Commercial pressures on journalism

Speech by Simon Collins for the Journalism Matters summit

Parliament, August 11-12, 2007

One step forward, two steps back

Journalists in the EPMU have organised this conference because we're concerned about the effects of growing commercial pressure on the quality of our media. Of course there have always been commercial pressures, and I want to start with a bit of history so we don't get too nostalgic for the past. But it seems to me that in the 31 years since I started work on the Evening Post up the road here in 1976, we have taken one step forward and two steps back.

One step forward: less deference to authority

When I started at the Post, classified ads still occupied the bottom half of the front page. We were very much the journal of record of the ruling elite. We reported everything said by the mayor, the councillors, business leaders, actually union leaders too and of course the Rugby Union, and we reported what went on in Parliament and the courts at length. We had a few more investigative features, but they were very few, and the voices of people from the grassroots tended to be limited to the presidents of local residents' associations and the winners of lotteries, fishing contests or flower shows. By today's standards, you would call it dull.

Obviously a lot has changed for the better, and not just the classifieds moving off the front page. All news media today give far less deference and indeed attention to authority figures like prime ministers and mayors. Good journalism now is defined as putting a human face on the story by interviewing ordinary people affected by law changes or rates increases. Human tragedies like Folole Muliaga and Nia Glassie have been taken up as effective media campaigns. Our stories have succeeded in completely changing the way power companies deal with poor customers, and I think we are also helping to change public attitudes and behaviours around child abuse and domestic violence. We have more investigative journalism (though still not enough). We have more news about women, Maori and other groups outside the traditional white male elite (though still not enough). We have more news from the rest of the world, including a lot more from Australia and the Pacific (though again, still not enough). We have far more comment and opinion by both professional journalists and outside columnists. In all these ways we have become less deferential and more critical, and that is absolutely a good thing.

First step backwards: cuts

But in the last 10 years or so we have taken two big steps backwards.

First, our resources have been cut - in the Herald's case, virtually every year since Tony O'Reilly took over the company in 1996. About three years ago, our chief reporter at the time went back through the records and found that we had only half as many general reporters (that is, excluding the specialist areas such as business, sport and features) as we had had 10 years before. At its peak in the late 90s when we had a separate regional edition, there were 10 reporters in the Hamilton office and we had branch office reporters in Whangarei, Tauranga and Rotorua as well as Wellington. Now the Hamilton office will soon be down to one reporter, the Whangarei and Rotorua offices have closed and we have only one other regional reporter in Tauranga, plus two in Wellington and now one in Christchurch. The Herald now has a total of 28 general reporters including branch offices and Parliament - slightly fewer than the 30 which the Evening Post, a paper with less than half the circulation, had in 1978.

As you know, the latest rounds of cuts are taking place right now at TVNZ and in the contracting out of sub-editing for the O'Reilly papers to an Australian company, Pagemasters. Seventy subeditors at the Herald, Northern Advocate, Bay of Plenty Times, Rotorua Daily Post, Hawke's Bay Today, the Aucklander and the Listener are being made redundant - some people here finished at the Herald last night. About 50 people are being hired by Pagemasters - a net reduction of 20 which they think they can achieve by making everyone work on multiple titles so when there's a slow time on one title they can pick up a page from another title and work at full capacity for a full 10-hour shift. We believe that this can only mean a reduction in quality too, because journalism is different from a production line - human beings can work at maximum intellectual capacity for a few hours leading up to a deadline, but you simply can't do that for 10 hours at a stretch, 4 days a week, and the only ways to cope will be to cut stories less carefully, forget about checking everything and only ring reporters to check ambiguities if you absolutely have to. Experienced subeditors are the institutional memory of any newspaper, and isolating them physically in a printing plant in Ellerslie will mean all the O'Reilly papers will lose an important source of local knowledge, informal news tips and guidance for younger reporters.

Second step backwards: Trivialisation

The second big step backwards in the last 10 years or so is that the reduced resources that our owners have not cut yet have been increasingly diverted from serious public issues to private celebrity gossip and entertainment. At the Herald, there are now no reporters covering what should be major rounds such as industrial relations, energy, foreign affairs and defence; and local body issues outside Auckland City are hardly covered at all. Roundspeople in the rounds that are still covered, such as health and education, are regularly diverted on to stories about Dancing with the Stars, NZ Idol or Paul Holmes' daughter. News judgments are being made in response to panels of readers emailing in to comment on each day's stories, and by the number of website hits on each story. When I had a story on KiwiSaver that got more hits than Paris Hilton or the America's Cup, it was so remarkable that the chief reporter made a point of congratulating me.

Causes: the internet, global capitalism and democratisation

In all of these changes - more critical journalism on the one hand, and cuts and trivialisation of news on the other - we are not alone. We are caught up in three big changes which are affecting news media everywhere.

Obviously the internet is part of it. Newspapers, radio and television are all losing advertising and audience to the net, and are reacting by cutting costs.

The second part of it is the constant expansion of global capitalism, which has allowed huge multinationals like Murdoch, Disney and, in this part of the world, O'Reilly and Fairfax, to buy up local family-owned newspapers and broadcasting stations. Especially in the white English-speaking countries where Reagan, Thatcher and Roger Douglas have set the ideological agenda for a generation, restrictions on media ownership, along with other restrictions on business, have been dismantled - although only recently in Australia. This change of ownership has driven the trivialisation of news because the old family owners, for all their stuffiness, at least wanted to own news media they could feel proud of among their friends at the club; our new corporate owners value us only for whatever money they can extract from us.

But thirdly, I think there has also been an international force for democratisation or political liberalisation, which is obviously linked to expanding capitalism because a free decentralised economic system creates a natural base for a free political society - but I think this is a force which is also to some extent independent of capitalism and therefore offers us some hope. Capitalism has no respect for authority, only for profits, so it has helped to foster critical journalism and the gradual liberation of women and ethnic minorities. But once we are free to think critically, we are free to think of alternatives to leaving everything to the market, which is what this conference is about.

Where are we heading?

Clearly, journalism of some kind will survive in the free market. We will still have plenty of stories about entertainment and increasingly stories about products linked to our websites, and we'll probably still have local news outlets funded by local advertising, and high-quality analytical journalism for specialist elites who can afford to pay for it. We will also have an ever-expanding volume of news and blogs posted by "citizen journalists" from the comfort of their living rooms.

What we are gradually losing is public issue journalism by journalists who are paid to go out beyond their living rooms to gather new facts and present them in a coherent form to a general audience.

Does it matter?

I think this matters because journalism about public issues is essential for a democracy. It:
* Gives people a coherent understanding of our world as the basis for a self-governing society;
* Provides a forum for exchanging ideas about how to deal with issues facing society; and
* Builds a sense of social cohesion and a foundation for collective action - well illustrated by the examples of Folole Muliaga and Nia Glassie.

The challenge

The challenge for this conference is to find new spaces for such public journalism. Here are four possibilities:

First and most obviously, we should make good use of the publicly owned media that we have: Radio NZ, TVNZ, Maori TV, Triangle TV and the other community TV stations, and Access and iwi radio stations. If we believe in the need for a democratic people to have a coherent understanding of the world, a forum to debate ideas and a foundation for collective action, then we should not shrink from the cost of democracy, which includes taxpayer funding of public media.

Second, we should take every opportunity to promote other non-commercial media, such as ethnic, religious and union papers, and also new papers, broadcasting stations and websites wherever we can find the funding from subscribers or supporters.

Third, we could learn from overseas examples and seed-fund good public issues journalism in all media through non-profit institutions similar to the Centre for Public Integrity in Washington DC, which produces reports on current issues. A very small-scale local example of this is the Bruce Jesson Foundation, which gives out up to $3000 a year for a work of journalism on an important issue or issues - I've put some fliers about this at the back of the hall.