Mediawatch’s weekly catch-up with Karyn Hay on Lately: This week Colin Peacock talks to Karyn about more fibre and new faces in broadcasters’ breakfasts; RNZ’s new show for early risers; a random typo tweets that rebounded - and the sliding doors of Kiwi rock nostalgia.
More fibre for Breakfast
John Campbell on his Breakfast debut Photo: screenshot / TVNZ Breakfast
Many commentators - me included - couldn’t see any logic in TVNZ putting John Campbell on TVNZ1's Breakfast.
“Maybe the critics got it the wrong way round. It's not that morning TV is a waste of Campbell's journalistic talents - it's that 7pm TV was a waste of his talents as a showman,” said Hayden Donnell on stuff.co.nz reviewing Campbell’s first week on the show.
John Campbell has been goofing around on the show but the generally lightweight format hasn’t stopped him from tackling some of the issues he’s run TV campaigns on in the past.
His first day featured 11 minutes devoted to homelessness in Auckland and on Monday a John Campbell exclusive: the lawsuit against government-owned insurer Southern response.
Photo: screenshot / One News Now
That led the bulletins on RNZ and other media followed it up. A good scoop - and one given an interesting online treatment laying out some of the source material - with JC himself front-and-centre visually.
Seems they are determined to make sure it’s as obvious as possible his journalism is still being supported. The story of the insurers’ inadequate response to the Christchurch quakes is one he’s been pursuing since 2011 on his TV3 Campbell Live show.
More morning media shake-ups
Photo: supplied / RNZ
RNZ’s introduced Corin Dann to Morning Report and a whole new show designed to deliver it more listeners from 5am First Up.
Normally I think there is too much focus on the hosts -- it’s the team and the broadcaster that gives news programmes their power.
But Indira Stewart, the 34-year-old host of First Up, is the first Pasifika presenter of a regular weekday show on the RNZ National network.
She told E Tangata she was “shoulder-tapped” by RNZ editor Pip Keane.
“One of the best pieces of advice that I got was from John Campbell, who said: “Don’t be a Susie Ferguson. Don’t be Kim Hill. We’ve already got people like that. You need to be you. We don’t have an Indira Stewart. We don’t have a brown Pasifika woman. You need to stick to who you are.”
"And I’m going into this first show tomorrow knowing that some brown girl, Māori or Pasifika, might be listening, or watching when we go on multimedia, and might think: “I’ll do that one day, when I get older.” That would make it all worthwhile for me, because I never had that experience."
E Tangata’s Dale Husband made an interesting observation:
“In a sense, you’re telling the Māori story, too. It’s a familiar story for our readers and me as well. I listen to National Radio quite a lot and I’ve heard a number of Pasifika stories that are really powerful. And I suspect that you’ve been behind some of them without me knowing.”
She replied:
“That’s a hard one because every story has been meaningful for me. And, as a journalist, it’s a privilege to provide a platform for someone else to have a voice. There is a matter-of-fact element about the work, though. You file a story, you go home. But there’s also this sense of giving someone an opportunity — of opening the door for someone who’s been voiceless to be heard. And that’s the best part of being a Pacific journalist.”
“It’s time for our voices to be in the mainstream. And there should be more of us. Māori and Pasifika are the fastest growing ethnic group in New Zealand. And we’re going to wake up one morning and find that we’re making up a third of the population. We’re overdue to have more Pasifika and Māori in the mainstream content — and we may soon be celebrating the appointment of some other brown host.”
Maybe. Maybe not.
In response to a comment about the departing Guyon Espiner’s te reo contributions on Morning Report, former RNZ Maori issues correspondent Mihingarangi Forbes tweeted this:
"Bro do you know how many times I applied @radionz for a "marquee" role? Would have respectfully shared my reo with all of you too."
The first First Up show:
First Up opened with an exclusive long and emotional interview with Jaunita Hickey, the mother of two teenage boys killed in a triple fatal crash while fleeing police in January.
It echoed Checkpoint with John Campbell’s debut - a long interview with Jonah Lomu’s widow which was similarly sad but only part of the story about his squandered legacy.
Ms Hickey said she asked health workers and the police for help the month before but was rebuffed. Police wouldn;t comment because of an ongoing investigation and the Canterbury DHB cited privacy concerns for not commenting.
First Up returned to the story on Thursday, revealing that Juanita Hickey has lodged a complaint with the Health and Disability Commissioner. She also told First Up a doctor wrongly prescribed her son medication without seeing him.
First Up also wraps up news that has happened overnight aims to tell stories about people up and about working at 5 am, kicking off with a guy at the Auckland Zoo.
In my view we don’t need more video-based stories about what goes on at Auckland Zoo. We do need stories from the NZ regions - undercovered by NZ media generally and NZ specifically.
Today First Up had an online hit with its story about Fonterra changing its tanker deliveries for disabled man Andrew Oliver. It's a story Indira has been following for a couple of years.
Interestingly, Kiwi journalists on their online Facebook forum all praised it as a feelgood, grassroots yarn but many of the RNZ Facebook followers suspected the hand of Fonterra PR in the story.
Kiwi music nostalgia: not what it used to be?
Shihad's Jon Toogood puts his hands in the air like he just don't care on 'Anthems' Photo: screenshot / Prime
It's NZ music month and that’s ushered in a rich feast of nostalgia for Kiwi music fans of a certain age.
Prime TV is running six part series Anthems, funded with $1.5 million - telling behind the scenes stories of supposedly ‘iconic’ kiwi hit songs - and “to further explore an untold story of NZ popular music.”
Steve Newall of flicks.co.nz gace it a big thumbs up on Newstalk ZB’s Sunday Session show.
But while Anthems is well-made it is not money well spent in my view.
Some musicians can tell a tale - like Dn McGlashan talking about the Dominion Road song - but most musicians talking about their music are pretty boring. In most cases there just isn't much more you need to know about these well-aired tunes.
One of the show’s producers Julia Parnell has made a more interesting doco out now: The Chills: The Triumph and Tragedy of Martin Phillipps.
I’ve never likes The Chills’ music and found the apparent intensity of the frontman offputting but he’s been to the brink and back with his health, addiction and musical relationships and it seems a much more interesting story.
Funding came from many sources, including NZ On Air, The NZ Film Commission and a Kickstarter campaign.
A yet-to-be-released local rock ‘n’ roll doco I want to see is this one about King Loser which - also deals in illness, mortality and the seamy side of rock n roll.
Shayne Carter’s memoir is out and he did a great interview with Kim Hill on RNZ National last Saturday.
It’s a proper personal story not boring rock n roll anecdote. He’s very self-aware.
He has a great sense of realism about the fleeting fame and hit and miss nature of overseas rock glory, noting that two months after getting offers from big labels in the US, he was back in Dunedin at the DSW signing up for the dole and being mistaken for a rehabbing addict. Bummer.
Can we trust the recall of egocentric ex-rockers?
Shayne told Kim:
"Most of the places I am the reliable witness, but that's in my mind as well with my own set of justifications. Whether other people see it that way I don't know but I'm not another person so I can only write what I felt and what I wanted to report, really. That's what happened, so that's what I wrote."
This brings to mind one of my all time favourite BSA complaints about a much earlier attempt to record NZ rock n roll history: the 2003 TV series Give it a Whirl by Richard Driver.
One episode included a claim that one musician had chucked an apple at Howard Morrison during a recording of pop show C'mon - which he denied.
The ruling says:
"A majority of the Authority is convinced that the apple incident, as recounted by X on Give It a Whirl , did not occur. In so finding, the majority also acknowledges that X may believe that his recollection was correct.
Whereas he acknowledged that nuances changed over time, Mr Moore did not accept that an “outrageous lie” could be shrugged off as the faulty memory of an “aging rocker”.
"The Authority also takes into account that the events occurred more than 30 years ago and the time lapse could well have had some impact on the memories of what TVNZ described as “these former stars”.
Finally, in her just released memoir-type RNZ podcast series, Sportsman of the Year, singer-songwriter Jan Helriegal also a great sense of perspective the ‘sliding doors’ randomness of rock success and failure.
Check out the episode called Neptune for that.
On the latest episode posted just this morning is called So Happy - and she goes out playing the some of the same name which is all about being content.
Taking the learnings from social media
I got a lesson in social media engagement last weekend.
On Mediawatch, we tackled three big issues: the Herald’s paywall going up; threats to press freedom in New Zealand and political journalists sidetracked by trivial stories fed to the opposition.
I dutifully tweeted each story after they were broadcast on Sunday morning but they didn’t exactly go viral.
However, when I spotted a startling typo in the online version of a Stuff profile of Newshub’s Mike McRoberts, it was different story:
A striking typo in Stuff’s Mike McRoberts profile pic.twitter.com/fFRkl1hAVv
— Mediawatch (@MediawatchNZ) May 4, 2019
But bointing out other people’s slip-ups is a fraught business. There but for the grace of God . . .
Given how much time @MediawatchNZ spends pointing out others' errors, it might have been worthwhile proof-reading this article. I stopped counting at five obvious mistakes, the highlight of which is the "initial two-moth period". https://t.co/AmwbG7beiv
— Andrew (@shortflyslip) May 5, 2019
Ironically all those mistakes were in a piece about ‘premium journalism’. Oops.
