OPINION
Sinead Boucher was our Face of the Day but the general tenor of her and her pals in other mainstream media is that they don’t believe they should change their business model to reflect modern business practices. That’s basically the thrust of their arguments.
The next thing they want to do is to have the government reach into the marketplace – in this case, it genuinely is a marketplace of ideas – and tinker, meddle, and distort the market in favour of them and their refusal to change or amend their business practices.
Sinead Boucher, executive chair and publisher of Stuff, and Joanna Norris, managing director of masthead publishing also spoke in support of the Bill.
Stuff was the second most searched term on Google last year after weather and news, Boucher said.
It is one of the biggest media companies in NZ and employs hundreds of journalists and “other staff who live and work in the towns they cover”.
“Even if someone never reads a single story … they’d benefit from the impact of good journalism, helping keep the company our country free of corruption and our societies healthy and our ability to continue to do this is in great peril.”
Journalism is in a fight for its life, she said.
“[Big tech] companies are squeezing us out, but using our own work to do so.”
She warned AI was creating what looked like “an extinction-level event” for news media.
Stuff
To which I say, ‘Cry Harder.’
I am not sure that making the tech giants pay media companies is part of Winston’s media utu policy.
The mainstream media are a moribund industry seeking to protect what they used to gloatingly call the “river of gold”, advertising in ordinary parlance, and have other businesses restricted in using “their” content.
Here’s the thing: these fools all embraced social media, they shared their content to Google, to Facebook and to Twitter (now X). They handed their audience over willingly as they pursued eyeballs. The only problem was their myopic policies and their overly ridiculous moderation of comment sections sent their readers away from their own sites because they simply refused to allow readers to engage.
I’ll give you a case in point: we send our posts to Facebook, but we have blocked all comments on Facebook. If you want to comment on our article you do so on OUR site, not Facebook’s.
Back in 2014 I had a meeting, along with Regan Cunliffe and the now deceased Tony Lentino, with Mark Jennings and Melanie Reid, who were both at TV3 back then but are now at Newsroom, to discuss precisely this issue. That was ten years ago. I told them then they were fools for giving their audience away. I proposed several possible solutions to shift the media landscape. It was a really good meeting, but ultimately it fell on deaf ears.
How do I know it fell on deaf ears? It’s easy. Both of them quit TV3, went to Newsroom and, despite having this knowledge, proceeded to implement the exact same strategy they were all caterwauling about yesterday, one which has so obviously failed them, and will continue to fail them.
A little-known fact is that our audience here at The BFD is larger than both The Spinoff and Newsroom, both of which have taken millions of dollars of taxpayers’ cash to prop them up. They are now crying a river of tears because their river of gold has dried up.
Cry harder, work smarter.
The BFD has continued to grow, without taxpayer funding. But we are still in a battle. You won’t see us moaning to politicians or begging for legislative changes.
Instead, we continue to appeal to readers who are yet to become members, to back us by joining up. Every little bit helps us hurt the mainstream more, and enables us to explore new content options and better technology. Please consider signing up, or donating below.
Meanwhile, enjoy watching the mainstream or legacy media cry harder. Join us and help them along to their demise.
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