Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Waterview: The giant up the road, in reply to bob daktari,
I’m fascinated and mortified by this huge homage to cars & petrol that I’ve watched rise from my bus seat – the planning and details that project managers have done to ensure everything has gone smoothly and to plan is most impressive and makes my head hurt
Same. It's impossible not to be impressed by how it's been executed.
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The Waterview shared path route – from the Auckland Transport information page.
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This just in: an NZME and Fairfax update:
Subject to fulfillment of the conditions under the agreement (including approval from the New Zealand Commerce Commission) (“NZCC”), the merger will be effected by a wholly owned subsidiary of NZME acquiring all of the shares in Fairfax NZ, in consideration for which NZME will pay NZ$55 million in cash and issue NZME shares to Fairfax Corporation Pty Limited (“Fairfax Australia”), a wholly owned subsidiary of Fairfax, equal to a 41% shareholding in NZME.
This is a big shift from the original proposal, in which Fairfax took 51%.
NZME and Fairfax have undertaken a review of expected transaction synergies, and as a result of this review, expect that the combined business could generate significant synergies. It is expected that realisation of the synergies will require one-off costs to be incurred by the combined business.
Translation: brace for redundancies.
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Hard News: Housing NZ keeps digging the…, in reply to Sacha,
Although ... my impression is that the philosophy does pretty well at the functional business of property management.
A HNZ employee put it to me that although the government has run down public housing stock, a move away from pouring all the money into expanding that stock had meant the assets are better maintained now.
But there are obvious limits to this ...
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Hard News: Housing NZ keeps digging the…, in reply to nzlemming,
Of course.
From a letter to the NZ Drug Foundation demanding payment for an OIA response.
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Hard News: Housing NZ keeps digging the…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
That’s true of every agency now. There is a myth (spread by management) that a good manager can manage anything. Our own CEOs come from Fonterra management who (guessing here) want to come home to NZ. They are nice guys but have no passion for science nor real deep-seated understanding of it, so they impose management doctrine without understanding the damage it does when it doesn’t fit with the work we actually do.
Yes. The whole HNZ meth thing is very process-heavy. It's interesting that it was the tenancy managers on the ground who were the ones who said "should we really be doing this?"
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Hard News: Housing NZ keeps digging the…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
It seems like HNZ was wrong and now finds itself unable to admit that and so is just digging it's heels in to justify the obviously flawed policy.
Yeah, that's my read: they're backed into a corner.
And the management has a vision of HNZ as something other than a social agency.
Mitchell is a business process guy.
Paul Commons, the COO who's been fronting a lot of the meth stuff for HNZ, comes from project management, originally in the cement business.
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Hard News: Obscuring the News, in reply to James Hawthorne,
And no doubt make sure the reporting on the illegal wars and genocide in the Middle East is not being covered, not least the ethnic cleansing in Palestine.
No. It does not.
Any news organisation can cover what it sees fit. The nature of the Outbrain links is determined by the desire to harvest cheap clicks, not a geopolitical agenda.
Frankly, it's a dodgy enough industry as it is – let's focus on that. Please don't bring this stuff here.
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Hard News: Obscuring the News, in reply to Emma Hart,
In the same time-frame people are talking about for the Herald, I’ve noticed a change in Stuff’s “related stories” links, at the bottom of the page. They’re not related, they’re the worst kind of Women’s Weekly diets, junk science and body-shaming crap. I used to go there every morning for news. Now I just do the quiz and leave.
I don’t know about Stuff, but the Herald uses Outbrain, a “content distribution network” (but in a totally different sense to Akamai et al) which aims to drive traffic to publishers who have paid to have their story teasers placed on the websites of other publishers. It allegedly uses “behavioural targeting” to choose which stories it shows, but the external links are generally risible clickbait. The whole industry is basically dodgy.
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Hard News: Obscuring the News, in reply to Barnaby Bennett,
Great article Russell. It reminds me of the final essay in Don’t Dream it’s Over: Reimagining Journalism in Aotearoa NZ in which Simon Wilson suggests a more productive local focus for the Herald that would both serve Auckland better and build a more loyal following.
And it must be said, what's happening to the website is the exact opposite of what Simon suggests in that chapter.
Is this plunge into rapid shallow journalism similar to Mediaworks and really about preparing a company for sale rather than building a business?
As I noted above, one theory is that it's a preparation for merger – with Fairfax NZ. It may be that there is a dollar value being placed on one or more metrics – impressions or unique users. So they're desperately trying to juice up those metrics to improve the NZME side of the deal.
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