowledged serious failures in their internal processes that resulted in embarrassing apologies, corrections, and take-downs.

The episodes in both newsrooms suggest the “second pair of eyes” that traditionally acted as a final check before publication no longer exists or is so over-worked in a resource-starved environment that they are looking elsewhere.

The RNZ situation is the more serious of the two episodes. It relates to the insertion of pro-Russian content into news agency stories about the invasion of Ukraine that were carried on the RNZ website. The original stories were sourced from Reuters and, in at least one case, from the BBC. By last night 16 altered stories had been found, but the audit had only scratched the surface. The apparent perpetrator has disclosed they had been carrying out such edits for the past five years.

Continue reading “Proof our newsrooms need a ‘second pair of eyes’” →

Redesign puts Herald on Sunday back on course

I am labelling the redesign of the Herald on Sunday a course correction. It is one that could bring the paper back on track.

From its inception, the HoS did not sit comfortably alongside its older siblings the New Zealand Herald and Weekend Herald. Somehow it didn’t seem to share the same gene pool. It always left the impression that it might, in fact, have been an adopted child.

After downsizing, the weekday Herald had retained something of the gravitas of its broadsheet antecedent even if it assumed tabloid trappings that pulled away from the ‘compact’ concept championed by The Independent in London (the Herald had been its stablemate during the Tony O’Reilly era). The Weekend Herald has also reflected its traditions, despite a tendency to confuse broadsheet and tabloid design concepts.

The Herald on Sunday had been born to break the traditional mould. The past was to be another country and ‘invented here’ was its guiding light. In a word, it was tabloid.

There is nothing wrong with breaking moulds if they are replaced by something superior. However, I do not think the HoS met that challenge. Worse, it was pitched at a market outside that of the main mastheads.

There are three Sundays in the New Zealand market: Sunday Star Times, Herald on Sunday and Sunday News. Stuff owns the SST and venerable Sunday News, which has been with us since 1964. The former strives for the ‘thinking’ end of the market while the latter is  what it has always been ­– a tabloid aimed at the lower end of the market (although the economies of copy sharing with its sister has unfortunately raised the tone a little). The Herald on Sunday should be pitched at the middle market, which is arguably much larger than either end of the spectrum. However, since its inception in 2004 it has been aimed lower than was wise.

The re-design last weekend is a welcome attempt to draw it back toward the centre and, while one swallow does not a summer make, it looks to be a successful move. Continue reading “Redesign puts Herald on Sunday back on course” →