Scooped?

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Interesting interview with Michele Hewitson today in the NZ Herald with Editor of Scoop, Alastair Thompson. It’s interesting because he is leaving NZ to be a journalist in Europe. Did all those people who have donated money to Scoop know he was leaving?

Alastair has been taking up space where ever he can to talk about the issues facing news and how people should be donating to Scoop. He was on Public Address only a couple of weeks ago making the same point, but I didn’t see anywhere it being mentioned that he was leaving the country.

The killing off of Campbell Live, TVNZ7, public broadcasting and progressive voices in the mainstream have left a barren media landscape that serves now only as a large right wing echo chamber, Scoop has been a self anointed counter to that, it will be interesting to see what happens when Alastair leaves.

5 COMMENTS

  1. I don’t see any reason he should have informed anyone of his personal business – He wasn’t asking for donations as an owner, then liquidating and taking the cash. He asked for donations as an editor, and upon his departure, the site will continue to run, and readers can trust that he will be replaced by someone whose integrity they can depend upon. I’d love to see Gordon Campbell take the position, but I’m sure many conservatives would howl that it was proof that the site lacked objectivity. Never mind the irony in that, though…

  2. Can someone give me a run down of what Michele Hewitson wrote about him?

    I read half that article and it seemed to be about Michele Hewitson being a self-indulgent blowhard, and something about Kim Dotcom.

    Who is Michele Hewitson? She should be on RadioLive.

    • http://brianedwardsmedia.co.nz/2010/08/i-meet-the-fearsome-michele-hewitson/

      If you live outside Auckland, you may not be familiar with Michele Hewitson’s interviews or her reputation. She is both admired and feared. Admired because her Saturday interviews are a joy to read; and feared because the joy so often takes the form of Schadenfreude – pleasure in the misfortune of others. Hewitson is an acute observer of people, their foibles and frailties and the fate of many of her subjects most resembles that of the fly who accepted the spider’s invitation to come into her parlour. Michele Hewitson, many of her victims and a solid proportion of her readers would say, is a total bitch. A hugely talented, very perceptive, extraordinarily readable and amusing total bitch.

  3. I read Hewitson’s piece on Alistair. What a dismal piece of gossip rag dross. No context. Nothing about Scoop, what it actually does, and Alistair’s role as editor, just random titbits about a company getting charged for having their logo on a press release. Nothing insightful about why Alistair worked for the Internet Party, and then left, just the same PR line that the Internet Mana experiment was an obvious failure, despite polling close to 5% a few weeks before the election, and doubling the number of party votes Mana got alone in 2011. Just appalling.

    If people get away with calling this kind of fluff “journalism”, perhaps I need to start submitting the marks I leave on toilet paper to the Herald as “story ideas”?

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