Posts by Stephen Judd
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It's been a difficult course for opposition politicians to navigate as they try not to be accused of exploiting the situation, and not to provoke the government into avoiding good ideas out of spite. They must continue to try as hard as they can, but I die a little inside sometimes when I look at the comments on news websites from people bitching at say Lianne Dalziel, asking why she can't be more supportive of the recovery effort and accusing her of just being out for herself.
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Hard News: Tired and emotional, for reals, in reply to Russell Brown,
engaging with readers and largely getting the tone right.
Yeah most of the Fairfax people I see on Twitter are navigating the personal/official divide in different ways. I don't engage with them too much because my Twitter account is definitely a private venture, and it would be professionally a bit odd for me to do so I think. But if you want senior, is the new editor of The Press enough for you? ( @jojourno )
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Hard News: Tired and emotional, for reals, in reply to Sacha,
Yes, shepherding Stuff Nation out has been consuming most of my energy recently. It will be very interesting to see how Fairfax' editorial team and readers end up using it.
Further to my snarky reply to Alastair, quite a few Fairfax reporters, columnists and bloggers are "cutting it up" on Twitter too -- more and more in recent months, I note. I don't see an obvious disparity between the two companies' activity online, but I'm interested what Alastair had in mind.
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Hard News: Tired and emotional, for reals, in reply to Alastair Thompson,
And it is abundantly clear that the NZ Herald is miles ahead of Fairfax in adoption of a more “on net” attitude to the news process.
[citation needed]
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What I find perplexing and a little sad is that in my experience, professional and otherwise, bloggers and social media bring readers to journalists. Anyone who is responsible for a popular website knows that referring links account for a great deal of page views. If Bryce Edwards makes a sarky note about Armstrong, he will link to Armstrong, and I will read it -- in fact these days, that's probably the only reason I will ever read Armstrong. If someone mentions an article disparagingly, I will probably still read it if there is a link. Perhaps Armstrong should ask whoever does the Herald's web analytics where his readers come from.
The kind of thing that Edwards in particular is doing can be seen as a new form of editorship, an editorship divorced from the operational tasks of running a publication and focussed entirely on selection and commentary. I have wide interests and a limited budget and limited time and a huge world of quality online writing. I find people willing to sift and cull things that might interest me very valuable. Between bloggers and my Twitter and Facebook contacts, I have a distributed editing team who assemble my day's reading for me.
Seen in this light Edwards is not a parasite. He is a symbiont.
(Why Campbell is lumped in with content-pillagers I have no idea. He writes long pieces that in no way rely on links or quotes from others.)
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Yeah "cannot change" would have been better wording on my part.
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Up Front: Choice, Bro, in reply to Paul Williams,
I don’t think it diminishes the legitimacy of a person’s sexual orientation/activity if there are also exogenous factors.
Exactly.
People seem to mostly think the human rights issues are based on discrimination against factors one cannot help, like race or sex. But I think it's about freedom of conscience, and privacy. My *chosen* sexual behaviours, with certain public policy exceptions, are not the law's concern.
Basing our case on the supposed immutability of same sex attraction means that our argument collapses if someone can show it's not immutable.
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Hard News: Media3: Where harm might fall, in reply to Russell Brown,
If it got to the level of the Tribunal, my hope and expectation would be that it would swiftly be dispatched,
Given what happened when Kerry Bolton complained to the BSA about Scott Hamilton's comments on National Radio, I'm not entirely sanguine about that.
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Hard News: Media3: Where harm might fall, in reply to Russell Brown,
You need to have a very low level of respect for others in the room for it to be “necessary” to be a dick.
Absolutely. But it's going to happen. Especially in other "rooms". And in fact I think that context, or social consensus, is what defines being a dick. Probably people who break local social norms are mostly unjustified, but occasionally, they will be righteous.
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What if the crackpots that Scott Hamilton and Matthew Dentith deal with so well on their blogs start claiming the emotional distress of contradiction and mockery justify penalties?
On another note, the first rule of PAS is all very well, but as has been pointed out on other occasions, sometimes it is necessary to be disagreeable – to be a dick relative to community norms. I think we can all imagine people whom we want to contradict vigorously and obnoxiously without fear of legal sanction.