Unfortunately, the main symptom of the rampant cost cutting over the past few years is that this invaluably precious time has been heavily eroded. And it’s not just on a day-to-day basis, when every minute is filled with dull, low-value tasks, as reporters file multiple versions of the same copy for multiple platforms, and rarely have time to do anything but react to the latest events in the world, without getting to dig into anything.
It’s a long-term thing as well. The war on time also means that people don’t get to do the vast amount of work that is needed to develop stories properly, with no space to build up contacts and gain the trust of story subjects. These things don’t happen overnight, or with a couple of phone calls. A decent story can literally take years, or even decades, to crack. (Ask any journo who has been in the business for 10 years or more, and they’ll admit having at least a couple of stories simmering away in their head, waiting for the right opportunity, waiting for the right time, waiting for the right person. Just not yet. These things aren’t just forgotten.)
Even worse for those who are trying to figure out the cost-benefits of their reporters - and the time they actually spend on stories - sometimes all that time can be wasted, and never turn into anything at all. It all fades away, a vital source never loosens their lips, or a key fact is never confirmed, and there is fuck all to show for it.
But sometimes it pays off, and it can pay off big time, with surprisingly fast repercussions. The controversy over living lunchbox Todd Barclay and his inability to keep his tape recorder in his pants has been simmering away for a long while, but he was gone within days, after Melanie Reid’s fantastic expose on the Newsroom site on the ham-fisted efforts to cover up his fuck-headery.
Reid got this result because the people paying her wages gave her the time she needed to cultivate the story, and let it grow into a truly exceptional scoop that everybody else in the news media spent the next few days chasing after. It took Reid ages to get this thing together, and she had to go to Gore to do it, which is about the biggest sacrifice you could ever ask of a journalist, but Reid and her collaborators got the bloody story. After taking her time to line up the hammer, she fuckin' nailed it.
There have been questions raised about why it took so long for the story to really come out (although that did lead to the memorable sight of the Prime Minister spending an entire week refusing to admit that the only reason it wasn't acceptable anymore was because everybody knew about it now). But this kind of story can't be done in an afternoon shift. Like anything of substance, it takes time to get a great story, and get the right result.
Of course, in this age of instant gratification, a lot of people can't wait for the fruits of these labours, and want everything done now, now, now, but life doesn't work like that, and it's childish to expect it. Sometimes politicians and other fuckwits in power take advantage of the fact – look at how the orange buffoon in the White House is declaring that he’s innocent of any Russian connection because nothing has happened yet, even though it can takes weeks and months, or even years, to build a proper case of that magnitude.
Fortunately, there aren't too many journos in positions of power who also don’t realise the value of giving the proper time to get a story right, and while editors and producers are facing tougher and tougher hurdles in getting that time out of result-fixated management, there is still a lot of great long-term stuff going on in all the country's big newsrooms.
Unfortunately, the New Zealand media scene lost one of its great fighters in this regard recently, with the sad passing of legendary TV journo Keith Slater. Slater was famous for not putting up with any bullshit and getting to the bloody point, but was also a boss who understood the pressures of daily deadlines, while also knowing that you need to put time and resources into long-form work, or you would just be forever spinning wheels.
Slater was a terrific mentor to a significant proportion of this country's great journalists, and taught them all the little details and tricks of the trade, also showing them the importance of taking the time to get a story right. The loss of Slater is a devastating blow to NZ journalism, but we can only hope this lesson of his continues to be spread far and wide.
Doing the shit that matters requires a significant investment in time, and that will be an eternal truth in news journalism.
- Katherine Grant
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