"But mostly, if my rep as a (cough) key influencer means anything..."

Get your hand off it, Russell.

Got to agree with Giovanni on this one. I’m a bit bemused by the excitable talking up of this reporter as someone who “could well become one of New Zealand’s very best public affairs journalists”. It’s hard to see any evidence in her work to support this claim. Keith makes mention of her good grades at university and her work on a student newspaper some years back – but as anyone with the faintest experience in media can tell you, success on campus, and in the real world of journalism are two very distinct things. Academic smarts are crucial, but it takes something more than that – stickability, hard-headedness, writing ability, contacts, an appetite for hard slog. There’s no shortage of examples of bright students who never cut it as journalists.

Nicola is not a promising student though, but a working journalist of a couple of years’ standing, who is yet to make good on this supposed potential despite, one would think, having had ample time to do so. In the intervening years, she’s yet to have demonstrated the ability to hold down a regular job in the local media, let alone produce journalism of consequence. Aside from the panhandling efforts, very few have ever heard of her. Where are the stories she has broken, the incisive features she has written in recent years to bear out this supposed passion for high-minded, issues-focused journalism? It wouldn’t appear that a lack of time in the classroom is responsible for her career failing to fire so far.

Sorry to make my first post so negative in tone, or if I sound meanspirited: I wish Nicola well in her endeavours. But, after years of reading PA, this post provoked me to comment because it so neatly encapsulates an issue around this site’s ability to credibly pass comment on and evaluate the media, a favourite pastime around here.

It’s Keith’s prerogative to talk up his Salient mate on his own blog, although I wouldn’t regard it as a particularly authoritative or persuasive take on matters. Unfortunately, experience suggests many PA readers do exactly that, taking direction fairly uncritically, and without much by way of insight or context, as to who are the “goodies” and the “baddies” in print and on their screens. Media discussion and criticism on the site seems often heavily coloured by personal allegiances and affiliations to those emanating from the same clubby student media/blogosphere nexus. Yet there seems to be virtually no awareness or acknowledgment around these parts that this is the case. And it’s a shame.

As Giovanni points out, the problem has never been a lack of able young journalists – there are a lot of them out there, doing the hard work of reporting, writing, investigating and breaking stories every day, most of them attempting to reform from within the imperfect system of the MSM (one of them, a Kiwi broadcast journalist whose accomplishments in political and public affairs reporting far eclipse Nicola’s own, will also be in the Columbia intake this year, without fanfare from the local blognoscenti). These reporters are the ones doing a lot of hard work that often deserves more serious consideration by thinking, concerned people who purport to take an interest in things, the types who frequent these pages. Yet from what I’ve witnessed, if they’re MSMers without a PA seal of approval, they’re more likely to have have their efforts subjected to what can often be snide and fairly uninformed ridicule.

Oh, boo hoo, you say. And fair enough. Reporters are by necessity pretty thick skinned, used to getting it from all quarters and certainly aren’t on the lookout for gold stars from the blogosphere. God knows there’s an awful lot to ridicule the MSM about. To my eyes, though, this blind spot compromises PA as a useful and increasingly influential forum on the local media landscape, at least when it comes to matters of media criticism. It makes discussion on this site slightly less constructive and enlightening on matters pertaining to journalism than it is on other topics. I'd suggest that could easily change, if contributors took more of an interest in constructive discussion around contemporary journalism, rather than heaping contempt on that favourite whipping boy, the dread MSM.

Just one man’s perspective. Apologies for the freaking novel, I’ll keep it brief next time.