"If we could expand that, by drawing in local media and cooperating with each other, then that sort of model could be expanded to all the community stations nationally.
This is an essential public service - and a not-for-profit is a good way to go because if it becomes successful, the owners aren't just going to flick it off to a bigger company or shut it down during a downturn which is what's happening to a lot of our old newspapers."
As I've mentioned before, there was a time when traditional newspapers being outcompeted into oblivion by network media would have seemed like good news to me. But that was when most network media were community-controlled and non-commercial. Locally-based, commercial outlets being driven out of business by corporate-owned propaganda machines, masquerading as neutral 'social media' platforms, was not the outcome I was hoping for.
"[Current Affairs TV shows] still rate really well in Australia. They do hard reporting (but) they have a kind of tabloid magazine format. Morally, they go beyond the pale a lot of times. There's trickery involved in getting stories. They'll pay money, you know, as we've seen with Bruce Lehrmann. But ethically, they fall short at times and the networks get sued."
#NathanJolly, Deputy Editor, media news website Mumbrella
"These days innovating means following the audience and operating online. But those who do are not always rewarded with the required revenue.
Unless you can get enough online supporters or subscribers to pay, which also means trying to secure digital advertising - and the vast bulk of revenue from that goes offshore to the companies which have cornered that market."
BPM think that the bill misses the target, and is likely to benefit larger news media companies - if any - more than small ones. Instead, they proposes using an industry-wide levy - say on all digital ad revenues - to fund something like the Public Journalism Fund.
<sarcasm> Yes, the last thing we want is democratic governments funding the public interest work of journalists, without fear or favour, even when they work for commercial publishers. What we want is news media companies financially dependent on funding from anti-democratic tech corporations. </sarcasm> 🤦♂️
"As the (slightly augmented) saying goes: Scream the error. Whisper the correction."
#MediaWatch on #rnz criticizes the Herald and the Government for spreading the lie that Auckland pedestrian crossings would cost $500,000 each.
The Herald's correction admitted, "This was incorrect. The story also omitted AT’s estimate for the crossings, which it predicts will cost between $19,000 and $31,000 each."
NZ would be a better place if our politics wasn't a team sport.
"This is exactly the same mechanism to what free speech campaigners always complain about, which is called 'cancellation', which is just social media mobs disagreeing with you en masse, right?"
No Hayden, cancellation is not people disagreeing with you. It's people trying to demonise you by willfully misrepresenting what you said or did, or making things up. Then trying to get more people to ignorantly echo them.
The TV and film industry in Aotearoa are eyeing up the success of their counterparts in the news media, at becoming beneficiaries of the DataFarms that have eaten their revenue. The lack of ambition is depressing.
SPADA president Irene Gardiner told #MediaWatch the big US streaming platforms "are not regulated in any way" and don't pay tax. But instead of fixing that, they want a levy on them to provide production funding "via the three main funding agencies".
"I have particular specialist subject areas; drug policy, urbanism, things like that, there are networks of people on Twitter that I don't know how to find anywhere else."
... they want a handful of transnational corporate DataFarmers to subsidise it instead. Through government-imposed mandates to pay for commercial license on uses like linking and quoting, which don't violate copyright (or they could take legal action on those grounds).
... I thought of one simple policy change that could make a huge difference to the neutrality of web search platforms, and to the survival of the publishers whose websites they index;
In the #Election2023 campaign, the NatACTs are claiming, as always, that the neoliberal right are the better managers of the economy. So you'd expect the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update (the PREFU you've heard pundits jabbering about) to be bad news for the current govt.
"A few journalists mentioned that they wish that there was a search tool that just simply searched through information from official sources, or from websites that they perhaps have nominated themselves. Or alternatively saved them time from scrolling through all those different government websites in order to try and find the information that they needed."
The latest Talbot Mills poll has news for folks who called #Election2023 for the NatACTs based on the last couple of polls. Labour are now only 2% below the Nats, Greens have pulled ahead of ACT by 1%, and TPM are on 4%. On these numbers, the only way the NatACTs could get a majority is with Winston First, who ACT have ruled out working with, even if the Nats haven't.
Other than NZ First getting back in, this election is too close to call.
"It's OK to report on the optics of politics, but it shouldn't come at the expense of reporting on substance, and newsrooms need to make sure they're getting the balance right."
#DanielBrunskill, politics and economics reporter, Interest.co.nz
"A million ad impressions being served onto websites is the equivalent of a return flight from London to Boston in terms of the [carbon] emissions being given out. If you think about how many billions and billions of impressions are being served on a daily basis, we do have a problem..."
#WillieJackson, Minister of Broadcasting and Media, comments on the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, that will force one set of media corporations to pay another set of media corporations, to link to or quote from their stories.
"Any right thinking person or right thinking party would support this, because you don't want to get offside with the media do you..."