In the wake of the announcements on Newshub’s closure and TVNZ’s cuts, I received an email from Pat, who lives in the Auckland suburb of Orakei. The email asked a simple question: “Is there anything a member of the public can do to register shock and horror at the loss of current affairs programmes and the talented people who make and present those programmes?”
I replied, suggesting Pat join the advocacy group Better Public Media. More importantly, I believe people like Pat must speak up in defence of what I now call democratically significant journalism.
‘Democratically significant journalism’ describes the sort of journalism that serves the interests of those living and interacting within a public sphere. It enables individual communities to know about themselves, and for communities to collectively share information to inform a broader consensus. In the past I would have said ‘public interest journalism’ but that phrase has been so maligned by people with agendas that benefit from destroying trust in journalists that I have stopped using it.
Last week I lost another former colleague, one who contributed so much to his adopted land.
Rod Oram was an outstanding business and environmental journalist who taught many of us about the consequences of climate change.
His death while cycling in Auckland’s Ambury Park was widely reported and well-deserved tributes flowed. Fellow Newsroom journalist Tim Murphy said: “His ambitious, high-calibre journalism set the new business section [of the New Zealand Herald] apart and in some ways changed the face of corporate and economic reporting in that era.” I agree. I was immensely proud of what Rod and his Business Herald staff accomplished when I was the paper’s editor.
I also agree with what many said elsewhere in recognition of his contributions to the environment and sustainability.
Rod was a kind and generous man and his name will live in the memories of all of us who worked with him or engaged with him in the course of a hugely productive career. His enduring legacy will be in the people he persuaded to think about sustainability and the impact of humanity on an age where our presence is so significant it has been named after us – the Anthropocene.
It is one of the fallacies of the digital age that its ubiquitous communication places the power of information in the hands of individual citizens.
At one level it is said to have provided each of us with the means to communicate with an almost endless number of people. At another level it is said to have given us the ability to choose for ourselves the information we receive. On a third level it is said to have given us the power to collectively hold power to account without mediation by mainstream media.
In fact, this apparent universality has had effects that not only fall well short of those utopian goals, but which create environments in which social cohesion and the foundations of democracy are put at risk.
Instead of broadening our range of contacts to give us a greater understanding of the views of others, it has created silos in which we take comfort from people with the same views as ourselves – irrespective of whether those views are reasoned, misguided, or malevolent. If anything, our contacts have become narrower in scope and outlook.
Instead of allowing us to choose the information we receive, we are hostage to algorithms that direct us to particular sources and, on the basis of our use of digital services, may reinforce our silo mentality. And our desire to seek information, without employing any of the skills needed for verification, has opened the field to those who use disinformation as a weapon.
Instead of allowing us to collectively hold power to account, with a few notable exceptions, that power has been allowed to hold the field. The promise of amateur ‘citizen journalism’ – even the flawed publish-then-filter model that allows facts to emerge over time through a process of online changes and corrections – has not been realised. It fails to hold power to account because it lacks throw weight. That term refers to the size of payload a missile can deliver, and citizen journalists cannot make a bang as big as their professional counterparts in the news media. The result is that the holders of power can ignore or minimise their endeavours.
Yet the fallacy persists, and it has eroded the standing of journalists and the organisations that employ them. The rationale is that society doesn’t need them because society can find out for itself.
This may be part of the reason for alarmingly low levels of trust in media, although the full scale of distrust in institutions is a complex matrix. Perhaps people distrust journalists in part because they think they can do a better job themselves, now that they are armed with the tools of communication.
If that is the reasoning, those people are living in a fool’s paradise. And, if they are looking for proof of their folly, they could look to last Saturday’s Otago Daily Times and ask themselves a question: ‘Could I hold people accountable as powerfully as Mary Williams has done?’ Continue reading “We need journalists: Here’s proof”→
Why on Earth would anyone want to become a journalist? The gauge on the government’s careers website rates the chances of landing a job in journalism as ‘poor’.
After all, census data tells us the number of journalists in New Zealand fell by 52 per cent between 2000 and 2018. There are now, I would estimate, only about 1600 of them employed in mainstream media. And the starting wage of $42,000 a year is not exactly enticing.
I began to consider the issue of careers in the profession after I opened my email one morning last week to find what was described as “a fan letter”.
It was written by a recent graduate who, browsing the university library several months ago, had chanced upon a small book I wrote in 2016 titled Complacent Nation. It was a welcome early-morning cheer up to learn that she was “beyond grateful that you wrote it”.
She now has a BA in politics & international relations and philosophy. She is working in the media but not as a journalist. Clearly, she has set her sights on a career in journalism but, justifiably, she is confronted by uncertainty. Continue reading “Why a would-be journalist should follow her dream”→
