Olympic champions at the big moan

SOME NZ sports writers have podiumed and medalled in a little-known Olympic discipline - moaning.

Their tedious complaints about Beijing belly, smog, internal travel, heat, humidity, over-zealous security, faking, lack of “atmosphere”, blah, blah, blah, have exceeded the quality of the reporting in print.

Just be thankful you’re there at all, people.

I recall in 1984 Armin Lindenberg was sole reporter in LA for NZ’s largest newspaper chain, yet he somehow managed to get around every gold medal performance and file on time, with never a complaint. That was the Games where we won eight golds, in case you’ve forgotten.

The TV contingent has excelled in inane interviewing, sometimes neglecting to ask obvious questions, as well as hugging competitors (literally and figuratively) before and after what are supposed to be professional and impartial encounters.

If I hear one more soundly beaten athlete get away unchallenged with comments like “everything went according to plan” I’ll…I’ll, well, I don’t know what I’ll do. (Switching off is not an option. Blogging colleague Ethical Martini might think his anti-Olympics stance will change the world, but he just denies himself the chance to see some remarkable events, such as this evening’s gymnastics closing performance).

Some of the better-known commentators are overdue for retirement. Using acronyms and jargon in the middle of sailing commentary is inexcusable, and Peter Whatsiname’s purple ranting as Tom Ashley crossed the line for his gold was embarrassingly awful.

I found the lesser- or un-known (to us) commentators tended to be calmly informative and far easier listening.

Peter Williams has done well as anchor, though, after a nervous start. Would we have been able to endure two weeks of hyperactive Tony?

The NZ TV audience has missed out in many respects because of the time zone differences. Boring stuff like sailing (apart from the board sailing final race), badminton, synchronised diving, volleyball and handball have been our prime-time staple, with most of the excitement scheduled after midnight.

One irritation inflicted on us by overly clever advertising people has been use of the TVNZ Games signature shot - the prelude to the resumption of coverage - as an occasional prelude to more ads. Shoddy stuff that was infuriating to those of us with a finely tuned mute button finger.

Some of the most interesting Games “coverage” has been on another channel. National Geographic on Sky had fascinating docos on how the Birdsnest and Water Cube were designed and built. More riveting than some of the events they housed.

But there I go - more moaning than an Olympic reporter. Best I get back to the couch, to drift off before whatever Cindarella hour event is in store before 3am.

Cate goes from Star-Times, and can feel proud

SO, Cate Brett will depart the Sunday Star-Times: how will media history judge her?

Pretty well, I reckon.

No massive defamation payouts (unlike her predecessor), only a couple of embarrassing lead stories (the Brash/Hansen comparison - boy, how prescient was that one! And the SIS Maori spying that wasn’t), a consistent liberal line on politics to balance some of her more right wing Fairfax colleagues and their papers, and well-considered change to keep up with a fast-changing society.

She headed a unique regime - a band of stroppy, middle class women middle managers who were determined to report the news in ways that didn’t necessarily sit comfortably with male convention.

She gave super-journalist Donna Chisholm a free hand to do her great work. She employed some of the best journos and writers in the business (Steve Braunias, Jenni McManus, Jon Stephenson, Michael Laws), but lost a few, as well (Oskar Alley, David Fisher, Jon Stephenson).

Her paper, when it had a good week, overcame the disadvantages of sucking the hind news tit in a country that doesn’t have a lot of hard news, sometimes hitting the mark three weeks out of four in a good month (she and I argued about this: she naturally thought it was 4/4).

Unfortunately, Cate’s regime of half a decade coincided with APN’s launch into the Auckland Sunday market, where the SST was always vulnerable because of its profile as a national paper. She fought off the challenge for a year, but gradually the Herald on Sunday wore into the market piggybacked on the Herald (the SST never had that advantage), and 35,000 sales evaporated.

As I explained in a blog on Sunday, Cate was always on a hiding to nothing in that war, if one judges the outcome on sales alone. The paper’s national presence has continued to be important, however, and to that end she succeeded.

The Law Commission’s decision to employ her as a media law consultant is smart. Academics, lawyers and commentators can pontificate all they like about media law and ethics, but none can measure up to a long-serving editor with recent experience of fighting the ever-present threats to press freedom.

Who will take over? Is there any good reason not to appoint Donna Chisholm, who has been the heart and soul of the paper since its early days as the Sunday Star? I think not. Self-effacing Donna will no doubt deflect colleagues’ suggestions she is the rightful owner of the editor’s chair, but hopefully Fairfax editorial supremo Paul Thompson will see past that.

Analysis? What analysis?

SOME sound analysis of media analysis - or the lack of it - here from Sandra Dickson, one of our students at Whitireia.

I agree with her that it took one of DomPo’s columnists to give us thoughtful analysis of the National Party’s welfare policy.

Talking of columnists, did anyone know where former Dom ed Dick Long was coming from with his hypothesis today that the Nats need to coagulate with the Maori Party after their November landslide?

The Maori Party? Jeez, Dick, have you lost it? Or have you been around politicians so long that you know exactly what cynicism they’re capable of in the quest for a BMW?

Or are you flying the kite to get us all used to the idea that after this election things may never be the same again?

Reporting diversity - the long path back

IN the aftermath of last year’s North & South magazine Asian Angst case - in which the Press Council made its first-ever discrimination finding - some of us have been working hard to show that such reporting is not typical in NZ.

It ain’t easy.

When Whitireia Journalism School (in partnership with AUT, Canterbury Uni, Asia:NZ Foundation, the Human Rights Commission and the Ministry of Ethnic Affairs) launched the inaugural NZ Diversity Journalism Award earlier this year, we hoped to encourage news media to show how well, on occasion, diversity is reported.

My theory is the good work - and I see plenty of it - is ignored, while prominence is given by media watchers to the fallout from negative examples, such as the Clydesdale report debacle.

This has brutal irony, of course, given the media’s natural attraction to reporting the negative: it’s own good work, when it happens in sensitive areas, goes under the radar.

An upshot, in my view, is editors grow sick of being hammered, and simply turn away from the condemnation offered by commentators, minority group leaders, academics, politicians and researchers.

We hoped, with this award (and accompanying workshop to be run by one of the world’s leading authorities on reporting race and ethnicity, Arlene Morgan) they might take the chance to balance the books.

Some have, but only after an endless stream of reminders and much haranguing from me. As entries close this week, we have work from TV3, TV1, NZ Herald, Sunday Star-Times, Dominion Post, Dunedin Star,  the Listener, the Aucklander and others. Oddly, nothing yet from RadioNZ or Maori TV - or North & South.

In all, we’ve received about a dozen entries. Not much of a showing (in terms of numbers, not quality) from the outpourings of a $2billion industry feeling the effects of rapid diversification of the country’s demographics.

However, I guess it’s better than nothing (which is what we had two weeks ago), and hopefully we can do better next year.

The 10 best entrants will gather at the school on Monday, September 1, to participate in a workshop led by Arlene Morgan, who will deconstruct the work, as she and her colleagues at New York’s Columbia Journalism School have done so successfully over the past nine years. The best entry will win its author Asia:NZ funding to work in Asia.

Ethical decisions become difficult when things get too real

WHEN reporters are shown being killed or injured (or just plain frightened) during war, the results are always dramatic.

Here’s footage of the reporter who was shot while doing a piece-to-camera in Georgia:

We debated a much milder example of this in class at Whitireia last week. It happened when one of the students was in a car recording an interview with the driver as they headed across Wellington to set up a photograph.

He came back to our newsroom and excitedly played his recording, which had the two talking normally until this:

“…look out..!”

Crashing sound, as the vehicle runs into the back of another.

“F…k” from the driver, loudly.

Nobody was injured and damage was relatively minor.

I suggested he might write an account of what happened, include the recording, and show a picture of the dented car (supplied later by the driver). To me, it was an interesting example of actuality, something fairly rare for journalism students, who don’t often get to do stories with any live action.

I raised the matter in class, because I thought we should debate whether or not to bleep out the swear word. The class decided that was wise, given our news website, NewsWire, is viewed by school pupils (we do a lot of stories about schools).

However, the discussion took an unexpected (for me) turn when a student suggested I was manipulating the student into doing his story and publishing the recording and that it didn’t feel right to her at all.

It was reminder to me that when you’re starting out in journalism a lot of ethical questions loom large, issues likely to be overlooked by people who’ve been involved in journalism for a long time (like me).

The class voted overwhelmingly in favour of publication, but the debate is still open.

The objecting student was unable to marshall convincing arguments to back her stance, but hopefully by the end of this term she will be much better equipped. We delve into the media ethics module this week, and my experience of teaching this is it empowers journalism newcomers to argue effectively about ethical dilemmas.

Newspaper circulations holding well - but slump may be close

IT’S BS time!

It’s that time when print editors, owners and their marketing gurus pore nervously over the Nielsen readership survey results and look for something helpful to declaim in their next editions. Watch for the small promo stories popping up to clutter the news spaces. Just like post-Qantas Awards time, when everyone is a winner.

There’s a lot riding on the process, because advertising agencies use readership data to advise advertisers where to spend their bucks.

It’s meaningless to the public, who have their own ways of deciding whether to keep reading a publication.

Personally, I think there’s only one way to tell if a publication and its editor are successful - the circulation (sales) figures.

Circulation numbers are not a source of good news for most newspapers these days, although (surprisingly, for those who have been writing obits to the newspaper for years) sales trends in New Zealand over the past two years are not too bad. Annual sales of our 26 daily and Sunday papers show a 5% drop (11 million) since late 2005/early 2006 - a yearly rate of 240 million then, compared with 229 million in 2008.

However, there is a suggestion in the last ABC audit figures (nine months to June this year) that decline has begun to accelerate.

The biggest papers show most stress. The NZ Herald - which at 188,000 still has the single largest sales on any day - has slipped more than 13,000 (6.5%) in two years, with 7600 of those losses coming in the last nine-month audit.

The Sunday Star-Times (now 176,000) has plunged 25,000 (12.5%) since late 2005, while Sunday News (now 87,000) is down 8375 (8.8%), more than half of that in the last audit. In the mid-80s, it peaked at 217,000 under editor Judy McGregor.

The Dominion Post is also a worry. Tim Pankhurst has performed extraordinarily well to keep his paper’s circulation steady at just above 98,000 in four audits since late 2005, but the nine-month one ending in June shows a sudden dip by 3653 (to 94,598), a decrease of 3.6%.

Our third biggest daily paper, the Christchurch Press (87,221), is losing ground steadily, down 5244 (5.7%) since late 2005. It has a new editor since Paul Thompson was promoted last year to head Fairfax’s editorial section.

The news is better in the provinces. The Waikato Times (editor: Bryce Johns) is up since late 2005 (plus 126 papers a day, to 41,209)), although that trend was spoiled by a drop of 943 (2.2%) in the last audit.

The Otago Daily Times at 41,711 is down 1535 (3.5%) since late 2005, but new editor Murray Kirkness has got the graph going up again, making a modest .6% (263 a day) gain in the last audit.

Southland Times editor Fred Tulett is also holding his ground well, with the paper hovering around 29,000, up .7% in the last audit, but down 1.9% (571 papers a day) since late 2005.

The Taranaki Daily News (editor: Jonathan MacKenzie) is steady on 26,000, down 1.7% since late 2005.

In Hastings - where Hawkes Bay Today editor Louis Pierard has just left after steering the paper since it emerged as an amalgam of the Napier Telegraph and the Herald-Tribune in 1999 - the drop has been 6.5% to 26,226.

Most of the other daily papers are down by single figure percentages.

Ironically the Levin Daily Chronicle - which made world media headlines last month when owner APN announced its closure as a daily - actually lifted circulation 1.5% in the last audit. The two year trend was not so good, however, showing a drop of 167 papers to 2701 (down 5.9%).

Looking at overall numbers, the independent papers (dominated by the ODT) are doing best: their annual combined sales of 20 million have stayed stable. Of the two big chain owners, FairfaxNZ is doing marginally better than rival APN.

Fairfax’s eight dailies dropped 3.6 million in annual sales (down to 99 million, a fall of 3.5%), while annual sales of APN’s 10 went down 6.1% (96.5 million to 90.6 million).

Raising the price of papers has meant income has stayed just ahead of inflation: by my calculation, income  was up about $10 million to $272 million over the two years. (Cover price accounts for only a small proportion of income, of course, with most coming from advertising, which is no doubt a factor in overseas trends for papers to go free to head off the negative perception of falling sales).

The Sunday paper market is particularly intriguing for those of us trying to discern patterns. On the surface, it looks as though APN Sunday supremo Rick Neville was right when he said the Sunday market had untapped sales, while Star-Times editor Cate Brett should perhaps be worried about her tenure.

Neither impression may be accurate.

Although the Herald on Sunday appears to have carved out a significant new market with its 93,665 sales (up 472 or .5% since late 2005), I have to wonder how many of those have come from the Fairfax pair (SST and Sunday News, who show a combined drop of 33,350) and how many have been cannibalised from the NZ Herald’s Saturday edition.

I recall the first weekend the Herald on Sunday appeared and spotting dozens of bundles of unopened Weekend Heralds at my local supermarket. The Herald used to sell 300,000 on a Saturday, but that was dented when the Sunday Star launched in 1986 and Aucklanders took to the idea of an Auckland-produced Sunday that wasn’t down-market Sunday News and wasn’t a Wellington paper (the Sunday Times) - ie, they were Herald readers.

The SST was always going to lose a lot of sales to a Herald Sunday paper, partly because Aucklanders hate anything that might have a link to Wellington, as Fairfax does. Remember, the SST has no daily basis on which to found its Auckland operation, so insular Aucklanders were always going to be enamoured by something connected to the local paper (even if it is a tabloid, sorry, “compact”).

I think Cate has done well to hold the damage to 35,000 (the SST was selling about 210,000 when HoS launched in 2004). She works hard to improve the product all the time. The changes are not always a success, but most are. Only a disastrous acceleration in sales losses would seriously threaten her position.

The next lot of ABC figures (at year’s end) will be the most important in decades. The relatively small losses over the past few years were on the back of a strong economy, which meant fat papers and a feeling of value for money.

As we watch papers begin to contract in the recession as advertising dries up, audiences already feeling the personal impact of the recession, will prefer bread and milk instead of a paper. It was just such a trend that wiped out half Sunday News’ circulation in the 80s.

Rick was right when he detected opportunities in the Sunday readership market, but he might be 30 years too late. In the mid-70s, sales of Sunday papers and Saturday night sports editions - at 750,000 a weekend - were twice today’s total of about 350,000.

It’s the economy - reported stupidly

TIME was, if you started in journalism and knew 10% of 100, you were promoted straight into the business department, such is the problem most reporters have with numbers.

Given the legendary ineptness of maths teachers at school, nothing has changed.

Those who report business, and those who consume their arcane stuff, presumably know what it all means, but many of us are left to continue blithely with our innumerate lives, even though numbers affect almost every aspect of them.

There is no real excuse for this. Business news is no different from any other kind, and the onus should be on biz reporters to treat it so, and produce stories anyone over the age of 11 can understand.

In New Zealand, the Sunday Star-Times business section is the only one with staff who treat the audience with respect and consistently de-mystify money, the economy, business and its associated spheres.

It’s no surprise they’re so good - the four writers (Tim Hunter, Garry Sheeran, Greg Ninness and Rob Stock) are an experienced team who eschew the tangled pathways of their daily colleagues, and concentrate on writing stories that are relevant, clear and devoid of the assumption that every reader is John Key or Bob Jones.

This is not solely a NZ problem, of course. Take a look at this wonderfully irreverant video (I found it via Mark Hamilton), which demonstrates that giving journalists new reporting tools has probably just made matters worse:

http://current.com/items/88872451_viral_video_film_school

Get your election plug here - for absolutely bugger all

HERE’S a special offer to all politicians: I’ll give you a favourable mention on this blog for $10, an unfavourable one for $15, and slip your profile onto NewsWire for $20.

Just kidding - as Steven Price is in his blog, reproduced below (the bit about Duncan Garner, etc).

Interesting that one of our mainstream media outlets, TV3, is offering MPs space on its election website for the paltry sum of $299 a profile.

Tawdry way to make money, and if you’re going to be tawdry, wouldn’t you want to charge properly. Would you abandon your ethics for 300 bucks a pop?

They can get away with it without incurring a BSA complaint because of the massive hole in our media regulation regime - websites operated by broadcasters or independents are not regulated by anyone.

Dollar votes?

By Steven | August 15, 2008

Russell Brown is pointing out that TV3’s election website is flogging profile pages to candidates at $299 a pop.

There’s no indication on the profile pages themselves that the MPs have to pay for them (though there is a “purchase page” tab on the main page that might clue readers in.

They’re also charging $399 for a favourable mention in Duncan Garner’s blog and $999 for party leaders to select their own soundbites in news stories. No, I made that up. Maybe next election.

The Press Council has upheld complaints against similar practices by newspapers, saying it:

“breaches the traditional ethic of journalism to maintain a separation between the editorial side of a newspaper publication and the business side”.

However, you can’t complain about a broadcaster’s website to the Press Council. Nor can you complain to the Broadcasting Standards Authority about broadcasters’ websites, even about the content of downloadable video (though you can complain about any content that’s actually broadcast, if you meet the complaint deadline).

It’s a bit of a gap in our regulatory framework.

Putting our Rs on the line

INTERESTING column in the DomPo this week on why Southlanders roll their Rs in words like “word”.

Apparently, it’s become fashionable again down there in the deep freeze. In fact, you’re looked down on if you don’t. A badge of respect.

I think, though, there’s a more serious issue with Rs: some people on radio and TV add them to words that aren’t supposed to have them. Listen to the way Sean Plunket and Mark Sainsbury say “now”. They add an R - to make it “nowr”.

It’s not uncommon, if you listen to the way people speak. I’m no expert, but I suspect it comes from what was once called a “lazy tongue”, and a reluctance to open the mouth to enunciate properly. Most of us were probably put off doing that by elocution teachers who wanted us all to speak with a plum, like radio announcers prior to Radio Hauraki.

Spotting mistakes - I may be losing it

PLEASE read the following carefully - and then let me know how many literals (mistakes) there are.

Okay, so you can’t spot any (unlikely), don’t care (blogs have mistakes, big deal), or you’re just too respectful of an aging journalism teacher to point them out.

Whatever, I’m growing concerned that somewhere in the process of adopting the web world we’ve given something away - accuracy. Not the “getting it right” kind (although that may have gone, as well): I’m talking about straight out mistakes - typing, misspelling (does that have two s’s or one?), grammar, style, imprecision, lack of clarity, etc.

You see, this morning I lost valuable blogging time fixing a  mistake I’d made when writing about Bill English and the recordings. I’d spelled “eavesdropping” without the “a” in every blog.

Polite colleagues said to me they thought it looked wrong, but I said, no, I’m sure it’s okay. None of us consulted a dictionary, and nobody trusted the Bill Gates spellcheck. It wasn’t until Anne, one of our students, sent me an urgent email that I realised I needed to check. Anne was right. It’s not spelled “evesdrop”.

Anne, incidentally, is mature enough to have learned proper English at school, but not mature enough to be losing her faculties, like her journalism teacher.

How embarrassing.

It got worse. Another student, Reesh, mentioned I had “year” when I meant “yeah” in this morning’s effort.

Okay, three points:

1. Nobody should ever publish anything without a second eye over it (this appears to be impractical with blogging, which is the ultimate form of vanity self-publishing).
2. The spellcheck (which I don’t use when blogging) does have its uses, and perhaps these days we rely on it more than I would ever have predicted.
3. The older you get, the harder it is to spot your own mistakes, even though someone in my kind of work spends half his day spotting other people’s.
4. Okay, it’s four: when you consider yourself some kind of authority, you need to set an example. So while most people accept blogging is a hurried and undisciplined art, some of us have an obligation to take care.

Two redeeming factors or excuses:

1. I misspelled “eavesdrop” consistently.
2. The typeface on this blogging page is so damned small it’s a wonder there aren’t a lot more errors produced.
3. Okay, it’s three: journalists older than 55 learned to type on typewriters, never received formal typing lessons, and mostly hammer away with two fingers. We type fast (unlike country policemen on telly, who peck), but have a 50% error rate. I hit the keys so hard I wear the A and E off a keyboard within a year or two. I’ve had to put a rubber pad under the keyboard to reduce the noise, which disturbs the neighbour downstairs.

Please report all errors in this blog to the proper authorities (my students at Whitireia).