In recent weeks the traditional news media themselves have become a major news story. With fast fading audiences in the face of alternative options, they’ve become a sunset industry and of necessity are undergoing constant staff layoffs, just as occurs in other once seemingly safe activities confronted by new technology making them redundant.
Consider the recent publication of the AUT’s annual survey of the public’s trust in the media.
This covered all of our newspapers, radio and television outlets. Only the Otago Daily Times, and then by the finest possible margin of 5.1% for against 4.9% against, showed a positive public trust in its integrity.
That same week in a special editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald, their senior editor deplored the behaviour of so many journalists in bringing newspapers into public contempt.
He made the correct observation that journalists have been the constant butt of satirical writing, starting with Evelyn Waugh’s wonderful “Scoop” written in 1938.
Yet up until about 20 years ago “Scoop” was widely referred to as the journalists’ bible, no-one treating it as more than the wonderfully over the top spoof it is. But it was followed by many other funny piss-taking novels at journalism’s expense, it being a field offering rich potential.
Indeed two decades ago I also poked fun at journalists with my comic novel “True Facts.” Furthermore, it was launched by a journalist, Deborah Coddington, before a large audience hosted by the Press Club no less. But back then we could laugh at human folly without getting upset, unlike today.
Because by dint of their activities journalists have the power to produce dishonest articles, there will always be some who will and in the process tar the whole profession.
In the past I’ve occasionally claimed that I could write a ten volume set of books on outrageous journalists distortions and outright lies I’ve personally been subjected to in my public activity days. That’s not hyperbole; I really could.
But I freely concede this is a rotten apple in the barrel faction, the majority of journoes being strictly honest.
As I’ve said, the issue is becoming increasingly academic as traditional media are fighting for survival in the face of technology. 50 years ago television was famously described as a license to print money. Nowadays it’s provably a license to lose money. On many occasions in my column writing days over recent decades, I’ve urged the sale of TVNZ while it still had value. There was and is today, not a single reason for this to be a state activity. It’s probably too late now as there’d be no buyer.
I don’t rejoice in that, indeed to the contrary, I having a life-long love of newspapers, one reason I enjoy being in Britain where, albeit with hugely reduced circulations, great newspapers still survive.
But ultimately they’re all doomed which is why Stuff’s nation-wide fleet of papers were sold for a token dollar despite 30 years earlier, probably then having a value of 5-10 billions dollars. Their Australian owners accepted the reality and jumped ship to avoid the constant tension of a dying investment and its corresponding redundancy obligations.
8 Comments
Quite right as always Sir Bob. As a former journalist, I deplore what today’s excuse for journalists have managed to achieve – undermining their own existence to promote the radical left’s agenda in praise of Ardern and Hipkins, the mar-ori party, the pale greens et al. Here’s another prediction – the new hyped Stuffed TV news service will not last a year. Stuffed is absolutely incapable of producing a credible reliable honest news service – they can’t do in print or online – what makes them think they can do it on TV??
Interestingly, I note that The Australian and SMH are both still journalistically honest and continue to publish opinion pieces by, dare I say it, proper journalists. I’d be interested to see an age demographic of our NZ Journalists, I suspect they lean very heavily towards the ‘around’ 30 age group, about which need any more be said?
The decline in newspapers has been going on for more than 100 years. In my book “Newspapers: A Century of Decline”, I set the scene thus
“On 2 November 1920 Pittsburg radio station KDKA — which claims to have become the first licensed commercial station to come on air in the United States — that night broadcast the results of the presidential election between Warren G. Harding and James M. Cox. Only about 1,000 people listened to the radio broadcast. The station had made an arrangement with the morning daily, the Pittsburg Post-Gazette, to be supplied with the results as they came in during the evening. Those 1,000 people were the first in Pittsburg to learn that Harding had won: they did not have to wait for the thud of morning newspaper at their front door the next day.
“Now, several crises later, newspapers face the worst of all those crises, and one so great that it is increasingly held as self-evident that newspapers are finished – if not immediately, then within a few years. Circulation figures plunge with each new audit, advertising has dried up. ”
I began as a cadet reporter on The Dominion in 1962, and have worked for The Age in Melbourne (in its left wing days), the South China Morning Post, The Dominion Sunday Times, Melbourne’s former afternoon paper The Herald, the National Times in Sydney and for 26 years wrote for The Australian which, fortunately, remains a good newspaper — not something that you can say about the rest of the Australian press. But the decline in NZ is the most depressing of all.
Newspapers are collapsing for similar reasons Rugby in New Zealand is also.
People have alot more choice now, and rather than go for quality the administration have diluted this with a high volume of low quality. Poor administration (including overpaid executives) is largely to blame. You go bankrupt if you don’t move with the times.
Just imagine what a half time show; for instance, with cheerleaders etc, would do to the crowds.
I’m currently sitting in the departure lounge at Manchester Airport enjoying a glass of champagne after a glorious week in Scotland. The news in the diminishing supply of papers is mostly grim but there are also many reasons to love Britain. Top of the list is the irrepressible humor and the new security procedures that no longer require you to remove your shoes as you pass through security.
And the further irony — that Stuff’s predecessor once had a digitally-based growth subsidiary (TradeMe) but sold it off to help meet, wait for it, predicted journalist redundancy costs.
Had it retained it and found other ways to meet those costs, it might now have the basis of a business actually worth something.
When our leading newspaper, NZ Herald, has a story headlined “Kiwi Man gives birth” you have to wonder if dishonesty is a sufficient descriptor; perhaps they’re all quite mad. Of course the new mum was, as expected, a women pretending to be a man but no, NZH insisted she was an actual he.
“We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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