Overhauling NZ journalism
A new book attempts to cure the industry’s ills. Will Harvie reports.
When meeting colleagues in the elevators of The Press building in Christchurch, I used to reply to the question ‘‘How are you?’’ with the retort ‘‘I still have a job’’. This usually produced grim and knowing chuckles.
And then one day, an elevator colleague cast me a sour look and said, ‘‘Well I don’t’’. I don’t make that joke any more. It’s the kind of anecdote that could have been published in a new book called Don’t Dream It’s Over: Reimagining Journalism in Aotearoa New Zealand. It’s a 368-page tome of 36 chapters written by multiple authors, many of them journalists or former journalists, freelancers, bloggers and academics with different perspectives on ‘‘saving’’ the news.
The forward was written by probably New Zealand’s most famous journalist, Peter Arnett, who won a Pulitzer Prize covering the Vietnam War and reported from Baghdad for CNN as bombs fell on the city in the Gulf War of 1991.
There are chapters by Maori broadcaster Mihingarangi Forbes, former Sunday Star-Times editor Cate Brett and Dirty Politics author Nicky Hager.
Almost all authors correctly diagnose what’s causing the ‘‘crisis’’ in Kiwi journalism – the internet, social media and smartphones. Audiences are slipping away from mainstream news sources, subscribing less to newspapers and magazines, relying more on social media for their news. Advertisers, which carry the financial load, are following.
‘‘People have adopted new technologies and embraced digital all over the world,’’ says Sinead Boucher, Fairfax New Zealand’s executive editor.
In this country, news organisations have built audiences on Stuff, nzherald.co.nz and the like but profits from these websites and their apps go mostly to Google and Facebook. The result has been redundancies, consolidations and a proposal to merge Fairfax NZ, publisher of the The Press, Dominion Post and Stuff, with NZME, publisher of the New Zealand Herald, its websites and other media assets.
The result, writes Radio NZ’s director of news gathering Brent Edwards, is that there is ‘‘still much good journalism in New Zealand but it is inconsistent and undermined by reportage which trivialises the news’’.
It’s clickbait, comments sections, celeb gossip and tittle tattle versus serious journalism such as Fairfax’s award-winning Faces of Innocents project about violence against children.
But if the authors collectively diagnose the problems, they don’t agree much on the treatments. This was intentional, says co-editor Giovanni Tiso. ‘‘We weren’t trying to get a particular answer to our question,’’ he says in an interview. ‘‘We tried to get a broad range of opinion.’’
‘‘The big question is how do we make journalism viable and that comes down to money,’’ says another co-editor Emma Johnson.
Probably the most common suggestion is taxpayer funding for news as an essential public service, like ‘‘schools, hospitals and courts’’ in the words of Nicky Hager.
‘‘Public funding is the only viable model, and is entirely appropriate since news is a public service,’’ he writes. He wants ‘‘new and greatly strengthened publicly owned news organisations, working alongside the privately owned ones’’. This would cost four times what is currently spent on news by central government, he estimates.
Co-editor Tiso endorses the idea, even as he acknowledges that John Key’s National-led Government is unlikely to make such a commitment.
More important, Tiso says, is the conversation about ideas and establishing that the best ideas are technically and pragmatically viable. Once that’s done, the debate becomes political – arguments about money and priorities. Some future government might just pick up an idea and run with it.
Wellington academic Peter Thompson offers an alternative to taxpayer funding – a ‘‘marginal levy’’ or small charge added to the price consumers pay for phone and internet services, advertising, subscription and on-demand services such as Netflix and retail goods such as televisions.
The levy – 0.5 per cent to 1 per cent – would raise between $80 million and $160m a year, which Thompson would devote mostly to Radio NZ, Maori TV and NZ on Air, although a contestable fund would be available to corporate media.
France, Spain and Turkey have adopted such levies, Thompson argues, ‘‘so the proposal is not some radical departure from existing models’’. The NZ Fire Service and Earthquake Commission are funded by a similar levies on insurance.
Don’t Dream It’s Over is published by Freerange Press, a collective of mostly non-journalists whose most prominent books concern responses to the Christchurch earthquakes. They are generally a Left-leaning bunch. Barnaby Bennett, an activist and designer, is a frequent critic of the rebuild. Emma Johnson, a book editor, agrees she leans Left. Tiso supported a communist party in his native Italy.
It’s not surprising that they mostly attracted authors with similar sympathies. Many authors, for example, favour increased public spending on the news. And most who address the proposed Fairfax-NZME merger oppose it.
‘‘I’m not suggesting journalism hasn’t always faced challenges but the challenges now are more at the fore,’’ says Emma Johnson. ‘‘There aren’t so many hubs where people can gather to discuss ideas.’’
Fairfax’s executive editor Sinead Boucher disputes this. ‘‘We’ve adapted our journalism and our business model as a result [of the global changes to news]. We’re no longer constrained by our platforms or brands – we’re focused on serving our audience’s needs and wants.’’
Don’t Dream It’s Over will be launched at the Word book festival on Sunday.
Will Harvie is a senior reporter in the Christchurch office of Fairfax NZ.