Everything you ever wanted to know about the popularity of flounder in Massachusetts

Today’s edition of the Stuff-owned Wairarapa Times-Age runs to 32 tabloid-sized pages. Seven pages consist of exclusive local content, including a Wairarapa sports page, a locally written gardening page and a half-page devoted to lightweight, reader-generated material such as a local amateur photo and a folksy “Thought for the Day” slot to which the same handful of readers habitually and predictably contribute.

The rest of the paper is centrally generated by Stuff and presumably shared with other papers in the Stuff group. There are just two pages of national news, one of world news and three of national and international sport. Those pages aside, the paper mainly consists of what I would call filler material. A less polite term is editorial dross - published not because it’s interesting, relevant or important, but because it’s cheap, readily available and fills space.

There’s a full-page interview with a Paris-based New Zealand architect whose name was unfamiliar to me, an investment column by Martin Hawes, a full-page feature from US-based Associated Press about the contest between China and America for global AI supremacy, a full-page opinion piece about public servants not being honest with politicians, two wordy and esoteric opinion pieces by chin-stroking Wellington academics, yet another full-page opinion piece about shortcomings in the way we do politics (on the face of it, a valid subject until you realise the writer is a lobbyist for an industry group and thus open to the accusation of self-interest), a two-page travel spread written for no obvious reason other than that the writer was offered a freebie by a cruise ship company, three pages of puzzles (that’s right, three, one of which replaced a weather page, presumably dumped because it cost too much), two pages devoted to TV shows most people can’t watch because they’re streamed on platforms only a minority can afford to subscribe to, and finally a full-page obituary from the Times of London about an Israeli scientist only a tiny handful of readers would have heard of (a common factor in the obits published by Stuff, although it routinely ignores the deaths of notable New Zealanders).

Admittedly, by wretched contemporary standards, seven pages of local content out of 32 isn’t too bad. I’m told it’s better than many Stuff regional papers manage. And the T-A still has an editor and four reporters, for which we should be grateful.

I should add that today’s paper is pretty typical. Some editions are worse, some better. But it would be a rare paper that doesn’t devote pages of prime editorial space to turgid content no one is going to read. Last Friday’s paper included a 1700-word, full-page feature from AP about the resurgence in the popularity of flounder on American restaurant tables and the delight it’s causing to chefs and fishermen in Massachusetts. Compelling reading for people in Eketahuna and Carterton? Somehow I don’t think so. (I should point out that the editor of the Times-Age, to my knowledge, has absolutely no control over what goes on non-local pages.)

A common characteristic of the many opinion pieces published by Stuff is that they are about subjects of extremely narrow interest and often better suited to dry academic journals. They are certainly unlikely to command the urgent attention of a general newspaper readership that consists not of honours degree students and members of the Wellington political class but of hairdressers, bank tellers, nurses, farmers and truck drivers with real-world concerns and limited time to skim the paper.

Twenty years ago – even 10 years ago – such articles would not have found an outlet in the mainstream media. I suspect they are published because the writers are eager for public exposure and happy to make their work available for nothing.

I recently sent an email to Stuff owner and CEO Sinead Boucher in which I protested at the amount of useless padding in my daily paper and accused Stuff of treating readers of its regional papers with contempt.

I wanted to know why, with all its editorial resources, Stuff couldn’t fill the paper with interesting and relevant New Zealand content. I pointed out that Boucher, in a recent email to subscribers, had boasted about Stuff’s “impactful” journalism. She named some of the star reporters whose work she particularly prized and I wondered why their work was never seen in the Times-Age. (For the record, they are not necessarily journalists I would rush to read. But Boucher is obviously proud of them and they are at least writing about issues relevant to New Zealand.)

Boucher’s reply seemed to confirm what I had heard from others. Stuff operates as two separate divisions, print and digital. Stuff Digital is owned 50/50 with Trade Me and its content, astonishing though it may seem, is not available to Stuff newspapers. The two divisions apparently function as self-contained siloes and don’t talk to each other, despite sharing the same corporate brand. I suspected as much because there have been times in the recent past when stories of direct local interest and relevance to Wairarapa readers appeared online on Stuff but not, bizarrely, in the Stuff-owned paper that supposedly serves the region.

Surely there’s the problem, right there? In a follow-up email to Boucher I observed that it seemed a fundamentally flawed structure - one that relegates readers of Stuff regional papers to the status of second-class customers, fed vast tracts of nondescript throwaway material while premium content is reserved for online subscribers.

I won’t go into the detail of Boucher’s reply to my email. Suffice it to say that the tone was prickly, defensive and full of self-pity at how difficult it is to be in the journalism game these days. All of which I know, partly because Boucher frequently tells us.

She also suggested I'm a cranky old has-been, pining for the good old days and resentful at no longer being a person of influence. To which I responded that no, I simply believe it’s in society’s best interests for newspapers to survive and flourish and I don’t see it happening under her watch. Stuff is a corporate train wreck and nothing Boucher and her team of executives do or say gives me any confidence whatsoever.

 

 

The Last Post

That’s it then. The End. Finito.

That was my immediate reaction to the news that Stuff’s printing plant at Petone will shut down next year and printing operations will be relocated to Christchurch.

The paper most affected will be The Post, Stuff’s Wellington morning paper – known in a previous incarnation as The Dominion Post, a masthead whose name was itself an ungainly amalgam of its precursor titles The Dominion and The Evening Post.

The Post is on its knees already. It won’t survive this upheaval.

Printing the paper in Christchurch and then freighting it north by truck and ferry, as Stuff apparently proposes to do, will be a death blow to a paper whose heritage dates back to 1865. I was tempted to use the phrase "coup de grace" rather than death blow, but strictly speaking, a coup de grace is a swift and merciful end for a person or animal that is suffering. This will more likely be a cruelly slow and inevitable decline, and painful to watch for anyone who values newspapers.

The proposed move means The Post’s final editorial deadline would be pushed back to the early afternoon, at best. Nothing that happens after that time will be covered in its news columns. It will therefore abandon any claim to be a genuine morning newspaper, or even a newspaper at all. Whatever “news” it contains will be withered and stale by the time it reaches any remaining readers.

The Post will be forced to rely even more on soft, flabby content that isn’t time-critical. This means more long-winded and ultimately pointless opinion columns, more cheap filler material lifted from overseas sources and irrelevant to New Zealand, and more lifestyle-oriented fluff – such as articles about movies, television, the arts, gardening, interior design, food and fashion – that used to be the preserve of glossy (for which read women’s) magazines.

Already the Auckland-based New Zealand Herald consistently carries more – and sharper – Wellington news. Wellingtonians who want to be informed on what’s happening in their own city have to read a paper published 500 km away.

And The Post won’t be the only title affected by the move. Stuff’s other North Island dailies – the Taranaki Daily News, the Manawatu Standard and my own local, the Wairarapa Times-Age – will also be printed in Christchurch and trucked north, which means they too will be subjected to the uncertainties of Cook Strait weather, ferry breakdowns and the inevitable road delays caused by a New Zealand Transport Agency that seems blithely indifferent to the impact of its endless and needlessly disruptive roadworks.

Those newspapers will therefore lose even more of the vital sense of “localness” that makes them relevant to their communities. Already their newsrooms have been hollowed out to the point where coverage of local news is scant and superficial. With the shift to Christchurch, the factors of time and distance will mean the papers become still more remote from the readers they supposedly serve.

This is madness. Much as I feel for the journalists still employed on these papers, some of whom I know personally, it might be more merciful – and more realistic – to shut the papers down now and abandon the pretence that they will continue to mean something in their terminally enfeebled state.

How did Stuff arrive at this dismal juncture? The immediate cause is the acquisition by the wealthy property investor Troy Bowker of the land and building that houses Stuff’s Petone printing plant. Bowker is not favourably disposed to Stuff, I assume for ideological reasons (Stuff is left-wing, Bowker is decidedly not), and I sense that he derived some satisfaction from giving the company notice to clear out next year and take its printing press with it.

He would have known very well that this created an existential predicament for Stuff, notwithstanding Stuff owner Sinead Boucher’s insistence that the company was ready and prepared for it and will take it the massive disruption and expense in its stride. Bowker obviously doesn’t believe her and I’m not sure I do either.

But the real origins of Stuff’s decline lie much further back. It began with the creation in 1999 of Sam Morgan’s Trade Me, a bold use of digital technology that deprived newspapers of a vital revenue stream from classified advertising – those lucrative pages of small-type ads for jobs, cars, properties and second-hand goods. In Australia, classified ads were famously described as “rivers of gold” and the same was true here.

That was followed by a much wider migration of advertising from print to online. Display advertising – the industry term for big ads, often occupying a full page, placed by department stores, car manufacturers and big corporates such as banks and telecom providers – soon dried up too as advertisers realised they could target their ad spend more effectively online.

Simultaneously, newspaper publishers were panicked into a suicidal rush to place editorial content online at no charge to readers. The assumption was that advertisers would follow in due course, to the benefit of newspaper websites. They didn’t.

The result was that newspapers were left with the same cost structure (because good journalism, after all, costs money) accompanied by a catastrophic slump in advertising revenue and income from newspaper sales – because why would people pay for a paper when they could read the news free on their PCs and mobile devices, and hours before the paper came out?

It didn’t help that some key media leaders – Boucher was one, as was Paul Thompson, now chief executive of RNZ but then executive editor of Stuff’s precursor, Fairfax Media – had an almost evangelistic faith in the digital revolution. The old newspaper model was being deconstructed and it was assumed that a brilliant new one would replace it. We’re still waiting.

Another baneful development was the sale of Independent Newspapers Ltd’s chain of newspaper titles – the ones now owned by Stuff – to Sydney-based Fairfax in 2003. INL was controlled by Rupert Murdoch but it was run by New Zealanders with a fierce commitment to newspapers.

Fairfax showed no such commitment either to newspapers or New Zealand. When the print media business became just too tough, the Aussies fled back to Sydney. They showed just how much they valued their New Zealand titles when Nine Entertainment, which by then had merged with Fairfax, sold them to Boucher for a token sum of $1. (The Petone building wasn’t included in the deal, for reasons that escape me.) 

Boucher herself then showed how much she valued her papers by changing the company name to Stuff. A company that took newspapers seriously wouldn’t have demeaned them by giving the company a frivolous name originally created for the INL website by whiz-kids from the advertising agency Saatchi, no doubt over a few bottles of expensive wine.

There have been other missteps along the way. Stuff recklessly alienated previously loyal readers by abandoning traditional journalistic principles of objectivity in favour of an overtly left-wing line that permeated all its news coverage and editorial comment. This coincided with, and no doubt contributed to, declining levels of public trust in the media overall. Stuff’s breast-beating front-page apology to Maori in 2020 for decades of supposedly racist coverage was dishonest as well as disgracefully unfair to generations of journalists who didn’t have a racist bone in their bodies.

This was consistent with the ignorance and disregard Stuff has regularly displayed for its editorial heritage. In 2023 it announced that The Dominion Post would be renamed The Post, a bland and meaningless name that conveyed no sense of the paper’s notable history. In fact it was a conscious disowning of the paper’s past. “We are under no one’s dominion,” then-editor Caitlin Cherry pompously pronounced, in a spectacularly fatuous statement that reflected the paper’s ideological obsessions. Cherry’s time as editor was short-lived and the inane change of masthead is the only reminder that she was ever there. The pointlessness of the change is evident from the fact that three years later, people still refer to the paper by its old name.

So now the paper formerly known as the Dom Post, and before that as two competing titles, The Dominion and The Evening Post, is about to take another step on its slow march to oblivion. It saddens me because I love newspapers and want them to survive; but it angers me too because at so many points along the way, the company that owns the paper has needlessly hastened its demise. And society as a whole is all the poorer for losing what was once a crucial source of reliable information about events of significance.

I often pass the Stuff printing plant on my way to Wellington on the Wairarapa train. It still displays the name of The Dominion Post. I was in that building on the night the new, state-of-the-art German press was used for the first time in 1990, when I was editor of the Dominion. It was a time of optimism and faith in the future of print. Now the press is to be dismantled and the building, by the sound of it, will be converted into apartments.

Much of what has happened in the years since the first papers rolled off that press was unavoidable. It was inflicted on the industry by the advent of digital technology. But the effects of the digital revolution could have been mitigated with better editorial and managerial judgment. Newspapers don't need to die; well-managed titles are still thriving overseas. 

For now, the Petone building is a poignant reminder of a time when newspapers mattered in New Zealand and the print media thrived; when the local paper was a vital part of daily life. Once the printing press and the Dominion Post sign have gone, the memory of that time will gradually recede to the point where it will be erased altogether. And The Post itself, which is already only a ghostly echo of what it used to be, will fade away too. Moving to Christchurch won’t save it, and anyone who says it will is either in denial or dishonest.

Correction: An earlier version of this post said Sinead Boucher bought the Stuff papers from Fairfax Media. In fact the seller was Nine Entertainment, of which Fairfax had by then become a part.

Stuff's operating model: cheap and lazy

(Estimated reading time: 10 minutes)

Last Tuesday’s edition of my local paper, the Wairarapa Times-Age, devoted an entire page to an Associated Press (i.e. American) feature story about affluent middle-class professionals taking extended career breaks.

The people mentioned in the story are representatives of an elite US metropolitan class who can afford to put their careers on hold while they spend months enjoying a “reset” in exotic locations such as Egypt and Brazil. It’s hard to imagine a story less relevant to readers of a paper in a New Zealand provincial town where many people are struggling.

Stuff, which provides most of the content in the Times-Age, made a half-hearted and thoroughly unconvincing effort to dress up the article as something important by labelling it “The Global Read”. That it was published in the Times-Age was an insult; in fact a double insult. It was insulting to the paper’s readers first because it was a lazy way to fill space, and second because of its complete lack of empathy. People who worry about being unable to pay the grocery or electricity bill are hardly likely to relate to stories about privileged lifestyles that they could never dream of emulating.

The article lacked even the saving grace of being well written. In common with much American journalism produced by earnest university graduates, it was turgid and overlong. I couldn’t imagine a single Times-Age reader persevering to the end. Most would have given up after the first few sentences, the subject matter being only marginally more compelling than a doctoral thesis on nematodes.

For this, the small editorial staff of the Times-Age are blameless. The paper is owned by Stuff and much of its content is generic, being shared with other papers in the Stuff chain. Local (i.e. Wairarapa) input is generally restricted to three or four news pages at the front, plus letters to the editor, an occasional opinion column, some featherweight community-contributed content (the “Thought of the Day” is popular) and a bit of sport. The rest is centrally generated by Stuff and relies heavily on syndicated content from overseas providers such as the aforementioned Associated Press. The editor of the Times-Age has no control over it and his opinion of its merit is not known to me.

Stuff papers are – excuse the pun – stuffed full of content that’s shovelled into the pages with little concern for relevance and even less for attractive display. Turn the pages of any Stuff paper and you’re bound to be confronted by great slabs of dull grey type devoted to subjects of minimal interest, typically illustrated with lifeless, static pictures downloaded from an online image library. Filling the space seems the sole imperative, and Stuff’s editors appear to grab whatever happens to be available.

It’s cheap and it requires minimal effort; that seems to be Stuff’s operating model. Never mind what the readers might want. Who cares?

Let’s return to Tuesday’s Times-Age. Eager to read something interesting and relevant after the AP snorefest, readers would have turned the page to see a double-page spread, this time reproduced from Britain’s Sunday Times, about Ukraine creating underground classrooms where children can learn without the disruption caused by Russian missiles and drone attacks.

I didn’t have the patience to do a count but I would guess the story ran to at least 2000 words, which is far too much to ask of a provincial newspaper reader on a weekday morning. (Note that the original British version was published on a Sunday, when people have the luxury of time – and bear in mind that the Sunday Times is read by the leisured class.) And while the subject was interesting enough, the story could have easily been crunched down to a quarter of its length without losing any crucial information (hint: it’s called editing).

And so it continued. The following page was another grey slab – this time a wordy opinion column on aged care, accompanied by another file picture retrieved from an overseas image library. More laziness.

Further on, another two-page spread: a travel article about a remote location in Queensland. Travel pieces are a handy way of padding a newspaper with fluff. The writers are often prepared to accept a token payment because their principal reward is the free trip (or junket, in journalistic parlance).

The Wednesday paper wasn’t much better. This time, the full-page “Global Read” was about Singapore Airport’s introduction of a levy to pay for sustainable aviation fuel. Really? An entire page, in a paper serving provincial New Zealand? Couldn’t they find something a little more germane to readers’ lives and interests?

Oh, but hang on – there’s more. A few pages further on, there’s a full-page opinion piece – running, I’d guess, to about 1500 words – by a university lecturer from Leicester, England, about the potential harm done by social media. And opposite that, another full-page piece of similar length by another university academic, this time an Australian-based American writing about cyber crime.

Most readers of the Times-Age will have flicked over these pages with barely a pause because they offered nothing to lure them in. The vital principle that a successful newspaper reflects its community appears to have been forgotten or ignored.

Thursday’s paper brought yet another double-page spread, again from the purveyors of stodge at Associated Press, about an American man raising twin boys with autism. It was labelled with the tag line “In depth”, as if that magically made it something people in provincial New Zealand would want to read about. And on the following page, an opinion piece by a University of Auckland academic about slavery laws. Academics, like freelance travel writers, are a handy source of cheap copy because they’re keen to get published and in their case, the taxpayer picks up the tab because the writers are on the public payroll.

This is a rip-off worthy of the attention of Consumer magazine. People in the Wairarapa (and come to that, in Wellington and the Manawatu and the Waikato and Christchurch and Timaru and Nelson and Invercargill too, all of whom get served the same dross by their local Stuff papers) don’t buy their daily paper to read wordy articles by academic non-entities about subjects far removed from readers’ real-life interests and concerns.

Another “In depth” piece on Friday – from The Times of London – was a dispatch from Greenland about how Donald Trump is making the locals nervous. Again, a legitimate subject – but two pages? And further back in the paper, another two pages devoted to newly released movies that may never be screened in the Wairarapa.

People pay good money for their paper. They deserve better than to be presented with pretend newspapers that contain barely a skerrick of hard news. Every one of those esoteric non-stories occupied precious space that in a previous era would have been filled with content of genuine interest and value; information vital to the functioning of informed communities. Even as recently as 10 years ago, no self-respecting paper would have wasted space on them.

To use a biblical analogy, we’re being fed lots of chaff but precious little wheat. Even the few supposed news pages come up short. In seven years as a news editor on daily papers, I always held to the view that on a typical day there were probably about half a dozen stories of such national interest and importance that they had to be in the paper. They might be stories about politics, crime, business takeovers, fires and fatal car accidents or whatever. You could be confident that if you read a daily paper in any of the major cities or provincial centres, you’d be informed about them. And if you didn't see them, by definition you were not well informed.

That operating principle was abandoned years ago. News coverage is now a random, hit-and-miss affair. You might read about a major event or you might not. We literally don’t know what we’re missing. Vast areas of the country are black holes; we hear virtually nothing about them. (The demise of the New Zealand Press Association, which used to ensure that all news of significance from anywhere in the country was promptly distributed nationwide, is a separate tragedy of its own.)

The American journalist Walter Lippman once said that without the news media, we would live in an invisible society; we wouldn’t know anything. We haven’t quite reached that point, but we’re heading in that direction. We know less about ourselves than at any time since the emergence of the popular press in the 19th century.

In place of news, we now get bulky opinion pieces from Stuff journalists. Too often they take a partisan political or ideological line. The short, sharp, punchy news story, which previous generations of reporters could write in their sleep and once filled papers, is virtually extinct.

In the case of Stuff papers, there’s a disproportionate preponderance of content from the Press. The Christchurch paper has become the engine room of the Stuff chain, with the result that Stuff papers carry a lot of Christchurch news that’s of zero interest to readers elsewhere.

Obituaries? Don’t get me started. I frequently see full-page obits for Americans and Brits whom most Stuff readers will have never heard of. The deaths of notable New Zealanders, meanwhile, pass unnoticed.

I could go on. I haven’t mentioned the pages devoted to soft, lifestyle-oriented content that used to be the preserve of glossy magazines: articles about gardening, interior design, food, fashion and relationships. The Times-Age, like other Stuff papers, also devotes acres of space to movies and TV shows that most people will never watch. In the days when everyone viewed the same free-to-air television, stories about programmes and personalities made sense. Not so, however, when most TV content is streamed on subscription platforms and viewing patterns have become hopelessly fragmented.

A few of the Stuff journalists who edit all this generic copy (if editing is the appropriate word, given that much of it is lifted holus-bolus, headlines and all, from other sources) are old enough to remember when newspapers were full of stuff that mattered. I can’t imagine all of them are happy to be processing editorial content whose sole purpose is to fill space.

It seems hard to believe that with its resources, Stuff can’t present the readers of its papers with a more compelling editorial product. I’m therefore forced to the conclusion that the company is run by people who don’t care much about newspapers and may even regard them as a tiresome anachronism that they would rather be rid of. I get the impression print readers are deemed far less important than those who “consume content” – a hideous phrase – online (Stuff owner Sinead Boucher was an early convert to digital).

How have we come to this? That’s a long, sad story that can wait for another time. Suffice it to say that newspapers were hit by a digital technology revolution that fatally undermined their profitability, and their decline was hastened by owners who were panicked into doing the wrong things – such as making content available free online.

The strange thing, in view of all the foregoing, is that I still value the Times-Age enough to keep paying my subscription. Reading it with my first coffee of the day, although it takes far less time than it once did, is a morning ritual. But more than that, the local paper – even in its tragically feeble and eviscerated state – is still a valuable means of keeping communities connected. With a bit more care and commitment from their apparently indifferent owner, Stuff papers might yet avoid the inevitable fate that otherwise confronts them.

What privilege looks like in 2025

Two weeks ago, in a blog post headlined What privilege sounds like in 2025, I made the case that the broadcasting organisation formerly known as Radio New Zealand is the embodiment of privilege. 

I argued that the dwindling number of New Zealanders who listen to the state radio station are in fact doubly privileged. Not only are they able to hear taxpayer-funded content that’s carefully curated so as not to offend their sensibilities or challenge their cosy assumptions, but they are spared the indignity of being bombarded with crass, intrusive advertising. That wretched fate is reserved for the proles who choose to tune into commercial radio (which, in this context, essentially means NewstalkZB).

I also noted that despite this disincentive, NewstalkZB’s audience keeps growing at the expense of RNZ. You’d think someone at the top of RNZ might have noticed this and started asking the obvious question – namely, why are listeners abandoning us? But even if they’re asking that question, the evidence suggests that they can’t bring themselves to answer it honestly.

As if to prove this, when my old colleague (and former broadcasting journalist) Barrie Saunders linked to my blog post on Facebook, RNZ board member Jane Wrightson sneeringly responded: “Oh good grief!” In doing so, she obligingly illustrated the problem.

I suspect that Wrightson, who has had a glittering career at the heart of the Wellington public service, inhabits an insular world that is largely deaf to critical outside scrutiny. They can’t see anything wrong, therefore there’s no problem. Wrightson apparently doesn’t pause to wonder why people like me no longer listen to RNZ.

For decades my radio was permanently tuned to the state broadcaster. I habitually listened to it at home and in the car. I should be RNZ’s target audience.

I miss some RNZ programmes and would gladly become a loyal listener again, because it still does some things well. I miss Jim Mora and I still sneakily listen to Phil O’Brien when no one’s around. But for me the entire organisation is fatally contaminated by the naked, systemic bias inherent in critical areas of its programming – most notably in its choice of presenters and in the way it deals with touchy political and ideological issues such as race, climate change and gender.

RNZ’s partisanship in favour of what are smugly and misleadingly labelled “progressive” values is evident not just in the issues it chooses to cover and how it deals with them, but just as critically in the issues it prefers to ignore and the people it refuses to engage with.

The parallels with the beleaguered BBC, currently grappling with the reverberations from a damning report exposing embedded biases on issues such as Gaza, crime and immigration, are obvious.

As a board member, Wrightson should be asking why RNZ has lost so many listeners like me (and you can be sure there are countless others. Not only do the audience figures bear that out, but I meet them all the time). But she prefers to dismiss criticism with an airy wave of the hand. “How tedious”, she seemed to be saying. It was what you might call a Marie Antoinette response.

But RNZ is hardly the only media organisation whose editorial priorities scream of privilege. If you want to know what privilege looks like in 2025, just read Stuff.

The Post’s Saturday magazine Your Weekend, in particular, wallows in privilege. I have no doubt that its editor and staff sincerely see themselves as champions of the marginalised. But this sits awkwardly with their choice of content, which invariably reflects the interests and preoccupations of a narrow demographic group consisting largely of affluent, young, educated, left-leaning, middle-class Pakeha women.

This highlights a besetting fault that pervades much of the New Zealand media. Editorial agendas are too often determined by journalists writing for and about people like themselves; people with the same interests, priorities, values and tastes. This is not a formula for success, since it ignores the rather substantial part of the community that doesn’t fit that profile.

Every time I look at Your Weekend (which I do quite often, because there are few things more satisfying than having one’s prejudices confirmed), I’m struck by the incongruity of editorial content that vacillates between earnestly woke on one hand and breathtakingly puerile, trite and self-indulgent on the other. YW appears unable to decide whether it’s a progressive socio-political pamphlet or an adolescent fanzine, slavishly pandering to elitist, designer-label consumerism.

A flick through a couple of recent editions reveals a preoccupation with actors, writers and artists (oh, and a burlesque queen last weekend and the weekend before that, a social media “influencer” and a food forager). In other words, a snapshot of an effete metropolitan café society that enjoys a lifestyle shared by a privileged few.

Nowhere is that privilege better encapsulated than in the sections devoted to subjects such as fashion, makeup and wine. Here you might see a pair of women’s shorts that costs $550, shoes priced at $595 and a handbag with a tag of $430. In the wine column I rarely see anything priced at less than $30, and often much more. I wonder, how many Your Weekend readers can afford the prohibitively expensive stuff the magazine promotes?

I accept that YW is targeted at a particular demographic group, but I would argue that it doesn’t even reflect the broad interests of that target market; merely a carefully selected subset of it.

A similar self-centred blindness to real-world interests and concerns seems to permeate the entire Stuff universe. Last Saturday’s Post, for example, included a wordy review of an esoteric Te Papa exhibition, a half-page by the same writer devoted to the woke podcaster Toby Manhire, another half-page about an obscure Australian musician (ah yes, obscure, but a close associate of Nick Cave, darling of the rock music cognoscenti - say no more), and an interview with the director of a Wellington food festival in which she listed all her favourite places in the city – mostly trendy bars and cafes, but with a sauna venue and a dance-fitness studio thrown in.

That last-mentioned item was a quintessential reflection of Wellington as it’s experienced by a well-paid, hedonistic, apartment-dwelling elite. I wait in vain for one of these regular “My Wellington” pieces to feature a checkout operator or a bus driver. Perhaps the Post assumes such people couldn’t possibly have anything interesting to say.

This type of non-journalism set a new bar earlier this year with a series of Post articles called “The Yummy Mummy”, in which a Stuff journalist who’s also a first-time mother visited various Wellington cafes with her baby to assess their suitability for “Mums and their pint-sized partners”. This was peak self-indulgence, speaking to a tiny minority of readers who share the Stuff editors’ strange ideas about what’s relevant, important and interesting.

As someone who recalls when the Post’s precursor papers, the Evening Post and the Dominion, were stuffed full of actual news stories – stories about court proceedings, council meetings, car accidents, crime, parliamentary debates, business and the economy, cats up trees – I naturally couldn’t help thinking how many such stories could have been accommodated in the hectares of space lavished on these overwritten and often pointless articles.

Of course it’s true that newsrooms have been hollowed out and that papers no longer have the resources to cover the stories they used to. Nonetheless we can draw our own conclusions from the fact Stuff chooses to squander its limited editorial resources pandering to a segment of the market that doesn’t reflect New Zealand society at large.

There’s a word for this: privilege.

I defended the media then; I wouldn't now

In his media column in the New Zealand Herald today, Shayne Currie reports that media organisations are having to think about security arrangements for journalists covering the election campaign. TVNZ went to the extent of hiring security staff for its news team at the National and Labour campaign launches, both of which were disrupted by protesters. Currie quotes TVNZ executive editor Phil O’Sullivan as saying: “Globally we’ve seen an increase in anti-media sentiment. We’re now seeing this in New Zealand too, with an increase in abuse directed towards our reporters while out in the field, and threatening behaviour in online spaces disproportionately impacting our female reporters.”

We have been here before. A post on this blog in November 2021 noted expressions of concern from journalists about hostility toward the media at anti-vax events. That post was headlined No one should be surprised by a backlash against the media and it still holds true.

I deplore attacks or threats against anyone lawfully doing their job, but people in the media need to ask themselves why animosity toward journalists – which has existed, to a greater or less extent, all the time I’ve been in the business – has been cranked up to an unprecedented level.

Part of the explanation can be found in an article that Currie quotes from. It was written in February last year by Mark Stevens, then head of news at Stuff. Stevens, who takes up a new job on Monday in an equivalent role at RNZ, noted that aggression toward journalists had increased and cited incidents of Stuff journalists being punched and having gear smashed.

Stevens (who I worked with when he was a very capable young reporter at the Evening Post in the 1990s) went on to say: “From time to time, news stories are published that rub a certain person, group or community up the wrong way. We often say in journalism that we can’t please everyone all the time. Nor should we. Holding the powerful to account, shining light on untruths and giving voices to the wronged isn’t always welcome or popular.”

This is the familiar narrative of the noble journalist on a heroic mission to uncover the truth, without fear or favour, and to make life uncomfortable for those in power. It’s an admirable ideal and one that appeals to journalists’ sense of self-worth, but I’m not sure the wider community has ever found it wholly convincing, and probably less so now than ever.

Then Stevens said this: “We publish a range of views, while avoiding and dismantling falsehoods, and we listen. But when you disagree, wipe the froth from your mouth first; we take criticism but cannot tolerate attacks, threats or violence.”

Let’s unpack that statement. “We publish a range of views”? That may certainly have once been true of the mainstream media, but it no longer applies. Just see how far you get with a letter to the editor in which, for argument’s sake, you challenge climate change orthodoxy, or suggest that the English language is being damaged by the increasing use of te reo (as someone I know did, and was told by the editor of the Dominion Post, when he asked why his letter was rejected, that he was a racist). Or try to get an ad published in which you assert that the word “woman” means “adult human female”, as both Family First and Speak Up for Women did, to no avail. In the case of Family First, every major paper in the country turned the ad down in a co-ordinated act – a conspiracy, effectively – of censorship. The “range of views” Stevens refers to is an increasingly narrow one, prescribed by media gatekeepers not on legal grounds, as might once have been the case, but on purely ideological ones.

Now, “avoiding and dismantling falsehoods”. Really? Who decides what’s false, and on what grounds? To use that same obvious example, who decided that “woman” no longer means an adult human female – a proposition still regarded, other than by an infinitesimally tiny and deranged woke minority, as an incontrovertible and objectively provable fact? The conceit that editors and journalists are able to determine what’s true and what’s false is a recent phenomenon, and one that has further eroded the already frayed relationship between the media and the public.

Then there’s this: “But when you disagree, wipe the froth from your mouth first.” The striking thing about this statement is its blatantly antagonistic posture. Stevens was characterising dissent as something that only mad and probably dangerous people would indulge in. He was overtly setting Stuff up in opposition to many of its paying customers. It’s a novel business model and it’s unlikely to end well.

Here we get close to the core of the problem. The media have effectively set themselves above the communities they purport to serve. They are interested only in people who agree with them; the rest can be dismissed as deplorables, to use Hillary Clinton’s infamous term.

The widening them-and-us relationship between the media and the wider community became starkly apparent during the Covid pandemic. Few journalists seemed interested in what motivated the hundreds of protesters camped outside Parliament. They preferred to look down on them, literally and figuratively, from the balcony.

Later came the shameful hounding of anti-vaxxers, when Stuff and other media outlets embarked on an orchestrated witch hunt aimed at demonising local government candidates who were deemed to hold the “wrong” opinions, or who were merely suspected of having links to so-called conspiracy theories. Not illegal opinions, mind you; just “wrong” ones. The frenzy reached a peak with Stuff’s overwrought – no, make that hysterical – Fire and Fury documentary. (Note: I was fully vaccinated myself so can’t be dismissed as anti-vax.)

To all this can be added the baneful consequences of the $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund, aka the Pravda Project, the beneficiaries of which never seemed to consider the likely public perception that the media were being bought by the government. Even if their motives were impeccably pure, there was always going to be a suspicion that the money came with strings attached.

Meanwhile, levels of trust in the mainstream media continue to decline, newspaper circulations continue to shrink and New Zealanders continue to abandon traditional free-to-air TV – that means the 6 o’clock news, along with everything else – in favour of streaming services. It’s slow-motion suicide.

And having alienated a large part of their audience and driven them to alternative online platforms, mainstream media then clutch their pearls in horror at the thought that audiences might fall prey to “unsafe” content and “disinformation” from fringe sources. It would be comical if it weren’t so tragic.

How did this happen? My own theory, and it’s unlikely to be popular among today’s journalists, is that it had a lot to do with the transferral of journalism training from the newsroom to the lecture room.

Earlier generations of journalists learned on the job from other journalists. Many of my contemporaries came from working-class backgrounds. They didn’t go to university and were proud to regard journalism as a trade rather than profession. The importance of neutrality, fairness and balance was drummed into them. They had no delusions of grandeur about being on a mission.

But from the 1970s on, journalism was subjected to academic capture. Budding journalists were inculcated with a highly politicised vision of journalism’s purpose. They were encouraged to acquire degrees that were often based on esoteric theories far removed from the simple, practical concerns of good journalism. Over time, that has had the fatal effect of creating a widening gap between journalists and the communities they claim to serve. Even more dangerously, it has led journalists to think they are wiser and smarter than the people who buy newspapers and watch the TV news, and even morally superior to them. As the Marxist American journalist Batyar Ungar-Sargon puts it, they climbed up the status ladder and became part of the elite.

So if anyone wants to understand why so many people are now reacting against the media and even viewing them as the enemy, there you are. It’s not pretty and it’s not desirable, but no one should delude themselves about how we got to this point.

I’m writing this blog post on a Friday. For many years, Friday was the day I would meet a good friend, the late John Schnellenberg, for lunch in Masterton. We would talk about politics and inevitably the performance of the media would come up. I suspect John took a mischievous pleasure in goading me with disdainful remarks about journalists and I would always rise to the bait. It was my instinct in those days vigorously to defend the media. I’m sorry to say that wouldn’t be the case now.

The Family First advertisement you didn't see

Too hot to handle: the Family First ad that six papers refused to publish.

Last Wednesday, Family First launched a campaign of resistance against the pernicious spread of gender identity ideology. The “What is a Woman?” campaign invites people to sign a petition that defines a woman as an adult human female – a proposition so self-evident that the necessity of affirming it would have been considered laughable only a few years ago.

Family First’s campaign was to be kicked off on Wednesday morning with full-page advertisements in six daily papers: The New Zealand Herald, the Bay of Plenty Times, The Post, the Christchurch Press, the Otago Daily Times and the Southland Times. The ads were prepared, submitted and accepted for publication. But then something very peculiar happened.

After receiving chatty emails confirming that the ads were set to run in all six papers, Family First was told at 8.30 on Tuesday night that the ad had been pulled from the New Zealand Herald and the Bay of Plenty Times – both NZME titles – pending “reconsideration”.

The ad had been supplied to NZME on June 27, nearly a month earlier. By refusing to publish it, NZME not only reneged on its earlier acceptance but effectively sabotaged the launch of a carefully prepared campaign by leaving it till the last minute to disclose that the ad been pulled.

That was followed on Wednesday – the day the ad was supposed to appear – by an email from Stuff baldly stating that the ad wouldn’t be published in The Post or The Press either. The reason given was that “the campaign doesn’t align with the values of Stuff due to the sensitive nature of the content”.

The decision was made on Tuesday but Stuff didn’t have the courtesy to notify Family First until after midday on the day the ad was due to appear. Or perhaps it was courage rather than courtesy that Stuff lacked, because advising Family First after the event meant it was too late to argue.

In what was either a nauseating display of phony empathy or an appeal for forgiveness after an appalling act of bad faith, Stuff’s group sales manager signed off the email with the words “Thanks for understanding”. It would have been less insulting to say nothing.

That left the Otago Daily Times, which is nominally independent but on this occasion cravenly decided to play it safe by going with the crowd. The ODT advised Family First – again, on the day the ad was supposed to run – that its chief executive had decided to follow the lead of the two big media companies. “Sorry for the late notice”, the email said. In fact, since it was sent at 6.34 on Wednesday morning, it was no notice at all.

Both NZME and the ODT subsequently offered to run the ad on Friday – an offer understandably declined by Family First because it was too late to coincide with the campaign launch. Apparently nothing more has been heard from Stuff.

To summarise the story so far, New Zealand’s three major newspaper publishers refused an ad that asked the dangerously provocative question “What is a woman?” and invited readers to go to the Family First website, where they could sign a petition urging that the definition of a woman as an adult human female be written into law and public policies. (You can find it here.)

In other words, media organisations colluded in the suppression of a legitimate contribution to debate on a matter of compelling public interest. The rest of the media, meanwhile, obligingly helped to conceal the scandal by ignoring the Family First press statement that exposed it.

Was it a conspiracy, or just a cockup? An email released by Family First indicates the Herald panicked when it heard that the ODT “got grief” for running the ad, although it hadn’t even seen the light of day. According to this account, “Stuff got wind of it and pulled it as well”. The ODT then followed suit so the industry could be seen as presenting a united front. 

All this is alarming enough, but what makes it more disturbing is that the ODT staff member indicated that the pulling of the ad was an editorial decision. If that’s true, then the editors who made the call abrogated their responsibility to enable free and open debate of political issues. 

Newspaper advertising departments might be forgiven for getting cold feet over a possible backlash from the publication of an advertisement – even one as demonstrably inoffensive as the Family First ad – on a controversial issue, but that doesn’t appear to have been the case here. They accepted the ad.

In any case, editorial executives are bound by other imperatives. They may have acted legally, but they have a professional and ethical obligation to allow people the same right of free speech that they assert for themselves every day of their working lives.

That didn’t happen in this instance, and there can be only two possible explanations. One is timidity, which is bad enough. The other is that the ad was cancelled because the media decision-makers didn’t like what it stood for, which is even more reprehensible. Stuff’s weasel words – “the campaign doesn’t align with the values of Stuff” – clearly point to the latter explanation.

Small wonder that an increasing number of New Zealanders feel unable to trust the media, or that conspiracy theories flourish. When a legitimate ad from a legitimate pressure group is blocked at the 11^th hour without a valid explanation, people are bound to wonder what else is being censored.

 

Meanwhile, down a blind alley ...

That worked out well, didn’t it?

Just six months ago, Stuff announced the appointment of Caitlin Cherry as editor of what was then The Dominion Post.

Both she and her new employer made rapturous noises. “We’re thrilled to have Caitlin leading our newsroom in the capital,” cooed Stuff’s Joanna Norris at the time. “She is a fierce advocate for the city and as a lifelong Wellingtonian, she is inherently aware of all that is newsworthy in the city and region.”

Not mentioned, unsurprisingly, was that Cherry was taking on the job with no previous experience in newspaper journalism. None.

Cherry, meanwhile, said she was looking forward to “working with the team to ask the big questions, look at the best solutions, and talk to those people who are doing all they can to make life better for the community.”

Now she’s gone – just like that. But you had to read the New Zealand Herald, Stuff’s main competitor, to find out. A leaked internal email ended up in the hands of Shayne Currie, the Herald’s editor-at-large and media columnist (and many years ago a young and very savvy chief reporter of the old Evening Post, from which today’s Post got its name).

No surprises there. These days the Herald is often the first to break Wellington stories, which is itself a telling measure of the steady decline of a newspaper publisher that once, in the heyday of the Dominion and Evening Post, owned the city.

Why is Cherry going? That wasn’t clear from the email to staff in which Bernadette Courtney, Stuff’s newsrooms editor-in-chief, lavished praise on the now ex-editor, saying she had made a “huge impact” and been a “champion for Wellington”.

Cherry’s energy, news judgment and passion for journalism would be missed, Courtney said. In that case, what happened to make her quit?

All Courtney’s email said was that Cherry was moving on to “take on her next challenge”. It’s perhaps another measure of Stuff’s decline that the company apparently expects its journalists to fall for this obfuscatory corporate flim-flam, which comes straight from the HR Manager's Handbook of Euphemistic Cliches.

As Currie commented in his story, Cherry’s departure appears to be linked to other changes in Stuff’s editorial leadership team. Her resignation was foreshadowed in a Newsroom story two weeks ago which speculated that the capable Tracy Watkin, editor of the Sunday Star-Times, would take on responsibility for the editorship of the Post (confirmed today) as well as Stuff’s press gallery team. The rationale for this rumoured transfer of control wasn’t apparent.

That story also mentioned that some high-profile Stuff journalists would be quitting, starting with #MeToo crusader Alison Mau, in what appears to be yet another downsizing.

All this follows a series of changes that included the rebranding of the former Dominion Post, the creation of an unorthodox partial paywall for three of Stuff’s dailies and the announcement last month of a new corporate leadership group with the company’s owner, Sinead Boucher, in the new position of executive chair and publisher.

Under the revamped structure, Laura Maxwell (ex NZME) will replace Boucher as CEO and three newly appointed managing directors will look after various segments of the business. Boucher presented this makeover as preparation for “the next big disruptive force of the digital era – the advent of new generative AI technologies”.

Trying to make sense of what’s going on behind the scenes at Stuff, to say nothing of the constantly changing job titles, is a bit like trying to track shifts in power and influence behind the walls of the Vatican or the Kremlin.

If there’s a consistent, coherent strategy, it’s well concealed. There’s a random, ad hoc look to it which suggests Stuff is making it up as it goes. Suffice to say that Stuff makes Chris Hipkins’ government look like a model of stability.

One of the most dismaying aspects of the upheavals, from a journalist's point of view, is the torrent of flatulent PR jargon that accompanies the company’s every move. If you accept the theory that corporate hype expands in inverse proportion to performance, the outlook is not promising.

One of the worst offenders is Norris, who becomes managing director of Staff Masthead Publishing. In a statement accompanying the recent restructuring, Norris gushed: “Our mastheads are totally focused on our subscribers and delivering beautifully told journalism from across the country in print and digital channels. Drawing on our 160-year history of journalism, we are reinvigorating and growing the portfolio of iconic journalism brands which are embedded in communities across New Zealand.”

This is the type of empty, self-congratulating puffery you expect from ad agencies. A former journalist like Norris should know better. The bullshit detector she was equipped with during her time as a reporter has clearly been disabled.

Besides, what Norris said borders on flagrant dishonesty. Stuff has shown little respect for the "iconic journalism brands" she refers to, most of which have been gutted.  

Nadia Tolich, managing director of Stuff Digital, wasn’t far behind Norris. “I’m looking forward to reaching New Zealanders at scale, serving up lively, bold and entertaining content that stokes the interest of the nation and builds on our position as the number 1 digital site in NZ. That unrivalled reach, combined with the hyper-local power of Neighbourly and connection with nearly a million members across the motu is an exciting proposition,” Tolich was quoted as saying.

Oh, please. Give us a break. 

The sad thing is that there are still good people at Stuff. They will be looking around their increasingly deserted newsrooms and wondering whose job will go next. They could also be excused for wondering who’s going to magically produce the "lively, bold and entertaining content" that Stuff keeps promising to deliver in the wonderland of the future.

They have been let down at every turn by bosses who adopted a perverse business model. That Stuff prioritised digital at the expense of the traditional print product, and in the process destroyed much of the value in its mastheads, could perhaps be forgiven as monumentally bad judgment. What was not excusable was that the company alienated and antagonised its most loyal readers by haranguing them and bombarding them with a relentless barrage of woke propaganda. 

It effectively declared war on some lifelong subscribers by declaring them pariahs and refusing to publish any more of their letters. It was a novel way of building customer loyalty and it had the inevitable result. Making enemies of your readers - holding yourself up as morally superior and more enlightened - is no way to win hearts.

The Otago Daily Times and the Herald both serve as evidence that daily newspapers can survive and flourish in the digital era. Stuff, on the other hand, has blundered down a blind alley.

And so the agony continues. Cherry is leaving a paper whose steady downward trajectory sadly parallels that of the city it purports to serve. Both the paper and the city have lost their way. Each may have been a factor in the other’s decline, leading to a gradual ebbing of public morale and confidence.

The Post is still capable of breaking gutsy stories, as it proved with Monday’s front-page exposé by Tom Hunt of mayor Tory Whanau’s entitled behaviour at a Wellington restaurant. It was gutsy because the Dominion Post had unashamedly promoted Whanau’s mayoral aspirations last year (remember all those free publicity shots?) and vigorously supported her radical Green agenda, even to the extent of haranguing readers week after week with tedious pro-cycling propaganda under the “Mode Shift” banner.

Perhaps Monday’s story slipped through while the editor was distracted by other things, in which case it sent the reassuring message that a journalistic heart still beats somewhere within Stuff.

Unfortunately the paper then sought to redeem itself with Wellington’s noisy woke minority by publishing a strident opinion piece in which Whanau’s close friend, sometime Green Party publicist David Cormack, indignantly defended her.

Readers were left to conclude that publication of the Monday exposé was a momentary lapse of editorial judgment and that normal service had resumed. This is not to say there was no defence to be mounted on Whanau’s behalf; merely that it looked less than wholly convincing – and certainly not impartial – coming from a man who I understand sometimes accompanies her to events.

All this may sound cruel to Cherry, but it’s not meant to be. I think she made a mistake in taking on a job that was beyond her. (I recognise this situation; I've been there myself.) But the bigger mistake was made by Stuff in appointing her in the first place when she lacked the appropriate credentials. She now appears to have been made to pay for Stuff's misjudgement, which may explain the glowing tribute paid to her on her departure.

Cherry can’t be held responsible for the Post’s decline; for that, the blame rests with the Stuff leadership and with Cherry’s predecessors in the editor’s chair - notably Anna Fifield, who disastrously allowed the paper to be captured by a journalistic model that didn’t reflect the values and expectations of its readers.

Please, Stuff, spare us the hypocritical rhetoric

There was more flatulent corporate blather yesterday from Stuff about its proud heritage.

In statements accompanying the announcement of a corporate restructuring, former Christchurch Press editor Joanna Norris – who now becomes managing director of Stuff Masthead Publishing, which apparently means she will take charge of metropolitan mastheads and websites – said: “Drawing on our 160-year history of journalism, we are reinvigorating and growing the portfolio of iconic journalism brands which are embedded in communities across New Zealand.”

Stuff likes to cite its journalistic legacy when it suits, but it has shown precious little respect for it. Often quite the contrary.

When it announced the phasing out of the Dominion Post masthead in April, it heaped scorn on the name Dominion, depicting it as a shameful hangover from colonialism. But the Dominion, although it was one of the younger daily papers in the country (established in 1907), was the starting point of what is now the Stuff group. It’s a strange thing for a company to skite about its heritage while simultaneously disowning a paper that formed its very foundation.

On that note, I should record again that when Alan Burnet, former managing director and later chairman of the Independent Newspapers Ltd (INL) group, died last year aged 101, I offered to write his obituary for the Dom Post. They weren’t interested.

The significance of this was that Burnet was the prime mover in creating the newspaper group that is now Stuff (although it was an infinitely stronger company then than now). The only reason Stuff owns those “iconic journalism brands” that Norris proudly refers to – the former Evening Post and Dominion, the Press, the Waikato Times, the Sunday Star-Times, the Southland Times, the Nelson Mail, the Manawatu Standard, the Taranaki Daily News, the Timaru Herald, the Marlborough Express – is that Burnet and his successor Mike Robson pulled them all together to form the nationwide group known as INL, which eventually morphed into Stuff.

To put it another way, Stuff wouldn’t exist had it not been for Burnet. Yet they declined to honour him with an obit, I suspect because he was an old white guy and they didn’t want to be reminded of their ideologically unfashionable roots. In the end my obit was published by the BusinessDesk website and by Burnet’s original home-town paper the Whanganui Chronicle, although it’s owned by Stuff’s rivals NZME.

Stuff doesn’t appear to be entirely ignorant of its own history, embarrassing though that history may be to its current management. The last edition of the Dom Post (now simply The Post) on April 28 announced the killing-off of the old name in a story headlined “Standing on the shoulders of giants” – an apparent acknowledgment of the generations of talented, dedicated journalists who worked for the Dominion and Evening Post and made them the successful and respected titles they were. Perhaps that headline was sneaked through by a subversive sub-editor who understood the paper’s history better than its owners do.

It wouldn’t have escaped the attention of long-term readers that two of the three stories the Post’s editor, Caitlin Cherry, cited as evidence of the paper’s supposed commitment to rigorous journalism happened long before the present regime took over. And the third example she pointed to – the coverage of last year’s parliamentary protest – seemed a curious choice, since the paper did no more than should have been expected of any half-competent news organisation. After all, the story was breaking in full public view right outside the centre of government. If that was the paper’s proudest moment under Stuff’s ownership, the cupboard is worryingly bare.

Incidentally, Stuff’s story about the launching of The Post included a message to readers that contained the sentence: “All of this innovation and rebranding doesn’t mean we are turning our back on our proud history.” Oh, but they have.  Under its current management, Stuff has followed the example of its former proprietors, the Australian group Fairfax, by continuing to methodically eradicate much of what made the precursor company, INL, so successful. The gutting of its titles, the hollowing-out of its newsrooms (the casualties of which included some of the company’s most capable journalists) and the inevitable subsequent collapse of its readership can only partly be blamed on the impact of digital technology, catastrophic though that was.

And what about that weasel word “proud”? This is the same company that, three years ago, indulged in an extravagant, breast-beating mea culpa, complete with front-page apology, about its supposedly racist history. In the process, it casually defamed generations of former employees, most of whom didn’t have a racist bone in their body.

Obviously, Stuff needs to make up its mind about whether or not it’s proud of its heritage. Either it is or it isn’t. 

As for Norris's statement that Stuff is "reinvigorating" its brands ... really? That will come as news to employees who have been through repeated downsizings and are reportedly bracing for a further round of redundancies. Who do Stuff think they're kidding? If credibility means anything to them, they would spare us the hollow, hypocritical rhetoric. 

Stuff's slow-motion suicide continues

A friend emailed me to ask what I thought of the announcement that the Dominion Post would henceforth be known simply as the Post.

I replied that what they choose to call the paper no longer matters, since it long ago ceased to bear any recognisable trace of its respected precursor titles. The name change simply confirms that Stuff’s owner, Sinead Boucher (and I’m guessing it would have been her decision, even if Dominion Post editor Caitlin Cherry announced it) has little knowledge of, and even less regard for, the heritage of the company she owns.

In fact when a company calls itself Stuff, a name that indicates profound disrespect for the nature of its business, any frivolous name will do.  

I added that I’ve given up caring about the fate of the paper(s) I spent a large part of my career working for, though I do feel for the few good people still employed there. Stuff has so thoroughly betrayed its journalistic legacy that I’m past caring whether the company even survives, which seems increasingly uncertain.

My friend wondered if Caitlin Cherry realised who her paper’s most loyal readers were. She then answered her own question: “Oldies like me. People who understand and appreciate history and are not consumed by 'presentism'" – a reference to the blind fixation whereby events and people from the past are judged according to the rigid and unforgiving ideological orthodoxy of the present.

Judged by the standards of this new form of hubris-driven bigotry, the word “Dominion” would be seen as having intolerable connotations of colonialism and subservience to an imperial power. That the newspaper was so named because it was launched on the day New Zealand attained Dominion status in 1907 is no saving grace. Stuff seems determined not only to disown but to erase its own heritage. 

It will have alienated still more of its diminishing number of readers with its latest lurch, and the irony is that much of this is being done to humour a demographic group that doesn’t buy newspapers anyway.

It remains to be seen whether the decline will be arrested by placing Stuff's main titles behind a paywall, as is rumoured to be pending. I doubt it. Stuff has left its move about 10 years too late, and in the meantime the quality of the product has deteriorated to the point where sensible people will decide they can do without it. The slow-motion suicide continues. 

 

The striking thing about the Dom Post's new editor

Stuff has announced the appointment of a new editor for the Dominion Post. Caitlin Cherry will replace Anna Fifield, who is returning to the Washington Post as its Asia-Pacific editor.

Cherry, who will start in February, has spent most of her career with RNZ in behind-the-scenes roles on news and current affairs programmes, including Morning Report and Nine to Noon. She currently has the title of Head of Content at Consumer NZ.

What’s most striking about her appointment is that judging by her LinkedIn profile, she has never worked for a daily newspaper – in fact appears to have no print experience of any sort. Yet she’s taking over the leadership of what used to be one of the country’s most influential mastheads.

This could be a move so bold and visionary that its brilliance isn’t immediately obvious. On the other hand it could be just plain dumb.

It could be interpreted as confirmation that Stuff isn’t really interested in print and possibly regards it as a dinosaur medium in the digital era. The company has often given the impression, intentionally or otherwise, that it regards its newspapers as an encumbrance.

Alternatively the appointment could be taken as yet another indication that Stuff doesn’t have a clue what it’s doing. When a puzzled former colleague of mine asked whether anyone knew what the company’s overall strategy was, the only answer I could think of was “slow-motion suicide”. But I hope my bleak assessment is wrong - because for all Stuff's missteps, hundreds of journalists still depend on it for a living. 

More desperate floundering at Stuff

Is Stuff stuffed? That’s a question that will inevitably be asked after the announcement of a restructuring that a rival media outlet predicts will result in savage cuts to staff numbers in the company’s provincial newsrooms.

According to RNZ, the Manawatu Standard, Nelson Mail and Timaru Herald will have their newsroom numbers cut from seven reporters to three. Two other Stuff titles, the Taranaki Daily News and Southland Times, would keep four reporters each.

The New Zealand Herald’s account of the pending changes isn’t quite so bleak. It reports merely that “positions are under review in several regions where [Stuff] has a presence”.  But anyone familiar with the loaded phrase “positions are under review” knows it almost never results in a good outcome.

No one should be fooled by the anodyne assurances given by Stuff in response to the Herald’s inquiries. The paper quotes Stuff’s chief content officer, Joanna Norris, as saying the company is “proposing some changes in tasks and roles in our local newsrooms.”

Norris went on: “The changes will strengthen our local news operations and ensure we continue to have journalists based right across New Zealand, deeply connected to covering local issues and people.

“This will allow our journalists with boots on the ground in our regional newsrooms to produce unique, enterprise [sic] journalism relevant to their readers and to engage regularly with our subscribers and future audiences.” But anyone who has followed Stuff’s fortunes in recent years will know there is a vast credibility gap between the company’s buzzword-laden rhetoric and reality. It’s a measure of Stuff’s decline that former journalists such as Norris unblushingly use empty corporate blather that any self-respecting, sceptical reporter should treat with disdain.

RNZ quoted Norris as saying Stuff would establish a new regional team made up of a group regional editor, four news directors and nine breaking news reporters in what she described as “a proactive step to strengthen our local reporting”. But how local reporting is strengthened by further eviscerating already gutted newsrooms isn’t clear. The changes foreshadowed today simply look like more desperate floundering by a company that lost its way long ago.

If RNZ’s report is correct, two points seem immediately obvious. The first is that Stuff’s journalist numbers in the provinces will be cut to the point where it will be impossible to maintain any pretence of comprehensive, quality news coverage.

The second is that it’s hard to see how the company’s editorial operations, at least in the regions, could ever bounce back from this degree of degradation. Stuff’s provincial titles are locked in a downward spiral where a continuing decline in editorial quality can only lead to further loss of support from advertisers and readers.

The impression is that Stuff is planning a retreat to its Auckland and Wellington metropolitan bases, but even there its future hardly looks bright. One sign of the company’s decline is that the Audit Bureau of Circulation no longer publishes Stuff’s newspaper sales figures. The reason can only be that they are so dire as to be embarrassing.  

As someone whose association with papers now in the Stuff group goes back to 1968, my immediate emotional response to today’s announcement is one of regret that a once formidable and competently managed newspaper company should have come to this. Naturally I also feel sympathy for journalists whose loyalty has been betrayed by a company that has made the wrong decisions at almost every turn and, in the process, systematically squandered a proud legacy. 

Some of those mistakes have been operational: for example, placing blind faith in providing free, online news at the expense of the traditional paid-for printed product – a baneful trend that began under the evangelistic leadership of then group executive editor Paul Thompson (now head of RNZ and a contender for the top job in the state-owned media giant hastily being cobbled together, despite the absence of any compelling business case, by the Labour government).  That resulted in a devastating hollowing out of news-gathering operations and a huge loss of talent and institutional experience as some of Stuff’s best editorial staff – notably including non-believers in the brave new world of digital – were “let go”.

Other wayward decisions could more correctly be described as philosophical, such as the fervent editorial embrace of identity politics and the culture wars. Somewhere along the line, Stuff abandoned journalism’s traditional role, which was to reflect the society it served, in favour of a radical new model in which the company’s newspapers and journalists promoted the type of society - a very different one - that they thought New Zealand should become. In the process Stuff alienated its most loyal readers, instead apparently seeking to attract a new, woke audience who would rather (to use the words of legendary British tabloid editor Kelvin MacKenzie) turn their left testicles into kebabs than read a paper.

The results are now all too plainly evident, and much as I feel sorry for the Stuff journalists whose jobs appear to be on the line, no one should be in any doubt as to where the blame lies for the company’s precipitous decline.

 

 

 

The term 'Stuff-up' has taken on a whole new meaning

Newspaper readers are confronted daily by depressing proof that we now have a generation of journalists with only a limited command of their most vital tool, the English language.

Here’s a small example from Stuff today, in a story about the group of bird watchers who died tragically when their boat capsized off Kaikoura.

“Arriving in Kaikōura on Friday night,” the reporter wrote, “11 people got together at the local dive lodge, a two-storey, inauspicious building, ready for an exciting day on the ocean.”

Hang on a minute. An inauspicious building? My New Zealand Oxford Dictionary defines inauspicious as ill-omened, unpropitious or unlucky. “Unfavourable” or “not conducive to success” are other synonyms.

I’ve never seen the word applied to a building before. Inauspicious circumstances, an inauspicious event or an inauspicious start, yes. But unless it was draped with ominous warning signs, I don’t think a building could be described as inauspicious. 

I suspect the reporter meant “inconspicuous”. I googled “Kaikoura dive lodge” and the building that immediately popped up on my screen could probably be described accurately using that word.

I see clangers like this every day. They are one more reason why media credibility is steadily being eroded, especially in the eyes of people who value the correct use of English. People may say I’m nitpicking, but the English language is a precision tool and the job of journalists is to convey information succinctly and accurately. They shouldn’t leave their readers scratching their heads and wondering what they mean.

That’s why newspapers used to have sub-editors – typically older, more knowledgeable hands who intercepted and corrected solecisms before they got into print. (A sub once saved me, as a young reporter, from describing a man's extravagant sideburns as verdant - which means green - when I really meant luxuriant.) But sub-editors, along with proof-readers (another line of defence against error), were discarded in the bizarre belief that reporters could check and correct their own copy. How they're supposed to correct their mistakes when they don’t realise they’ve made them has never been explained.

And here’s another obvious question: why do they become journalists in the first place if they don’t value and understand words? (One likely explanation is that many see themselves as being on an ideological mission. Words, grammar and syntax are of incidental importance.)

The puzzling thing is that Stuff, even after years of hollowing out, still employs a surprisingly large cohort of experienced editorial executives. You wouldn’t guess this from looking at the company’s papers or website, which are routinely riddled with errors. Whatever these executives are paid to do, their duties obviously don’t include correcting what might be termed Stuff-ups by their bright-eyed but ignorant reporters. Either that or they’ve simply given up caring.

It’s notable that Stuff journalists take great care to be correct in the usage of Maori words, right down to the placement of the appropriate macrons. That’s as it should be. But English is still the language by which we communicate and convey important information. Generations of newspapers took pride in doing this properly and it’s a symptom of Stuff’s profound decline that it no longer bothers.

Footnote: On an atrocity scale of one to 10, Stuff’s misuse of the English language probably rates a 3 at most. But The Dominion Post’s flagrant and wilful manipulation of “news” to promote favoured politicians, as documented here by David Farrar, is a 7 at least.

 

 

 

Guest post: Stuff's 'Fire and Fury' documentary forsakes truth-seeking journalism for the predetermined story

By FORREST CHAMBERS*

All our arguments are about the Story.  What story do we believe? Who is doing right, and who is doing wrong? Where is the story going, and what should we do as participants in the story?

Stuff's Fire and Fury tells a story: some people in New Zealand have become sucked into dangerous right-wing political extremism, and the anti-Covid-vax and anti-mandate movements have really just been portals into far-Right darkness. Once we have had an anti-mandate protest, the story goes, we will have Trump-crazed rioters storming Parliament and killing politicians (cut to scenes of the January 6 Capitol riots).

It seems that Covid-19 and vaccination has now become a signifier for “what side are you on?” – that is, “What story do you believe?” If you don't trust Pfizer, that means you don't trust the government, so that means you must be extreme Right. Right? And vice-versa. This is a dangerous oversimplification.

I have watched the Covid phenomenon unfold and seen the unprecedented and outrageous clampdown on freedom of thought and belief.  When I see doctors, scientists and ordinary lay people with reasonably derived questions and opinions censored, de-platformed and suspended on social media, I can see there is something terribly wrong.

I would have thought Fire and Fury “journalist” Paula Penfold would be curious about the unfolding Covid story as the data emerges (for example, reports of adverse reactions, rising excess death rates, declining birth rates) rather than simply taking sides and describing any Pfizer injection sceptics merely as victims of misinformation and pawns of the far Right.  There are so many doctors now speaking out.  Dr Dave Cartland, a British GP, is just one example: https://metatron.substack.com/p/breaking-the-silence. He tells his story of going from accepting what he was told, getting vaccinated, then seeing a sharp rise in “unexplained” and unusual health conditions in his work; complete denial that vaccination could possibly be linked; censorship of free medical discussion; fear among colleagues; and eventually his decision to speak up, questioning the vaccine narrative (and losing his job). But rather than consider what he has to say, according to the logic of the story: if he is sceptical of the official Covid-19 vaccine strategy, he must be lumped in with the far-Right league of miscreants. Almost every day there are more doctors and public figures trying to “walk back” their initial support for the vaccines and lockdowns. Are they joining the far Right? No!

Yes, there are far-Right bad actors out there, fomenting hatred and violence, and they should be diminished.  I guess the question is: what is the best way to do that?

Perhaps we need to consider the question, what is their story? It is clear at this point in the global technological society that corporate media giants and other “powers that be” undeniably can and do exert social manipulation and control. (I guess the question is: just how much are we manipulated and controlled? The work of the eminent psychologist Dr Robert Epstein is very disturbing.) 

Most likely, politicians must co-operate, or they won’t be politicians for very long.  The way I’m hearing the “far-Right” ranting, it seems they are aware of manipulation and control and want to fight it.  Obviously, some of their theories about the “deep state” really go off the deep end (adrenochrome, anyone?), but their basic intuition is right: people are being manipulated and controlled.  Unfortunately, their response and tactics (take down the government) are completely wrong. 

Of course, the mainstream media are implicated in this story of manipulation and control.  I had family and friends at the mandate protest and closely watched the reporting which was so biased against it (with a few notable exceptions, like the political scientist Dr Bryce Edwards, who, after he gave sympathetic reportage, had to weather a social media pile-on).  I watched Chantelle Baker’s livestream of the police-induced riot and listened to RNZ at the same time. It was clear which one was most truthful (Chantelle’s). The MSM have their story to tell and will tell it, selecting “facts” and incidents to support it. That is why the people at the protest didn’t welcome MSM reporters.

Out of the thousands of people present at the protest, two were chosen for the so-called documentary who looked/sounded like gullible Kiwis who had swallowed Counterspin hype. They were chosen to fit the “story”.

At one point in Fire and Fury, the three Voices for Freedom (VFF) women leaders were equated with women of the “Nazi programme” because they were “wholesome” (gasp!). This would be laughable if it wasn’t so provocatively offensive and plainly wrong.  Would the VFF three have more credibility (i.e. be less like Nazis) if they were less wholesome? It seems they can't win either way. Too wholesome? Nazis! Unwholesome? Well, say no more... 

While on the topic of Nazis, let’s remember that the Nazis used “'modern medical science” to justify the separating out of Jews, putting them behind a wall in the early days of the Warsaw Ghetto. This was justified by the “scientific” belief (story) that Jews carried typhus, and the best way to protect the “innocent public” was through segregation. Just like the vaccine mandates, which decreed that our teenage daughters could not attend dance class because that would put everyone at risk (justified by modern medical science).  It is only a short step then to scapegoating and hating a group of people you have “blamed” and ostracised.  Sound familiar? This is what the mandate protest was about: division and hatred caused by a government policy.  Not far-Right nonsense (although I agree there were far-Right activists trying to capitalise on the collective disgust at government policy).

And if the “Nazi” accusations aren't convincing in a “documentary”, add a bit of spooky atmospheric music and high production values to sway the audience.  Just like ... oh yes, it was the Nazis who pioneered “state of the art” media and propaganda films to great effect (see Leni Riefenstahl). What else reminds us of Nazi tactics?  Monopolising and controlling all sources of information, quarantining'/segregating/scapegoating, denouncing and firing critics, government and big business working together, etc.  Unfortunately, accusations of being “Nazi” have a dangerous tendency to boomerang back.

A couple of last points: “personal anecdotes” (such as: “my uncle got sick after the injection”) were dismissed as just another kind of “fake information” designed to con people into the wrong beliefs. Which prompts the question: how can journalism proceed if anecdotes are now off-limits? Or how, indeed, can we make sense of the world without listening to anecdotes? 

A number of years ago, Fire and Fury presenter Paula Penfold was curious about anecdotes and investigated possible adverse reactions to Gardasil (a mass vaccination programme for teenage girls intended to reduce HPV and cervical cancer). But in this current climate, she would not be able to run a story on Covid vaccines as she did on Gardasil without becoming a victim of the “Covid vaccine sceptics are actually Right-wing puppets” story. Truth-seeking journalism has been sacrificed to the predetermined story.

It would take a truly courageous journalist to go beyond the “received and approved” story.  But they seem to be very rare birds these days. 

*Forrest Chambers is a prison chaplain who lives in Levin.