MEDIAWATCH: 25 years of Stuff

Stuff celebrates 25 years.

They have celebrated by reading mean tweets, but that only works when people don’t legitimately detest you, so it is less funny as it should be…

Twenty-five brutally hilarious comments we’ve received

Here are my thoughts on Stuff over the last 25 years:

• You have to salute Sinead, she has built a genuine NZ news operation and taken on real risks and challenges.
• Stuff is the news you read if you don’t live in Auckland.
• They have an impressive range of opinion, Far right libertarian Damien Grant on one side and almost everyone else on the other side.
• Andrea Vance is one of the best columnists in NZ. Dit De Boni is also excellent.
• They’ve done a decent job of journalism, there was the Alison Mau man hunts and the possibility of their first snuff journalism by goading Martin Devlin into a suicide which always seemed charming.
• Not sure what Paddy Gower does.
• I’ve never watched their 6pm news thing. It’s costing a fortune with little return.
• Lloyd Burr is actually a really good journalist.
• Donna Miles-Mojab and Verity Johnson are excellent columnists.
• It’s been a better standard of journalism than the NZ Herald and NZME have pushed for the last 25 years.
• The Fire and Fury melodrama was a middle class pearl clutching farce that NEVER held Mallard to account.

This is how I described Stuff’s new look launch las year:

The colour code feels like it’s been dictated to by the Trans Rights Flag colour palette.

Slightly off primary colours in an ugly beige Neapolitan ice cream colour scheme that manages to make the entire look of the site feel juvenile.

It’s like the Rainbows End Community noticeboard, but younger.

This section feels like Tinder for TicTok.

It feels cheap and they’ve managed to rob authority from their own news product.

It’s like a social media platform for girls who go to private schools, if that was what they were aiming for, they’ve nailed it.

It’s so surprisingly ugly.

Stuff is like a 50 year old women dying her hair purple and cutting it short and demanding we all love it.

We don’t love it.

I think their soft paywall is an arse, I have an account but ut never works so I don’t bother reading most of the story, thank Christ they give you the main facts in their bullet points so you never really have to read the whole thing…

…The biggest complaint I would have about Stuff is that Luke Malpass is their Political Editor.

They don’t note he was the NZ Initiative Researcher, the NZ Initiative who are so deeply ensconced inside the political narrative for promoting free market mythology. His coverage is a joke.

Stuff have done a decent job of being a Fourth Estate Guard Dog over the last 25 years and they deserve our support, but when the competition is NZ Herald, you should be doing a lot better than just decent.

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