‘‘We love what we do, but we can’t buy our groceries with likes and favourites.’’
Iread the phone today. Oh boy. So farewell then, maybe, TV3. I remember you from such episodes as a receivership in 1990 and Weldon-era turmoil and being bought and sold by hedge funds and invested in by an outdoor billboard company and maybe someone will come along again with some money, but it’s probably bad news for people who still watch TV the old-fashioned way.
This is an uneasy time to be a well-paid executive in the media.
It’s also a time of fairly great suckage to be a foot soldier churning out relatable snackable disposable content.
Who knows when the doors might swing shut leaving you out in the cold; a Goodnight Kiwi without a blanket or a dish.
Also on my phone this week I saw former Spark chief executive Simon Moutter reminiscing.
Sky TV shares selling for 90c reminded him that in 2014 he got unsolicited pitches from six investment banks to bid for Sky at $7 to $8 a share.
He told them ‘‘that would be like catching a falling knife’’.
He was right, they were wrong. Investment banks. What are they good for? Absolutely don’t know.
Let’s recap. TV? That’s the thing we all used to turn on and watch whatever they’d decided we should see tonight.
You had to buy The Listener to find out what was coming and that meant they sold about a gazillion copies a week, so they could put some really good journalism around the listings.
The newspapers were fat with classified ads. You’d just put your Kingswood up for $2000 ono, no timewasters.
There was no Trade Me, no-one asking what’s
your reserve and would you change the buynow price I’ve got cash.
Even the Radio Hauraki newsroom in 1972 had 22 people. That’s about the same number now working in Simon Bridges’ office on social media, reportedly.
How long ago and far away it all seems. And so does TV3, once you fire up the Netflix and Amazon Prime and the Lightbox because they do what Sky sort of promised, only at a lot less cost and without crap technology or stale programming.
The internet began giving away news for free, Google and Facebook started hoovering up dough from advertisers, and newspapers across the world closed.
Belatedly they turn to paywalls and people say ‘‘what do you mean I have to pay to see this work you’ve done? Why can’t I just click and read it?’’
Possibly these are the same people who don’t seem to grasp how a Trade Me auction works.
You think it can’t get any worse and then you see that evil geniuses are using Facebook’s dominance to deliver news and bend opinions and skew elections and make people distrust one another and pizza shops.
What a mess. What’s to be done? I speak only for every person I know who works in the media: we love what we do, but we can’t buy our groceries with likes and favourites.
There are two crucial points to bear in mind as we stand beside the grave with a shovel full of soil.
The first is this: wherever people gather these days, one thing is abundantly evident.
Look at them all: engrossed in a screen. These are eyeballs. These are people with an interest in reading something. There are so very many of them.
What they’re not in the habit of, not yet, not much, is paying for stuff.
Except for the phone itself. There aren’t very many people who won’t pay for one of these things. Maybe that’s where this all ends up: people buying a media service from their phone.
Meanwhile, if you stroll across to the other side of this particular paddock, to the PR firms and the comms departments and the marketing divisions, where people work all day long to try and shape their media coverage, holy smoke, get a load of those budgets.
Just imagine what might happen if some of that money were to get sloshed around people who produce the stories and not the ones getting them massaged.
The shape and sound of your news media, ultimately, reflects the state of your society. It reflects who we are, and what we value.
What’s in the mirror right now has a lot of Kardashian, and sharp elbows, and investment bankers. But you couldn’t call it pretty.
We love what we do, but we can’t buy our groceries with likes and favourites.