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Mediawatch looks critically at the New Zealand media - television, radio, newspapers and magazines as well as the 'new' electronic media.
Flood of opinion follows Labour's summer camp revelations; pioneering digital journalist Cory Doctorow urges NZ to free up copyright law; NBR's boss pushes subscriber-funded journalism; Korean correction.
Our creaking pre-internet copyright law is up for review, with the rights of digital-age creators and consumers in conflict. Canadian author and online pioneer Cory Doctorow tells Mediawatch propping up old business models would be like rewarding the winners of last year’s lottery all over again. But if we're more free to share online, how will anyone make a living?
When you play some audio from news media website like RNZ's you might only listen to it the once, just as you would listening live to the radio. But you are in fact copying an original work.
If you used a portable digital device, you might have made another copy of it in an online backup somewhere or even in a cloud storage system without even knowing. You could be breaking the law.
The Copyright Act 1994 allows owners of original work to control the copying, publishing and sale of the work. It also gives owners the right to give the right to do all that to someone else. It was written long before online sharing became a thing and even though it has been amended several times it has lagged far behind technology
For example, it wasn’t until long after VHS recorders were in most homes that an exception made it fully legal to record and keep TV shows at home.
When a review of the law was announced last June, the government warned it will "not be able to resolve all issues to everybody's satisfaction."
But what changes might help?
One outfit with lots of skin in the game is Google, which now offers online tools for creating, storing and sharing and original content with hundreds of millions of users all over the world.
It commissioned international consultants Deloitte to take a look at our law and this week it released the findings at an Internet NZ conference in Wellington.
The current regime’s 'fair dealing' test, says Deloitte, has "failed to keep pace with changing technology".
It is permissible to copy music from a CD to your tablet for sound recording - but not to copy a film from a DVD to
your tablet
It is permissible to back-up a CD to your computer, but not to communicate by storing it privately online or electronically transmit the sound recording so you can listen to it on mobile
It is not permissible to copy a funny photo you saw on Twitter and share it on a Facebook page as it is not covered by any exception
It is permissible to watch an online video, but not play it in a presentation to your team at work as it is not covered by any exception.
Content may be used for news reporting or criticism, but not for parody, satire or purely artistic purposes.
The report says New Zealand should follow the lead of the US, South Korea and Israel and adopt a 'fair use' regime with more flexible exceptions for use of copyright material based on the purpose of people’s use and the nature of work they create from it. But broader exceptions to copyright would be opposed by publishers, movie makers, photo-libraries and the music industry, which all want people to pay for their products and not just share them.
In his keynote speech in Wellington this week, Canadian author, journalist and digital pioneer Cory Doctorow said propping up existing businesses in news, media and entertainment is like trying to reward the winners of last year’s lottery all over again.
“Freezing old business models” will mean “ending up at war” with the forces of innovation and change, he warned.
But doesn’t that condemn writers like him - and other creators in the internet age - to only ever earning only a pittance from their work?
"When technology comes along it challenges the exceptions to copyright. But you can't afford to wait 20 years to legalise new technologies, not least because they are really important to the entertainment industry," he said
"Without the VCR it would have been in a lot of trouble. The DVD and streaming services that exist today are the legacy of the VCR," he told Mediawatch.
In his 2014 book Information doesn’t want to be free, Cory Doctorow argued for fewer restrictions on intellectual property. Last year, Cory Doctorow put his money where his mouth is by launching a fair trade-style platform for -e-books.
"The internet only works by making copies. In the past readers could read a book without understanding copyright. Today in theory you are expect to read and solemnly agree to between 10,000 and 30,000 words of extremely dense legal boilerplate. A regime that criminalises broad swathes of the population is just bad policy," he said.
While it's natural for creators to resent online sharing, Cory Doctorow says the digital media thinker who coined the terms Web 2.0 and Open Source - Tim O'Reilly - got it right when he said: “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.”
"We need a set of industrial rules for the entertainment industry and we should stop pretending that 12 year-olds are going to abide by copyright," he said.
In his native Canada, a government-ordered report into the problems of the news media - The Shattered Mirror - suggested tightening up copyright law to prevent news created at great expense by one news outlet being lifted or copied by others online. Some countries have pursued so-called "link taxes", imposing a cost on online republication.
Good idea?
"Link taxes have never worked. Charging people to tell other people about your news is not a way to get people interested in your news. There is not a newsroom that would survive creating copyright from snippets or facts,' he said.
Once a behind-the-scenes boss, National Business Review owner Todd Scott has been front-and-centre lately - culling contributors, taking on ad agencies and clashing with other journalists including his own. He tells Mediawatch it's all part of a plan to put paying subscribers at the heart of the business.
Todd Scott took charge at the National Business Review - New Zealand’s biggest weekly business newspaper and most-read news website dedicated to business - five years ago. He bought out its longtime publisher Barry Colman after serving as NBR's chief executive and sales chief.
Since then he's been mostly behind the scenes, but recently he’s become almost as vocal and visible as he was as a radio host and TV2's Lotto guy alongside Hillary Timmins in the late 1990s.
"I'm actually petrified of reading out loud. I'd pack my pants on Saturday night when we went live on TV2 and I had to read from the autocue," he said.
Todd Scott has been saying all sorts of things out loud lately though.
He was in the headlines last month when NBR suddenly canned the weekly column by Sir Robert Jones after pulling a supposedly satirical piece about race relations from its website.
He then tweeted his own reporters:
Todd Scott
@ToddScottNBR
Note to the http://www.nbr.co.nz newsroom, drop the satire and cartoons and focus business news you can use. Mainstream media deliver entertainment, let’s stick to the serious stuff.
9:02 AM - Feb 10, 2018 · Auckland, New Zealand
Earlier this month Todd Scott suddenly declared he no longer wanted political and business insiders “paid to push a point of view” in the NBR.
"Update to newsroom: Member Subscribers trust & respect the integrity of @TheNBR Its you they trust to cut through the PR crap, misinformation and out and out lies in search of the truth," he wrote on Twitter this time.
That decision followed a controversial column by political commentator and lobbyist Matthew Hooton which was highly critical of former National Party minister Steven Joyce - critical enough for Steven Joyce's lawyers to threaten to sue.
In comments to media - and more tweets - Todd Scott said he would defend any legal action and he backed the writer he’d just cut from the NBR. He criticised the two news outlets which revealed the contents of the legal letter.
All this followed another Twitter salvo back in February at advertising agencies who place ads in the NBR for a cut of the money.
"You okay, man?" Newsroom's Tim Murphy asked recently on Twitter, in response to "all this personal-corporate-editorial angst being played out in public".
"Never better," Todd Scott tweeted back.
What's he up to?
The common thread in all this bullishness is his insistence that paying subscribers are the critical source of revenue as advertising dwindles and comes with more strings attached.
The weekly print edition of NBR doesn’t sell as well as it used to, but NBR makes much more money online than five years ago. More than 5,000 people and businesses currently subscribe to its digital offering.
Only those who pay $35 a month - and businesses who plump for an in-house subscription giving online access to employees - can see the NBR’s exclusive content online which now includes new video and audio every day.
Todd Scott says NBR's first target is to double the roster of paying subscribers.
A bold goal?
"Not at all. Bold is 100,000 which is where I see us going eventually. We have to knock over 10,000 first. We'll comfortably do that within 18 months which will make us the undisputed champion of business news in New Zealand," he told Mediawatch.
But the NBR surely won't pull in a paying audience as big as that of the New Zealand Herald with a diet of only business news.
"We will get to 10,000 offering business news. To get to 30,000 we will need to broaden," he told Mediawatch.
"We will do that by getting journalists and contributors people respect behind the paywall. They will work for us because they can do the job for our subscribers without commercial restraints such as sponsorship or advertising," he said.
Todd Scott says hundreds of thousands of dollars has been invested in a new website to launch in June which will make more of the NBR Radio audio content and NBR View video content.
The latter features familiar names from TVNZ such as Susan Wood and Simon Dallow. The content's not as elaborate or expensive at TV, but is it paying off?
"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts," Todd Scott replied.
Does that mean not many people are listening or watching?
"The numbers . . . are not as important as giving our member subscribers timely, relevant and useful business news whether its text, audio or visual - and we will deliver that," he said.
Todd Scott recently told the Herald "pimply faced teenagers" from ad agencies were doing a bad job of selling space in the NBR.
Why is he is taking on advertising agencies who can still provide important income while he strives to hook more subscribers?
"Some ill-informed people are doing a poor job and we have called them out. We are being misrepresented. The agencies try to beat us down on price and we are strong enough to stand up to them," he said.
"Like Rod Drury (CEO of Xero) I'm not necessarily the best person for the job going forward but I certainly have a passionate belief in the job that needs to be done, and its a different job expected of us in the past . . funded by member subscribers," he told Mediawatch.
Labour’s summer camp scandal triggered a flood of opinion in the media this past week. Much of it claimed political spin had overridden the rights of the victims, but the coverage and comment also made it an even more political story.
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Mike Hosking's call for the sacking of Labour's general secretary.
Mike Hosking's call for the sacking of Labour's general secretary was widely aired by Newstalk ZB and the New Zealand Herald. Photo: screenshot
What happened the night when four sixteen year-olds were allegedly sexually assaulted by a 20 year-old at a Young Labour summer camp party back in February - and how the Labour Party handled it - was in the headlines all week after online news outlet Newsroom broke the story last Monday.
In one of many editorials about this, the Otago Daily Times pointed out it wasn’t just what happened that night that has preoccupied the media this week - but what didn't happen next.
"The things which did not happen include Labour Party general secretary Andrew Kirton not telling the parents of the young people, not notifying the police of the allegations and not informing Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who was apparently caught unawares by the allegations when questioned by the media," the ODT said.
On RNZ's Checkpoint, the Labour Party's secretary general Andrew Kirton stood by what he called a “victim-led” approach, which meant not telling more people - including the PM.
While the 'keep the circle small' approach was backed up by two sexual abuse support organisations few in the media seemed to agree.
The New Zealand Herald’s political editor Audrey Young said it was "crazy" to keep the PM out of the loop.
“He had higher obligations than just to the victims. To ignore the political dimension of the allegations is to deny reality," she wrote.
But while she said it was not a sacking offence, plenty of others disagreed.
Mike Hosking voiced his disapproval:
"Instead of using common sense, they used a so-called professional to get advice. Who thinks that way? If I am in charge of kids, I think for myself," he told his listeners on Newstalk ZB.
There was little danger of not knowing what Mike Hosking thought.
His ZB comment piece was recycled online as a Mike’s Minute video which was attached to several online stories about this issue, written by others for ZB and the Herald online with the heading: 'Andrew Kirton needs to be sacked'.
It was also on the Herald's website as an opinion piece, where it appeared alongside the thoughts of his wife Kate Hawkesby, who precedes him on ZB's Early Edition.
"I don't care what any 'expert' says, no one cares more about that child than its parents," she said on air and online.
After Jacinda Ardern herself admitted the party's care of the four teenagers had not been not good enough, Tim Murphy - co-editor of Newsroom website, which broke the story - tweeted that Andrew Kirton's position must be untenable.
But on Three's show The Project, former Labour Party president Mike Williams - who said he set up such camps in the past - insisted Labour's top brass should not have to quit.
"These camps have been run smoothly for 17 years. It’s a really bad look for a political party but at the end of the day it was one drunken idiot," he said.
The Dominion Post raised the question of whether the party’s slow and softly-softly approach was what Mike Hosking called “butt-covering politics” - but didn't seem to want to answer it.
"We'll leave readers to draw their own conclusions on that," The Dominion Post's editorial said.
But the DomPost was certain the police should have been told at the time.
"The party usurped the role of the law enforcers in deciding what may or may not be criminal activity," the paper said, also insisting the Labour Party should have told the parents of the teenage victims.
"Society sometimes struggles with this concept, but parents still have a role to play in their children's life. Possibly a right."
But not according to Newstalk ZB's political editor Barry Soper:
On the ZB website, he said the law actually prevented Labour Party from telling anyone else if that’s what the victims themselves wanted.
He said only two of the four victims replied when contacted by Labour, just one of them wanted to pursue the matter, and none of them initially wanted their parents involved.
"Kids aged 16 have more rights that you may realise, like where they live, when to leave school, to get a firearms licence, to have an abortion without their parents knowing or even to get a passport without asking mum or dad. Whether they're old or mature enough to have such responsibility is for the lawmakers to decide," he wrote.
Kate Hawkesby was not at all happy about that on Newstalk ZB - and in the Herald - the next day.
"The bulk of laws like this appear to be designed to cater to the lowest common denominator. I think that’s a problem."
"The lowest common denominator is the minority. If we structure our society around pandering to the smallest group of people, then are we not failing the majority?," she said.
Labour was “hiding behind the law” for “political management” reasons - and it needed “to humanise” its approach, she said.
Yet just the day before on the air she folded the teenage victims’ plight into the matter of party politics.
“Ardern and Kirton are peddling the line of defence [that] informing the PM would've been a ‘political management response’, instead, they were focused on 'the people not the politics’. Wake up. The people are the politics and vice versa,” she said.
After the PM faced more questions about the this on Newshub Nation on Three, panelist Ben Thomas - a former press secretary turned PR professional - also said the young people affected and the political handling couldn’t and shouldn’t be divorced.
But he also said so-called “‘politcal management” need not be the same as cynical spin.
“Political management is just making sure that everyone in an issue is being taken care of and feels like they’re being heard, cared for and supported so no one has a grievance coming out of it,” he said.
“If there was mismanagement it happened here at the point the victims came forward to Andrew Kirton and the Labour Party and their concerns were not adequately dealt with,” he said.
Labour‘s leaders’ eventually acknowledged they let the victims down by not responding quickly enough.
The revelation that Labour only followed up with the victims three weeks later, just before the story broke, aroused suspicions that that was an exercise in damage control rather than doing the right thing.
But on Scoop.co.nz, Gordon Campbell made this point:
“There is something a bit off about the media raising this matter as if everyone else was acting out of self-interest, while its own motives – and the possible impact of media coverage on victims who had previously expressed their desire that the events not be publicly disclosed – are seen to be above question,” he wrote.
The revelations triggered a flood of opinion in the media, some of which claimed cynical political spin overrode the rights of the victims - without making it clear what those rights really were, and that some of the victims appeared to exercise them independently.
The media themselves played a big role in making this a political, rather than a personal or social story.