Hard News by Russell Brown

With Buzzfeed, there should definitely be a move away from the more egregious swiping of content from other places without "value added". I notice they're being a bit more careful with attributions, but the posts that consist of ALL the images from someone else's blog article, with only a sentence of introduction, do annoy.

So I hope the trend continues away from wholesale "recycling" and more towards new news content and infotainment. I don't mind aggregation either, if it is collating from various sources into a new piece of content (like those "10 best beaches" kind of thing) and properly acknowledging sources.

During the week David and I put together a clip for The Suburban Reptiles song Rosie with the sequence from Angel Mine that used it (one of the reasons the movie had the bizarre censor’s warning “Contains Punk Cult Material”).

Russell: planning to bring a bunch of students up to next week's recording

The Baffler on Vice.

“Contains Punk Cult Material”).

This would be a classic gravestone inscription :)

There is always a price for content. Buzzfeed are a particularly enthusiastic scraper of personal data for the purposes of profiling. Even scarier - you know those half-arsed 'quizzes'? Well your answers to those can end up as part of your profile in Buzzfeed.

A fuller technical explanation - and some debate in the comments - is available at Dan Barker's blog ...

Excellent. You would have loved the huddle with Blyth.

On-demand ...

Last night's Media Take.

And the extra interview with David Blyth, which is (inevitably) actually better than what actually went to air.

Great show. Why oh why does the Maori TV website require Facebook? #meh

Cheers Russell, just wanted to let you know that the extended interview seems to hang around the 10.30 mark.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who is probably just as confused about the anti-terror raids now as I was when they happened. Going to track down that Operation 8 doco and hopefully get a better picture...

Hang on a minute, there's something worrying about this:

Don Rood said that his head of news position had been disestablished.

[......]

Staff approached by the Herald said they expected there would more significant changes when a new content boss was appointed.

My emphasis added, and there's plenty more in the elision to worry, I just cut it down to the two bits that most grabbed my attention - though the article is so short only a Newstalk ZB editor would think, "hmmm, that's a little wordy", so it wasn't easy to decide what to chop. But Radio NZ isn't doing news anymore? Only content, whatever the hell that means? And more significant changes on the way? Like what, swords dangling by threads over presenters to make sure they keep the punters tuning in? Isn't news a specific type of content of sufficient significance to society as a whole to warrant its own department with its own boss? Could I repeat that level of alliteration? Is there any reason to not worry?

I just watched the latest Media Take; thanks much for the piece by Toi about the police apology. I haven't seen the Operation 8 doco either, and will try to get a copy. The clip you included sure made clear the toxic role the news media played in the whole affair. I was trying to keep track of print media coverage of the "terror raids" at the time and wrote up a paper for PJR about it (made from a talk at a JEANZ conference in 2007). I was just horrified at the time at the incendiary (intended!) and credulous reporting, endless anonymous, even third-hand sources, and some of the editorials justifying this. So, the police apologised, but the news media never seems to have to look back and take stock of their own role, to learn anything from this, let alone, of course, to come close to apologising for what they, too, put so many people through. The 2007 reporting had the same 'feel' to it as the post 9/11 period and run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion in the U.S. (and no doubt here, too)... a 'feel' I felt close up as I was working on the foreign desk at the NY Times at the time. Which was sort of the angle I took in the talk/PJR paper: i.e. the hysteria-driven "terrorism" reporting in the post-9/11 context NZ-style, where papers were unable to resist anonymous sourcing that would let them use 'terror' and 'napalm' on the same page; where Maori were the local version of those terrifying "others" (appreciating those subjected to the raids etc., were not all Maori, but nevertheless that "Maori" featured so heavily in the coverage) At the NYT there were a series of follow-up stories of a mea culpa nature, but here we seem to sail merrily on. Who, us? But we're the fourth estate, we were only reporting what we were told, the people have a right to know, etc. etc.