Newsroom is to Stuff what Spinoff is to NZ Herald
2 Dinosaurs discover keyboards
So another new news blog has launched in NZ, this time it’s called Newsroom and it’s for mostly white people who want news from mostly white people…
It’s funny watching a bunch of people who have been forced out of their respective news organisations because of the internet reducing ad revenue starting their own online news source. We are seeing the sub contracting out of news services to other groups at arms length from the parent news organisation in a desperate attempt to stay alive and keep credibility in an age where there is nothing but contempt for corporate news.
Stuff have signed a deal to subcontract actual news out to Newsroom which frees Stuff up to just continue publishing their lite entertainment clickbait newsz opinion (and prepares Stuff for the looming cutbacks their owners have threatened if they don’t get their newspaper monopoly). The stuffy old NZ Herald has done the same kind of deal with the Spin Blog where Spin provides lite entertainment fluff to plump up the Herald’s dour dislike for popular culture.
It’s the same gatekeepers desperately attempting to find relevance in a social media age that has walked away from them.
These mutations aren’t a solution to the problem of under funded journalism, they are a symptom of how damaged the business model has become.
Independent my arse.
Still owned and or influenced one way or another by the rich men who will say exactly what can and what cannot be published.
And wasn’t Murphy the editor at the Herald when that slanderous $100K bottle of wine smear on David Cunnliffe was printed?
And wasn’t Murphy that editor at the Herald during their slanderous $100K bottle of wine Donghua Lui smear/hit on David Cunnliffe? The one that fatally wounded his political career. I wonder where, in the winter of Dirty Politics, did that smear come from Mr Editor in Chief?
Again, independent, what-fucking-ever!
There was a time when information was dispensed with quill , ink and parchment.
Then the printing press was invented.
I am not so sure whether this can be seen as a “solution” to the crisis of our media, some see it as an addition of sorts, in this case not a bad one:
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/201836547/media-with-gavin-ellis
Gavin Ellis seems it may turn out to be something good to add to the present media landscape.
But I agree, we need some better public broadcasting and a future government step up and ensure sufficient funding for this, where conventional media offers online and various other services, to cater for the older and younger generations, and to ensure we have a reliable source of information, as otherwise fake news will spread all over the show.
Advertising-funded journalism has always been an awkward compromise, for reasons explained in detail by Chomsky and Herman in ‘Manufacturing Consent’. On the internet, where advertising revenues are small and accessing them requires a shit-load of dodgy javascript tracking the reader’s every click, it’s positively toxic. I highly recommend experimenting with Firefox plug-ins like Privacy Badger and NoScript, which allow you to see lists of the stuff javascript is doing behind the scenes when you read a page of text on an ad-funded site.
If there is a future for professional journalism that investigates, exposes, and informs (rather than merely titillating and distracting), it will be funded by audience subscriptions,or by public broadcasting grants from government or NGOs, provided with explicit guarantees of editorial independence. Another option is citizen journalism, with stories polished in consultation with trusted editors, and published through aggregation portals, rather than the current algal bloom of individual blogs (mine included).