Tag: Sunday Star Times

The sands keep moving on news deserts

Here is an op-ed I wrote on News deserts for today’s Sunday Star Times. At the end of the article is also a link to an interview on the same subject that I did with Mediawatch’s Colin Peacock.

The op-ed:

If you are reading this, consider yourself blessed. You still have a news outlet providing you with news of what is happening in your community and what may affect your daily life.

Others are not so lucky. They live in areas where there is little or no local news produced through professionalised public interest journalism and distributed on a regular basis through recognised outlets.

These areas are called news deserts.

There is no reliable data on the full extent of news deserts in New Zealand but, be in no doubt, they are here.

The closure of more than 40 mastheads over the past seven years, and downsizing of newsrooms as the financial state of the news industry demands ongoing belt-tightening, has created holes in the fabric of newsgathering and news dissemination.

Like the natural ecosystem, it is the fine ends of the media environment that have been the first to go. Community newspapers have been particularly vulnerable, and it is here that hyperlocal news is reported.

The news outlet in which you are reading this commentary will keep you apprised of what is happening in your wider community. But it has neither the space nor the resources to tell you about proposed changes to parking restrictions in your local shopping centre.

It cannot let your local doctor reflect on the impact of the latest edict from the Ministry of Health. Nor can it show people you know pumped up with pride at the primary school prizegiving. This is daily bread for community news outlets.

We are starting to see what is already manifest in other countries where news deserts have reached alarming proportions.

I was the lead author of a paper on news deserts that was published today by Koi Tū Centre for Informed Futures. It examines the extent of news deserts in other countries, their impact, what is being done to stop their encroachment on the news environment, and ways New Zealand can do likewise.

Frankly, the numbers are appalling. More than 200 counties in the United States have no local newsgathering while a further 1500 only have access to a single limited source. Over the past 16 years, 347 Canadian communities lost their local newspaper.

Spain has experienced major rural depopulation, and more than three quarters of its local authority areas now could be considered news deserts. In the United Kingdom, 38 local authority districts have no dedicated local news outlet and a further 10 are described as ‘drylands’ because they are poorly served.

Closer to home, Australia has found the Red Centre blowing sand under newsroom doors. More than 200 regional newsrooms have closed in the past decade, and 27 local body areas have no local news outlet.

Among them is Broken Hill, which has a population of about 17,500. An Australian Federal Government survey suggests that neither radio nor digital services fill the gap once local newspapers close. It found that approximately a quarter of respondents did not receive, or were unable to access, news that was important to their own community.

More disturbing are the consequences that come from being deprived of local news.

Countries with identified news deserts have found evidence of ‘democratic disconnect’ and lower voter participation, a sense of community isolation, increased corruption when officials are no longer under scrutiny by journalists, and declining transparency by local authorities. There are increased incidences of misinformation (factual errors) and disinformation (deliberate untruths).

There is no magic formula that will reflower the deserts or prevent them developing in the first place. In other countries, a broad range of measures by central and local government, by community groups, and by media organisations are being used to fight the problem.

They range from direct financial support and tax rebates, through new incentives and technical innovation, to a rise in not-for-profit news organisations. All are based on wide recognition of the fact that journalism – and the outlets that disseminate it – contribute to democracy and social cohesion.

Principled public interest journalism is a public good that not only deserves support, but whose future must be protected for society’s sake. And the public good lies not only in reporting the pronouncements from the Beehive. It also lies in informing our smallest communities about themselves.

News Deserts: Local Journalism at Risk can be downloaded on the Koi Tū Centre for Informed Futures website: informedfutures.org/news-deserts 

Link to Sunday’s Mediawatch on RNZ National

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/573660/mediawatch-news-desert-warning

A glimmer of the role that newspapers should serve

Maybe, just maybe, the Sunday Star-Times has signalled the beginning of a sea change in New Zealand’s newspapers.

No, I’m not talking about its appallingly badly designed front page last weekend – I rest my case with the picture above and apologise if its visual disruption gives you a migraine. I am referring to the reset of its content to reflect the realities of where a weekly print publication should sit in the media landscape.

Editor Tracy Watkins has changed the SST in recognition of the indisputable fact that people no longer get their ‘news’ from a newspaper but through the immediacy of digital delivery.

I see all five metropolitan dailies and their Saturday offspring, plus the two Sundays, either in physical form or e-editions. Too often I open them only to find stories that I have already read, or which reiterate what I have seen elsewhere online.

Watkins maintains that the SST has changed over time to reflect changing audience habits and the impact of digital platforms. To an extent that is true, although too much of the content of its forward pages has still been news that may have been overtaken, derivative material that lacks perceived ‘freshness’, or stories that do not have a persuasive connection with readers. With commendable honesty, she acknowledged the most recent reader survey found “we lack relevance, lack balance, and we’re too expensive”.

She is moving to change that perception and the results are encouraging. Continue reading “A glimmer of the role that newspapers should serve” →

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’” →