Posts by philipmatthews
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As someone who came to Chch from somewhere much bigger (Auckland), I wonder if the perceived threat is about the absence of people rather than the presence of them. I remember going to see movies at night up at the Palms or Westfield Riccarton and then driving back to St Martins (what's that? 7km or so?) at around 11.30pm and sometimes not seeing another car on the road or a light on in a house. Which is far spookier the first couple of times it happens than if you were driving through some lurid, Travis Bickle-ish scene of urban depravity.
And then there's that concentrated muntery, and a couple of really shabby streets in the CBD: Gloucester St along the side of The Press building and Hereford along by Scorpio Books could both use some urban renewal. I can see why they feel like the kind of places you could get jumped in.
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Sacha, agreed on the outsourcing issue. When I first joined the Listener, there was a chief sub and a deputy editor -- Tom McWilliams and Geoff Chapple -- who helped steer me and other new writers. Tom, especially, was legendary for his patient tutoring. But there were twice as many on staff then producing a magazine that's the same size as today, and most of the subs have gone.
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Also, as Du Fresne noted on his blog, Trotter is not actually a journalist. So if he hasn't spent all these years sitting in newsrooms, how has made his observations about how journalists work?
I thought Thomas's paper was very good. I think it showed that those who teach journalism are not yet actually teaching it. Instead, they're teaching the basic practical skills required to do it. They're hoping that the rest of it -- such harder to pin down qualities as news judgement -- are either something you're born with or something that seeps in by being exposed to it in a newsroom. In a way, there's something about the latter, as news values vary from place to place, or even editor to editor, but it means that the assumptions that underpin most news values aren't challenged either.
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Caleb, I agree completely that the majority of journalists are unreflective. I've often felt that Janet Malcolm's 'The Journalist and the Murderer' should be required reading, especially for anyone about to join the death-knock staff of the Herald on Sunday. Malcolm wrote:
"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and "the public's right to know"; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living."
Of course, not all journalism involves this kind of treachery but a healthy amount of self-doubt or self-examination among journalists should be encouraged. But I've met many journalists with a terrifying lack of such doubt.
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I generally agree with Russell that Phelan has made a little go a long way. It would probably be easy for any of us to boil his essay down into a couple of pages. But as was said above, there are different style and language requirements depending on who you're writing for, and I doubt that Phelan would submit writing like that as an op-ed for a newspaper or expect journalists to imitate the style.
Confronted with that paper, Du Fresne thought it proved that academics strive to make the world appear more complex than it is. I would argue that columnists like Du Fresne try to make the world seem simpler than it is, and his unquestioning use of phrases like "marketplace of ideas" shows that, as Geoff says above and Tim Corballis also says in the comments on Du Fresne's blog. It's that claim to be unideological. Somewhere between that complexity and that simplicity is a good place to pitch our writing.
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Kyle -- you're exactly right. You can't learn to be a journalist in six months. We were trained in just the absolute basics, so that if you turned up for your first day at the Levin Chronicle and the chief reporter said, there's a cat stuck up a tree and we need 300 words by lunchtime, you'd have a rough idea of what to do.
That was 17 years ago. I'm sure -- well, I'd hope -- the course has got a bit more thoughtful now. It's not necessarily about reading Foucault, but some sense of different perspectives on how journalism works would have been useful. Even some basic history. Who was Woodward? Who was Bernstein? Who is Pat Booth? We got none of that. But it's probably telling that most of those who have gone on to make a career of it -- about four or five out of 30 -- came into it with a BA at least.
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One other thing I would say is that far from being hostile to academics, most journalists are very dependent on them. Think of how often you see some university boffin commenting in a news story. Rather than being obscure, these guys are relied on to state the bleedin' obvious, to say things reporters can't say themselves because of the convention of neutrality. Need someone to say that church numbers are declining or less people read newspapers than they used to or people are more tolerant of homosexuality than they used to be? There'll be an -ologist somewhere to flesh out that news story. And the universities like it too.
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That's more or less how I would summarise it too, Stephen. Journalism students could use some critical thinking, and what we now fence off as media studies, alongside their typing and shorthand. I didn't pick up that Phelan thinks practical skills should be reduced, but it might be that these courses would need to be longer.
Fair enough on that score too. I trained as a journo in 1992 at what was then Wellington Polytech and is now Massey University, I think, which would make it Phelan's school. It was a six month course. There was absolutely nothing about how the practise of conventional journalism relates to power, capitalism and democracy; mind you, there was just one afternoon on reviewing (guest lecturer, Raybon Kan) and one on feature writing. It was still very close to the model Trotter loved -- we were just prepared enough to learn the real basics from some grizzly old chief reporter on a community newspaper or small town daily.
I thought that Phelan's unpicking of the contradictions in Trotter's column was good too -- along the lines of, the anti-market Trotter expects the market to provide. I also agree that Du Fresne was unreasonably hostile to the Prichard press release about Trade Me -- in fact, the whole thing seems to have been an escalating series of over-reactions. Phelan himself might have over-reacted: I'm not as confident as him that you can take Du Fresne as representing the mainstream media response to the academy. There are other views in there. What about someone like Finlay Macdonald? Or Brian Rudman? Both would, I guess, have written more sympathetically about academics.
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Is it that tired routine where he tries to make comedy out of "inpenetrable" academic writing? Never gets old, that one.
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Bruce, there is a very good Gordon Campbell column on this: