Missing in Action: The Wisdom of Crowds in New Zealand
by Alan Wilkinson
Are New Zealanders well served by our mainstream print media websites? The two major ones are APN News & Media’s NZ Herald and Fairfax Media’s Stuff.
As the Internet brings the world to our screens at the click of a mouse, we have access to worldwide news from any international source we choose. So it is inevitable that the role of local media websites is changing from the print versions. Rather than try to compete with the major international news gatherers or simply relay world news from them, our local media have to add value by selecting items of particular interest and relevance to New Zealand. A cursory scan of the world news on either the Herald or Stuff websites shows the impact of this localisation and loss of general coverage in favour of human interest trivia with a scattering of regional and NZ interest stories.
At the national and local level, the coverage is much more detailed, competitive and complete. The Herald website is more directly accessible, while most of Stuff’s coverage is buried deeper in regional or sectional web pages. Obviously print journalism everywhere is under financial pressure as readers switch to online sources rather than buying paper versions, and as advertisers follow suit. Furthermore, the Internet provides direct access to the best expertise on specialist subjects. General journalists cannot hope to compete at that level, nor can their newspapers generally afford such expertise. In consequence, where local news stories require specialist input or insight our media are generally limited to what can be obtained readily and for free. So it is patchy in both coverage and quality. Read the rest of this entry »
It is entirely appropriate that every possible effort should be made over the coming months to determine what exactly led to the ballooning accident that claimed 11 lives on Saturday. That knowledge may make a similar accident less likely in the future.
Less appropriate is ghoulish speculation on the victims’ last moments alive – were they electrocuted, incinerated or killed when they plummeted to earth? The events are simply too raw for the relatives and friends of those who died to see such horrific scenarios canvassed in the media.
The Herald, however, had no such qualms, sending its reporter Amelia Wade off to interview a clinical psychologist, one Barry Kirker, on what might have been going through the minds of the eleven people as they faced certain death.
Mr Kirker of course doesn’t know the answer to that question. No one does. But he was willing to speculate at length not merely on what would have been going through the victims’ minds, but on how their friends and loved ones must be feeling as well.
Mr Kirker’s speculations, the Herald tells us, included the observation that “the scenario was similar to that of the 9/11 victims, and the terror attacks might have put the thought to jump in Chrisjan Jordaan’s and Alexis Still’s minds.
“A bit like the people who jumped from the Twin Towers in New York, they might have thought, ‘What the heck, we’ve got nothing to lose – if we don’t jump, we’re definitely going to die.’”
And he had another fascinating piece of psychological ephemera to offer:
“Mr Kirker said it would usually be the man who would take the lead in that situation and would suggest jumping from the basket to the woman.”
Mr Kirker doesn’t actually know who told whom to jump or indeed whether any “telling” was involved, but his theory will certainly give the couple’s parents pause for thought. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been trying to come up with a few adjectives to describe the New Zealand media’s coverage of the alleged impropriety between English rugby player Mike Tindall – husband of the Queen’s granddaughter Zara Phillips – and ‘an unidentified blonde woman at Queenstown bar Altitude last Saturday’. You may care to add some of your own, but here’s what I’ve come up with so far:
voyeuristic
sad
infantile
grubby
salacious
sick
destructive
cheap
keyhole
smutty
intrusive
tabloid
prying
squalid
pernicious
pornographic
sleazy
worthless
So that’s a start to describe coverage of this particular non-story on One News, 3 News, on commercial and non-commercial radio networks, in the New Zealand Herald, the Dom Post, the rest of the Stuff stable, the ‘women’s mags’ and every other ‘news’ outlet in the country, excepting those who might like to put up their hands and say, ‘Wouldn’t have touched it with a barge pole!’ I’ll happily print your denial.
What a tragic indictment of journalism in this country. What a badge of dishonour against the names of every journalist whose by-line or name appeared in one of these print or video nasties.
Turns out the ‘mystery woman’ was an old friend of both Mike and Zara. Still, Rupert would be proud of you, ladies and gentlemen.
[I'm told that Prime did not cover the story. Well done, Prime.]
You cannot hope to bribe or twist (thank God!) the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do Unbribed, there’s no occasion to. – Humbert Wolfe
A new word has entered the English language courtesy of the New Zealand media. The word is “urinator” and it doesn’t appear in any dictionary in my bookshelf, which is full of dictionaries. Spellcheck hasn’t heard of it either, but then Spellcheck hasn’t heard of “spellcheck”.
So what is a “urinator”? Presumably someone who passes urine, which includes every man, woman and child on the planet and – I may be corrected on this – all animals.
What distinguished Michael Aitken from most urniators was that he urinated in the aisle of an aeroplane, spraying himself and other passengers. He was drunk and out of it and has no real memory of the event.
“I believe that in life most women are more productive totally than most men. I absolutely believe that. When you take into account the things that women do in their lives compared to most men. They often do all the arranging of the finances for the whole family, they run the household, they care for the children, they do all manner of things and they go to work. Their total productivity in life, in my opinion, is higher than most men.”
The answer? Alasdair Thompson. Where? In an interview with Mihingarangi Forbes for Campbell Live.
How come you didn’t know that? Because that part of the interview wasn’t shown on the programme. In fact only 4’18” of this 27 minute interview was shown. Read the rest of this entry »
This Media Release from International Ice Hockey was passed on to us by Kerre Woodham. English as a Second Language?
Press Release Tuesday, March 22, 2011
No broken ice for International Ice Hockey
After the devastating earthquake which shock Christchurch businesses to a holt on 22nd February the future of events in the city looks bleak as many venues have been left in tatters and most events planned for Canterbury have pulled out. But not for the promoters of International Ice Hockey USA vs Canada who vow that the event will go on.
International Ice Hockey’s game two is set for Christchurch’s CBS Arena on 30th July and with the venue coming out un‐scaved the event promoters see no reason for Christchurch residents to miss out on the action sport event of the year. Read the rest of this entry »
A few minutes ago I was phoned by a young Fairfax journalist. She told me that an Auckland broadcaster had been diagnosed with melanoma and had taken leave from her job. Would I like to comment as a close friend?
Comment? On what, for god’s sake? The prevalence of melanoma, the latest research I’ve read on the subject – or the unfairness of one’s friends getting sick? Ah, has to be the third one, doesn’t it?
This type of lazy journalism gets right up my nose. Ring around for horrified/tear-stained/saccharine utterances from anyone close to the victim/sufferer and feed those morsels into an overblown story. The ‘close friend’, of course, is supposed to let slip all sorts of titbits of indiscreet information about the victim/sufferer and talk about his/her sterling qualities – it beats doing research any day.
I hate this tabloid trashiness. Whatever happened to the simple announcement that allowed a person to retain a little privacy and dignity? If you’re sick, surely that’s the least you deserve.
I’m saddened and worried for the broadcaster. As it happens, I know her well and have worked with her, but I could hardly be described as a close friend.
So, could I give the young journo contact details for someone who is a close friend?
Over the past week several media outlets have offered me a six-figure-sum. It’s not the first time they’ve done this. In fact it’s being going on for years. It won’t surprise you to know that they want me to keep quiet about this. But, as an iconic broadcaster and media commentator, I refuse to be muzzled. I intend to speak out. So here goes.
Ladies and gentlemen of the mass media, I reject your repeated offers of a six-figure-sum. They are tiresome and stupid. I will never accept them. And I invite you now to cease, desist and stop. Read the rest of this entry »
I have written four posts on Mark Hotchin. The first Reflections on not caring in Hawaii was highly critical of Hotchin’s and his wife Amanda’s seeming inability to comprehend why New Zealanders were offended by the contrast between the Hotchins’ current lifestyles and the current lifestyles of the thousands of Hanover investors who had lost not merely huge sums of money but their happiness and peace of mind as a result of Hotchin’s and Eric Watson’s greed and, by the most generous interpretation, mismanagement of the their investments.
My comments had been largely triggered by a front-page report in the Sunday Star Times headlined Inside Hotchin’s Hawaiian Hideaway, in which Amanda was quoted as having said, “We don’t have to justify where we get our money from or what it is spent on to anyone. I don’t care what anyone says.”
I concluded:
It really is quite an extraordinary statement, exemplifying as it does all the characteristics of Level 1 moral development – absolute selfishness, lack of conscience and indifference to the welfare of others. I don’t doubt for a moment that these people love their children and are kind to animals. But the misery which their actions have brought to thousands of ‘mum and dad’ investors seems for them to fall into the category of ‘long-distance impersonal harm’, all the more distant from a lounger by the pool in Hawaii.
I have nothing but contempt for most of the finance company shysters, whether on Wall Street or Queen Street, who have wreaked such havoc in the lives of those who put their trust in them. But really my contempt is wasted. They don’t care. And it is their not caring that is the unforgivable crime. Read the rest of this entry »
Some of you may have thought I was overstating the descent of the New Zealand Herald from quality broadsheet to trash tabloid in yesterday’s post. If so, today’s front page might just give you pause for thought. The style of the Hotchin headline - provocative quote from bad guy, screamer fonts, cut-through red for the damning evidence – combined with a photograph of Hotchin looking like someone you might expect to see on America’s Most Wanted and body copy which essentially says, ‘Filthy rich bastard wants even more!’ – all of this would sit perfectly comfortably on the front pages of the News of the World or The Sun.
There is just a slight problem with the headline which is clearly intended to convey the idea that the words ‘I need $7000 a week’ are a quote, that they were actually spoken by Hotchin. But there’s nothing in the story to support that at all. Indeed, the third para of the story reads: ‘But that’s not enough for Mr Hotchin and the Heraldunderstands he has sought to increase that limit to between $6000 and $7000 so he can pay for rent, living costs, a hire car and private school fees for three children.’ Unless I’ve misunderstood the story, Hotchin didn’t speak the words in the headline at all. Read the rest of this entry »
The Herald devotes most of today’s front page to a story headlined ‘LUXURY HIDEAWAY – Mark Hotchin hot and bothered as Herald calls in’. There’s a large photo of Hotchin looking ‘hot and bothered’, a photo of the ‘luxury hideaway… overlooking the golden sands of Mermaid Beach’ on the Gold Coast and a sidebar reminding readers (How could they have forgotten?) of other properties owned by Hotchin, including ‘the $30 million extravagant Paritai Dr home in Auckland’.
From this story you will learn that Mark Hotchin is a very rich man with lots of expensive real estate in nice places, whose assets have been frozen but who has been granted a $1,000 a week living allowance.
In other words, from this story you will learn absolutely zip, except perhaps that nothing delights journalists so much as the opportunity to climb on a bandwagon, even if that involves flogging the dead horse pulling it. (Sorry!)
But I did like the use of the term ‘calls in’ in the headline and, later in the story: ‘He’s unhappy that the Herald came calling on his multi-million-dollar Gold Coast property during the weekend.’ I had no idea that Hotchin and the Herald or its reporter Andrew Koubaridis were on such friendly terms that they could just ‘call in’ or ‘come calling’ on their old buddy Mark. But it does make his angry reception of them all the more bewildering.
As with Tristram Clayton’s airport ambush of Hotchin on Campbell Live, the only sensible words spoken in the Herald story came from Hotchin himself: ‘Leave it to the courts, they’ll sort it out.’ Read the rest of this entry »
Campbell Live team member Tristram Clayton has begun to make something of a name for himself as a slightly quirky, off-beat reporter. He’s very good at it, as a superb little television vignette he appeared in on Tuesday made abundantly clear. Sadly, there was Wednesday to come, bringing with it a lesson for Clayton and his producer – the cobbler should stick to his last.
So as not to finish on a sour note, I’ll start with last night’s appearance. 3 News had obviously got wind of the fact that Mark Hotchin was returning from overseas and had dispatched Clayton to meet him at Auckland airport. They no doubt expected two bites off this particular cherry, a clip for the 6pm bulletin and a longer piece for Campbell Live. The tone of the interview which Clayton was expected to deliver was made clear in a promo for Campbell Live by Rachel Smalley at the start of the bulletin:
‘And we’ve got him! Campbell Live speaks exclusively to Mark Hotchin about his extravagant holiday as he tries to slip back into the country.’
This is a disgraceful statement to appear at the front of a news bulletin. All pretence of objectivity is abandoned. A businessman returning home from overseas is effectively cast as a criminal, attempting to avoid the authorities: ‘And we’ve got him … as he tries to slip back into the country.’ Hotchin’s holiday, if it were indeed a holiday, is defined as ‘extravagant’, a largely irrelevant concept in the case of a multi-millionaire, but more importantly a matter for the viewer to decide, not the reporter to prejudge.
I don’t have much time for Hotchin myself, as a post I wrote in May makes clear. There are questions I’d like to see put to him, but not by a nervous reporter, clearly out of his depth, pursuing him through an airport arrival area. The outcome is an embarrassing mess, in which Clayton manages to look inept and wetly offensive while Hotchin keeps his cool, remains determinedly polite and comes across as remarkably forbearing in fending off this irritating gnat.
Clayton’s problem is that he isn’t sure of his ground. Hotchin corrects almost everything he says and he can’t come back. After Hotchin replies to an accusation that Hanover was over-valued at the time of sale to Allied Farmers, Clayton says, ‘Right, well that’s good to know.’ I think that’s called a retreat.
When he tackles Hotchin on the mansion at Paratai Drive, Hotchin matter-of-factly replies: ‘I can’t hide it. It’s there. It’s going to be finished and it’s going to be sold.’
Clayton: ‘That’s fair enough.’
I’ve got firsthand experience of Clayton’s difficulty, of being faced with a rather daunting interviewee, being expected to take a fairly aggressive line and knowing full well that you’re out of your depth. (The name Muldoon springs to mind) This accounts for Clayton stammering and stuttering his way through the interview and for those soothing verbal gestures he makes to Hotchin, who barely looks at him.
When Hotchin finally said, ‘Why do I keep talking to you?’ I thought this was the best question in the interview. Read the rest of this entry »
I spend a fair amout of time on this site taking the New Zealand television networks to task for their generally abysmal prime-time coverage of public affairs. So it’s appropriate to be equally generous in praise when they get it right.
Following David Tamihere’s release from prison, Monday’s Close Up featured a background report by Hannah Ockelford on the murder of the Swedish tourists, the subsequent arrest, trial and conviction of Tamihere, his unsuccessful appeal to the Privy Council to overturn his conviction and his 20-year imprisonment during which he continued to assert his innocence.
This was not a long item, perhaps five or six minutes, but it was a model of television storytelling. I have long been an admirer or Hannah Ockelford, who is an excellent interviewer, brings a quiet maturity to her reporting and, as a bonus, both looks and sounds good. Her report included archival footage of the police hunt for Tamihere, who was then on the run, a summary of the evidence both for and against him, and interviews with Tamihere’s wife Kristine, his son Jon and journalist Pat Booth. All three impressed.
Pat Booth is without question the most admired investigative journalist in New Zealand. He is a crusader for justice. And, as it happens, he understands the art of persuasive communication, no better illustrated than in his interview with Ockelford. At a technical level, he sits forward, holds intense eye-contact with his interviewer, speaks quietly – this is an intimate format – and listens intently to the questions. I doubt that he thinks about any of this. It’s instinctual. He presents his case entirely without hyperbole or histrionics. He is utterly reasonable. And, most important of all, he willingly concedes any weakness in his argument. When accused by the interviewer of having just as blinkered a view of the case as the police, he simply replies, ‘Oh yes, yes, I agree. We are all victims of our environment and what we know.’ The effect is not to undermine but to enhance his credibility. This is an object lesson in the art of the interview.
At the end of the five or six minutes, I feel that I have been given a clear, concise, low-key and even-handed summary of the issues surrounding the arrest, trial, conviction and imprisonment of David Tamihere. I have been informed. And I have been left to make up my own mind on where the truth actually lies. That is what I mean by ‘getting it right’.
And look for the line of the week – Pat Booth talking about hard-line detective John Hughes, who headed the investigation: ‘He was known in the underworld as The Gardener, because he planted so well.’
I measured the front page of the NZ Herald this morning. Excluding the top and bottom margins, 25cm was taken up with advertising and glaring promos. Only 29cm was news content, and if you exclude the photos and headlines, there was precious little of that – a mere 47.5 column centimetres of copy.
The front page of the Herald has become a travesty of journalism. Today the headline screamed: KIWI UMPIRES CAUGHT UP IN CRICKET SCANDAL. The implication is clear: our umpires were in the thick of the match-fixing.
Squinting at the front page while I made the first cup of tea I wailed, “Oh no, not Billy Bowden!” I’ve always been a fan of the outrageous Bowden and the concept of him being involved in match-fixing damn near curdled the milk.
So it was both a relief and an anticlimax to discover that Bowden’s involvement in the “cricket scandal” amounted to umpiring the fourth test between England and Pakistan, and calling the staged no-balls for what they were. Read the rest of this entry »
The Herald’s decision to publish the names of the final six contestants in TV3′s New Zealand’s Next Top Model programme was petty, mean-spirited and unnecessary. The story had nothing newsworthy about it, other perhaps than in revealing a particularly nasty streak in the paper’s editorial staff. Even that will barely be news to most people.
At present there are still 12 hopefuls in the televised competition. Since we now know the names of the six finalists, we also know the names of the six who won’t make it. What purpose was served by spoiling viewers’ enjoyment of the programme for the six weeks it will take the outed losers to be sent home, is beyond me, except to allow Herald reporting staff to tee-hee behind their hands in the toilet.
They will have spoiled things too for the outed girls, each of whose survival over the coming weeks can scarcely be celebrated by them or the viewers who now know that their hopes and dreams are bound to come to nothing.
Almost more cynical than publishing the names was to tease the story with a large photo of one of the six finalists top left on the front page with the text EXCLUSIVE PICTURES – Top Model final few revealed A3 and a small diagonal banner bottom left with the words SPOILER ALERT. The sole purpose of that was of course to whet your appetite for what was on Page 3. Which meant, if you think about it, that if you didn’t want to know who were the ‘final few’, you couldn’t turn to Page 3 at all or probably even to Page 2 opposite.
All in all this was just a piece of gratuitous nastiness on the part of the Herald, which I happen to know [SPOILER ALERT] is a shoo-in to win this year’s award as New Zealand’s Next Top Ratbag Newspaper.
Michele Hewitson with Greg Dixon at the Cathy Pacific Travel Media Awards
There’s a lesson here about preconceptions. It’s easy to misjudge people whom you know only from watching them on the telly or hearing them on the radio or reading what they’ve written in the paper.
I was amazed when Herald journalist Michele Hewitson rang to ask me if she could interview me for her back page feature in the Saturday Herald. With uncharacteristic lack of caution, I immediately agreed. If Judy had been home, I’d probably have said, ‘Look, I’d like to have a think about this, can I ring you back?’ But Judy was at university and not due back for hours. So I agreed. I have a suspicion that Michele was surprised by my instantaneous agreement.
If you live outside Auckland, you may not be familiar with Michele Hewitson’s interviews or her reputation. She is both admired and feared. Admired because her Saturday interviews are a joy to read; and feared because the joy so often takes the form of Schadenfreude – pleasure in the misfortune of others. Hewitson is an acute observer of people, their foibles and frailties and the fate of many of her subjects most resembles that of the fly who accepted the spider’s invitation to come into her parlour. Michele Hewitson, many of her victims and a solid proportion of her readers would say, is a total bitch. A hugely talented, very perceptive, extraordinarily readable and amusing total bitch.
So I was pretty nervous about being interviewed by her. No one wants to appear in print looking like a total arsehole. Read the rest of this entry »
You are a reporter for the television news. You go out, shoot your story, take it back, edit it and record the soundtrack. It is neatly packaged and all ready for the six o’clock bulletin. The newsreader could deliver the intro and go straight into it – s/he could even do the voice-over. That’s the way news used to be.
But that isn’t good enough for modern news. You, the reporter, have to go back to the location with your camera operator and stand, shivering in the pitch black, maybe in the rain, and do your ‘live cross’. It’s bizarre enough at the best of times. In the depths of winter it borders on insanity.
Why do we have live crosses? Well, there are two reasons: the first is completely legitimate – the news is still happening and you are updating the item you shot earlier; the second is all about (you guessed it) ratings. Read the rest of this entry »
Bath tragedy: Mother’s fight to save baby This was the Herald’s front page headline yesterday. The subhead read: Twin dies after being left for ‘just minutes’.
From the story we learned that ‘a desperate young mother frantically tried to revive her baby daughter after finding the infant floating face down in the bath next to her twin sister.’
But the mother’s efforts were unsuccessful and the baby later died in Starship Hospital. The story continued:
‘Police are investigating the death but say it’s too early to know if charges will be laid…. It is understood the mother briefly left her daughters in the bath while she went to get something ready for them.
‘”It was just a matter of minutes,” Detective Michelle Shepherd, of the Waitakere child abuse team, said. “She immediately scooped her out of the bath. She phoned the ambulance who talked her through doing CPR.”‘
The remainder of the story highlighted the dangers of leaving small children unattended in the bath.
The story was back on the front page again this morning:
Railing at the water cooler? In despair about the quality of our television news bulletins? Think you could do better with your monosyllabic nephew as camera operator and the pneumatic blonde from the dairy armed with a list of pre-prepared questions? You need Charlie Brooker’s How to Report the News. Enjoy!
I’ve been trying to come up with a few adjectives to describe the New Zealand media’s coverage of the alleged impropriety between English rugby player Mike Tindall – husband of the Queen’s granddaughter Zara Phillips – and ‘an unidentified blonde woman at Queenstown bar Altitude last Saturday’. You may care to add some of your own, but here’s what I’ve come up with so far:
Some of you may have thought I was overstating the descent of the New Zealand Herald from quality broadsheet to trash tabloid in yesterday’s post. If so, today’s front page might just give you pause for thought. The style of the Hotchin headline - provocative quote from bad guy, screamer fonts, cut-through red for the damning evidence – combined with a photograph of Hotchin looking like someone you might expect to see on America’s Most Wanted and body copy which essentially says, ‘Filthy rich bastard wants even more!’ – all of this would sit perfectly comfortably on the front pages of the News of the World or The Sun.
Campbell Live team member Tristram Clayton has begun to make something of a name for himself as a slightly quirky, off-beat reporter. He’s very good at it, as a superb little television vignette he appeared in on Tuesday made abundantly clear. Sadly, there was Wednesday to come, bringing with it a lesson for Clayton and his producer – the cobbler should stick to his last.
