The proposal by Warner Bros. Discovery to close one of the country's biggest commercial media company’s newsrooms — let’s be honest, this is not a proposal, they’ve already made up their minds — should be a major concern not just to those of us in the industry, but to all Kiwis.
As a small country we don’t have a lot of national news media outlets — two of them, TVNZ and Radio New Zealand are state-owned broadcasters.
Newshub offered an alternative independent perspective, something important for democracy. You don’t need to like or agree with everything on the news, the important thing is it is available to us.
We should be concerned with what us happening to Newshub, as it has consequences for us all.
Remember the 1pm Covid briefings? I was an avid watcher of these and would often see comments in the livestream of people getting mad at the journalists — "you’ve already asked that question; ask something new; they’ve already answered that".
The reason questions were being repeated by the different outlets is they weren’t actually being answered.
The number of PR staff in New Zealand is calculated to be a ratio of 10:1; in 2019 there were about 8000 people working in communications, with roughly 1600 journalists working in print and broadcasting.
Our politicians and people in positions of power are being taught how not to answers. And it makes our job as journalists even more important.
It is something we see here even in Central Otago.
Take Aurora for an example. Looking into the large-scale power outages across the region earlier this year we put a number of questions to the company. They came back to with us with a statement — none of which answered our questions. We pointed back to our questions, they directed us to a new media release on their website which still did not answer the questions.
Every day we receive a barrage of media releases from companies, local government, central government and a wide range of places and people straight in to our inbox.
Our job is to look past these and see is there a story here and if so, is it what is being presented here? Is this the full picture or a positive spin on an issue? Who else should we be talking to get the full story?
Without a range of news media — television, radio, print — asking questions and presenting stories, the public are left to the spin doctors to tell them how to see the world, and trust me, that is not something we want.
— Shannon Thomson, Central Otago bureau chief
