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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 29 Sep 2006 10:49 pm |
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Much as I lament the passing of the Wellington afternoon newspaper, the Evening Post, which was absorbed into the Dominion in 2002, it has to be admitted that the Post was a much less intelligent publication that the Dom. It was a considerable loss to Wellington, but the loss of the Dominion would have been a tragedy of vastly greater proportions.
Sadly, however, the Dominion Post is rapidly becoming a clone of the Evening Post. The only way it could get much worse is if it started running long articles by the egregious Robert Fisk ("I counted them out, and I counted them in, and I'n still banging on about it, 20 years later"), as the Post was wont to do.
The worst symptom of the change is that the editor of the Dom - a "Tim Pankhurst" - doesn't seem to have the faintest idea about what constitutes a news story. For example, the two major (ie largest, and therefore presumably "major") stories on the first two pages of the international news section this morning were very silly features - one was about the last thoughts of prisoners on Death Row in, I think, Ohio, as if that constituted "news" in Ohio, let alone New Zealand; the other was about a street in Baghdad which, no-one will have been surprised to learn, has seen better days. Both articles should have been spiked but, if they had to be published for some abstruse reason, and I very much doubt whether there was one, apart from saving the time of a very lazy subeditor or two, they could have been run any time.
This trivialisation of the news is frequently true of the Dom's domestic news pages as well. I wonder whether this is also happening with the Herald, the Press and the ODT?
I think we should be told.
Yesterday's front page from the Press, from the Today's Front Pages website (which you can access via The Unscrambled Web). Mercifully, the Dominion Post's front pages are not available for all the world to see, and laugh at:Attached Image (viewed 173 times):
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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 29 Sep 2006 10:55 pm |
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| And this is what the Herald looked like yesterday: Attached Image (viewed 159 times):
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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 29 Sep 2006 10:57 pm |
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| And the Melbourne Age: Attached Image (viewed 166 times):
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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 29 Sep 2006 10:59 pm |
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| And, finally, the SMH: Attached Image (viewed 146 times):
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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 29 Sep 2006 11:05 pm |
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I'd show you the front page of the Dominion Post, so you could make a comparison but:
* as noted above, it is not one of the 500+ newspapers featured in the Today's Front Pages website
* and the Dominion Post doesn't even have its own website!
I'm sure you will agree that this latter point is little short of incredible, but it's true. There is a Dominion Post page inside the Fairfax website, but it's a crappy little "About Me" page which tells you next to nothing. See:
http://www.fairfaxnz.co.nz/businesses/dompost.html
Amazing, huh?
So whereas the rest of the newspapers circulating in Australasia continue to be newspapers the DomPost is boldly setting out to go where no man has gone before: to become a frothy, mindless, women's magazine-type Sunday "news magazine" which you get every day of the week except Sunday.
What a mess!
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David Harcourt
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Posted: 1 Oct 2006 05:57 am |
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I am indebted to giraffeinfall for the information that, while the Dominion Post doesn't have its own website, there is a page on http://www.stuff.co.nz which reports on stories in the paper. See:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/dominionpost/0,2106,0a6000,00.html
This doesn't tell you what any particular issue of the paper looks like, and it's not a reliable guide to what's in it on any particular day, but it's better than nothing.
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jaybee2003
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 272 |
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Posted: 1 Oct 2006 12:47 pm |
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Leaving aside your once upon a time MB comment about "shudder Masterton"... perhaps these papers are trying to match our local Award winning Wairarapa Times Age standards.
http://times-age.co.nz/
Believe me, then you will have vaild cause to complain.
We are Dom readers, when we can get it. It used to be delivered by our rural mailman, but he had a fallout with Fairfax when they refused to pay him more for delivery than a paperboy gets, so he wanted to charge us an extra .60c to $1 per paper for delivery, and we all responded with a no thanks, on principle. Thank goodness for stuff.co.nz.
I should mention the Award was for the Least Informative Newspaper.
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David Harcourt
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Posted: 1 Oct 2006 11:18 pm |
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jaybee2003 wrote: ... perhaps these papers are trying to match our local Award winning Wairarapa Times Age standards.
I suppose we should count our blessings that we have any newspapers at all, Jo.
Will daily newspapers survive much longer in cities like Masterton, New Plymouth, Wanganui, Blenheim, Nelson and Invercargill? Certainly, a proportion of the population will always want them, but there must be a circulation level below which it simply isn't economical to publish a newspaper any more.
I suspect that one day our children will be asking a similar question:
Will daily newspapers survive much longer in cities like Hamilton, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin?
It's hard to see any reason why the New Zealand Herald will not eventually become the sole daily newspaper in New Zealand, published simultaneously throughout the country each day, with one or (if we're very lucky) two pages of "local news".
After all, similar centralisation in Auckland has already happened with television, despite the fact that two of the three main national channels are owned by the Government, which you'd have thought might be interested in seeing news gathering and broadcasting more dispersed through the country than it is now ...
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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 3 Oct 2006 09:18 pm |
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I won't do this every day, as you would find this very tiresome and I might begin to bore even myself, but I do want to tell you about the first two pages of the second section of the Dominion Post this morning. This is the part of the paper which begins with international/foreign news (the section is called "World") and goes on to such vital material as letters and Tom Scott's hilarious cartoons.
Today the three main stories on these two pages - "main" in terms of the space allocated to them - are these:
* An article about the Amish, ostensibly relating to the massacre there but in fact neither more nor less than - an article about the Amish. It could have been run last week, or last year, or last century. It could be run next week, or next year, or in the fourth millenium (provided horses survive as a species until then).
* The discovery last week of an uninteresting Russian vessel which sank for uninteresting reasons in 1934.
* And an article from the Los Angeles Times which is so discursive and intrinsically uninvolving that I find it difficult to summarise. Here is the headline and opening paragraph: "Testing time for baby Einsteins: Tutors are replacing toys as parents try to give toddlers the best educational start..."
These stories appeared on the morning after North Korea announced that it plans to test nuclear weapons. This development didn't get a mention in the Dominion-Post.
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giraffeinfall
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
| Location: | Australia |
| Posts: | 191 |
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Posted: 4 Oct 2006 01:05 pm |
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You will be pleased to hear then that at least in the 'Stuff' pages version the Dom Post has finally caught up with North Korea, however belatedy; perhaps that story will wander into tomorrow's version..
However this putative small triumph may perhaps be again diluted in your view if tomorrow's version also devotes significant coverage in its World section to the story of the Republican House of Representatives leaders struggling to contain a mushrooming sex scandal ...which,it transpires, happened six months to a year ago but has - astonishingly enough - surfaced just in time to become an issue five weeks before an election to decide control of the US Congress. The absolute accuracy of everything now alleged, reported and being slung by both sides of politics in this happily timed incident is perhaps best summarised by White House spokesman Tony Snow, who - trying, with Bush, to stay above the fray - is reported to have said "The House (of Reps) has to clean up the mess, to the extent there is a mess".
Last edited on 4 Oct 2006 01:07 pm by giraffeinfall
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jaybee2003
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 272 |
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Posted: 4 Oct 2006 01:12 pm |
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An aside - my Mother (now in her 70's), rang me today, very annoyed again and ready to line up journalists to give them an earbashing.
The article she had just read reported something along the lines of "...and her elderly mother, aged 71.."
"Elderly! " she exclaimed most indignantly, "71?.....Elderly?.......What are they on about? ....Journalists!!......"
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