April 12, 2016 – 2:58 pm

tl;dr: Today’s NZ Herald drove me to this analysis/rant. I’m giving the damn thing up and will get my news from other sites, Radio New Zealand and NewsHub. You should too.

I can’t imagine how disheartening it is to work as a journalist in New Zealand. Almost as disheartening as it is to be a news consumer in New Zealand.

The newspapers are shit. I include Stuff, owned by Fairfax, in this as Stuff has become indistinguishable from the NZ Herald—they race to cover each other’s stories and make sure nobody sees a different set of “news” when they visit the other’s pages. There are two rays of hope, though: Radio New Zealand and NewsHub. I’d never have picked it, but TV3’s NewsHub seems to cover more actual news than newspapers (or, perhaps, features Real News more prominently than Rugby Player In Celebrity Vajazzling Tragedy And What Does It Mean For Your House Prices stories).

What do I look for?

New Zealand focus, as opposed to printing Australian or UK stories. If I’m a Pom living in NZ, I can skim the Guardian or Daily Mail and choose which Brit stories I want to read, instead of having that selection made for me by the type of person who thinks “Woman’s excruciating pain baffled docs” is a story. Stories about my region are more relevant than stories about other regions. Beyond a reprinted press release. A press release tells me what the originator of the press release wants me to think. What context does this sit in—who is behind the press release, is there a real problem, what’s the history behind this solution, what data supports or challenges this, what do neutral experts think? I’d like to become better informed about the issue, not simply the latest step. Relevance. To me that means I can take action on it. It might be by voting or by spending or by travelling or contributing.

What I don’t look for:

Celebrities, who help me not at all. House prices, which help me not at all. Foreign stories, which help me not at all. Scare stories, which help me not at all.

The latter is particularly relevant. The Herald’s top 15 stories feature: cursed, bitter, murder, sexual, excruciating, illness, attack, murder, breast, punched. 15 stories, 10 of which are scare stories or framed as such. The framing with sex and violence is like deep-frying and covering the news in sugar: it makes more people want to consume it, but what they’re consuming harms them. As one researcher wrote, Fear has become a standard feature of news formats steeped in a problem frame oriented to entertainment. Entertainment abhors ambiguity, while truth and effective intervention efforts to improve social life reside in ambiguity. It is this tension between entertaining and familiar news reports, on the one hand, and civic understanding, on the other hand, that remains unresolved.

First-pass breakdown of the NZ Herald coverage follows. I’ve taken the website section by section, and looked at how each story works for me. I should probably have done this in a spreadsheet, rows for stories and columns for what look & don’t look for.

The NZ Herald web site prominently features 15 stories under their logo. Each is shown with headline and thumbnail photo and teaser text. Few qualify as relevant news.

Then comes the National section:

And World:

And Business:

Michael Hill confirms primary listing move to ASX: the news is what you might get from a press release. No analysis. Income tax in New Zealand lowest in OECD: “Single workers in New Zealand face taxes of 17.6 per cent in 2015, compared with the OECD average of 35.9 per cent.” My first response was to be aghast, as that’s HALF of the OECD average. Anyone who grouses that their kids’ school is underfunded or has a relative die after months on a surgery waiting list should have the dots connected for them. The last line of the story ends is “The report doesn’t take into consideration GST.” That’s only 24% of the government’s revenue. So why even bother with this “news”? The journalist has taken an OECD report and looked for NZ’s position in the graphs and turned numbers into sentences.

… and here my will to live ends. We’re so far below the fold of the web page that these articles can’t get many reads. And if I read much further, I’ll encounter the Entertainment and Lifestyle sections which will end me.

Also at the top of the page is a ticket with few-word teases for two “trending” items, and a list of stories showing “Latest”. I’m back later in the day, and the current Latest listings are: