Tag: news values

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”. Continue reading “NZME’s ‘news that resonates’ sets off bad vibrations” →

It takes more than global chaos to change the front page

The computer chaos that enveloped much of the world on Friday told us something about almost all of this country’s daily newspapers: Either their deadlines mean they are no longer newspapers, their priorities lie elsewhere, or their ‘news’ values are shot to hell.

I say “almost all” because one newspaper stood out from its contemporaries. The Otago Daily Times was the only paper that led its Saturday edition with the story of the catastrophic worldwide effect of a bad update of security software for Microsoft Windows-based computers.

For the Weekend Herald, it was more important to report on an elderly man’s inability to sell his house – in a story that contained NZME’s magic word OneRoof (its real estate site). The Post thought mouldy old Onslow College trumped global chaos, and The Press was more concerned about contaminated conservation land.

The ODT led with a seven-column story under the headline “Update causes global IT outage”, combining both a local angle on the impact on local airline and emergency services with an explanation of the global outage from an Australian computer science academic.

The Herald relegated the story down page on page 2, despite an intro which read: “A global IT network outage caused chaos last night, downing banking services, disrupting flights, preventing supermarket purchases and causing havoc for public transport commuters”. The Stuff mastheads ran no more than a single column story on page 3, devoted mainly to a measured statement from acting prime minister, David Seymour, saying the government was “moving at pace” to ascertain the extent of the crisis.

I would have thought there were enough pointers there to suggest this was a major story and one that potentially affected millions of people. I would have thought that a paragraph in the Stuff story saying a number of airlines had asked the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to initiate a global ground stop on all flights would have been one of those large, flashing, red pointers. Continue reading “It takes more than global chaos to change the front page” →

I have news for you, Sunshine: It’s not all bad

Last week I was lying in my sickbed recovering from a painful allergic reaction and, as you do, I let my mind wander. It began to ponder a question that has preoccupied me ever since: Why is there so little good news?

It seems the world is filled with the bad and the ugly and precious little of the good stuff. At least that is the impression I get from my daily diet of news.

I looked back over the lead stories of New Zealand’s five metropolitan dailies for the past month. Of the 130 stories I counted, 98 had a negative tone. Only 16 were positive and the remainder were neither one thing nor the other.

I have been tracking these newspapers’ lead stories since 2020 and there is an almost unrelenting sense of gloom, and sometimes doom, although I admit the Covid pandemic accounted for some of that negativity. It did a couple of years ago, but not now.

My introduction to the day’s news yesterday via the country’s news websites was a smorgasbord of gloom and copycat gloom at that – the same topics repeated across outlets. It didn’t improve into the afternoon when there was blanket coverage of the return of the three strikes law for repeat offenders.

Mind you, our overseas counterparts weren’t any better. The Sydney Morning Herald gave me “Eighteen minutes of terror” as it retraced the movements of the Bondi Junction mall killer. The New York Times pondered the “mountain of evidence” against Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal took me inside the “White House scramble” to avert a Middle East War. The Daily Mail said Tories were accusing Labour of “appearing to hate Britain” and the BBC and Deutsche Welle both told me Netanyahu vowed to reject sanctions against an army unit for human rights violations. Only The Guardian had a glimmer of good news over military aid for Ukraine (good news, that is, if you’re not Russian).

Why are journalists so drawn to bad news? Continue reading “I have news for you, Sunshine: It’s not all bad” →

Can CNN’s Mark Thompson cure my obsessive compulsive disorder?

I am a rippler. Don’t worry: Your confusion is understandable.

I am neither a person who removes seeds from hemp with a ripple, nor do I suffer from a particular disease that is possibly of venereal origin. I have invented a new meaning for the word.

A rippler, according to the Knightly Views Dictionary, is a person who ripples up and down through the news feeds on Sky while waiting for the morning paper to be delivered. Rippling may be defined as moving from news channel to news channel trying to find something other than opinionated talking heads.

There was a time when the channel selector stayed on CNN, seldom giving the BBC, Sky News or Al Jazeera a look in, so to speak. Fox News never made the list because it made me fall off the right side of my chair and, in addition, age has made screaming skulls harder and harder to endure.

CNN seemed to fill my international news needs very well. Its coverage was wide, and sometimes deep. It concentrated on reportage, and its commentators often gave their contextualised views from the field. It was, of course, the world’s first 24-hour news channel.

Yet in recent times it lost its distinctiveness. Too often, when I tuned in, it was screening yet another opinion from an eminently qualified academic or former whatever. Too often, when I began rippling, it was screening the same topic as everyone else. Well, not quite everyone. I found Al Jazeera’s news values different to the western nexus ­– CNN, Sky News and the BBC – whose news values and international news judgements were disarmingly similar. Its scope, however, was not as wide-reaching.

I had reconciled myself to life as a rippler. Then I saw a story in the Wall Street Journal that led me to hope – perhaps irrationally, and certainly prematurely – that help for my obsessive compulsive disorder may be on its way. Continue reading “Can CNN’s Mark Thompson cure my obsessive compulsive disorder?” →