Posts by Idiot Savant
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And if we want examples of media unprofessionalism, here's the Herald's Fran O'Sullivan talking chummily about National's secret agenda. Discussing Labour Party President Mike Williams' numerous board appointments, she goes on to say
Proportionately this is obviously out-of-whack and would be untenable if an incoming National government does tackle the major policy shift it talks about behind closed doors.
A "major policy shift [National] talks about behind closed doors". Isn't this the sort of thing journalists should be reporting on, rather than burying? Or is the purpose of the media now to obfuscate and deceive rather than inform?
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Unfortunately the party's over - the Listener has stuck the delaywall back up.
I wonder what effect it had on their traffic?
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you'd just be the guy in the middle of the office with the unloaded gun - a sitting duck
You mean you don't use a New York reload?
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Isn't that true of all political reporting? They're reporting on the game, not the policy/outcomes...
Not really - we still get a lot of straight reporting of what's going on in Parliament and what the parties are saying. But game-commentary is pretty dominant, precisely because its easier and cheaper than real reporting.
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Properly trained, paid and resourced journalists breaking well written, well researched, good stories will almost almost blow the enthusiastic online amateur out of the water. The trouble is, they don't exist anymore. Instead, opinion pieces are substituted for reporting and analysis - and everyone has an opinion.
At which point its worth bringing up the other interesting point in Clifton's piece: this:
Labour and National have far more investigative resources than news organisations, which have also to report the sport, the weather, the crime, the international affairs, the cute animal stories and the celebrity baby names. Labour and National have, in the form of research units and activist squads, the equivalent of a large, dedicated and highly motivated newsroom each, tasked solely with digging dirt on rivals and crafting it into hate-bombs.
And OTOH, its hard to see what difference a research unit would make to Clifton's game-focused style of commentary, since she deals more in political gossip than empirical facts.
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To be a successful blogger, you just have to be able to write well. Just like being a journalist.
Actually, no. Compared stories in the Herald with the press releases on Scoop recently? The key skil four journalists seems to be being able to use the copy/paste function (to the extent that they complain if you send them material in a hardcopy format where they actually have to type it in...)
Snark aside, there's more to journalism than writing - the whole business of balance, attribution, professional ethics. But that's more around the reportage than the commentary side. The difference between a blogger and a hardcopy political commentator is very small, and usually simply a question of medium and whether they are paid.
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"partisan flame-baiting" meaning "saying what you stand for"...
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Very few bloggers do reportage. But then, neither does Jane Clifton. She's a commentator. Give her a website, and she'd be distinguishable from the rest of us only by her quality of writing and superficial focus. So I can see why she might feel her status was under threat...
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Oh, and Nicky Hager has a parallel media? Where?
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People might want to look at Vernon Small's end of the discussion as well. Unfortunately, it smacks of the same old-media snobbery that Clifton's piece does. There seems to be an inability to distinguish between the medium and the messenger - to realise that blogging is just a platform, like TV or newspapers, and what matters is what you do with it. Most bloggers aren't journalists (I'm not, most of the time; I just dabble) - but there's no law of nature saying they can't be. Or else Small and Espiner and garner and all those other blogging journalists would be stripped of their Secret Journalist Club membership cards for having been forced online by their bosses.
And as for blogs being "confusing for the voter", I think that gives us a relevance we don't deserve. Readership is tiny compared to the electorate. Blogs are mostly read by political insiders, who are generally looking for material they expect to agree with - not ordinary voters. The only way these people are going to be confused are if I come out supporting torturing the poor so their money can be given to the rich, while DPF backs a more progressive tax scale to pay for a universal basic income.