Toiletorial
Some say down the toilet, but I do some of my best thinking and reading in the bathroom. So much so that I am pretty sure the staff and contributors get annoyed with the proliferation of media related paper products in the Salient toilet. So it isn’t going down, not just yet.
There is no other place for it though. My desk is covered with plastic animals and empty bottles. My mind is littered with the detritus of a thousand unwritten editorials.
The scary thing is I do a lot of reading at that desk. My RSS reader overflows daily with Main Stream Media (MSM) feeds: stuff.co.nz, herald.co.nz, International Herald Tribune, Haaretz, NY Times, et al. Non-paper publications are changing the way in which we absorb the fourth estate.
Gone are the days of picking up the paper in the morning, listening to the radio news on the car ride to work, breaking bulletins cast over the PA system, and then home to watch the six o’clock news.
We are now saturated with news. We swim in a sea of information and that information is on the internet. Oh, and there is the ‘web log.’
We could talk about the rise of blogs. Blogs this, blogs that. A blog told me there are somewhere around 100,000 blogs created daily. Big ones like Kiwiblog, Public Address and Media Law Journal are fine, but I prefer not to get my news from them. I go there for opinion. Hot sweaty opinion.
Blogs have seemingly undercut MSM. Cost to set up a blog: $25 for a sweet domain name and then however much effort you want to put into it. Cost of running a weekly publication like Salient: $5000 a week in printing costs alone.
Bloggers are quick to point out that many stories have been broken in the blogosphere. Yeah, they have, but just as the printing press enabled everyone to read, the internet has enabled everyone to write.
All major mainstream media outlets have cut back, and not just the on “taxis and booze” of TVNZ. Last year NZPA, the main syndicator of news across all media mediums, cut seven of its fifty-five staff, including its sole South Island reporter. Fairfax cut 160 jobs. APN wrote off $127 million of the value of its New Zealand assets in February.
We at Salient live the high life: I feel like a Dickensian capitalist—top hat and all—when all you little kiddies come in asking to write. Ha ha! I guffaw to myself. Eat your hearts out Murphy, Pankhurst and Cavanagh: I have people queuing up to work for me, for free, and their writing is even good.
As editor of Salient, I decided three things about the direction of this small portion of the media:
One was to publish a news section that kept you informed about what was happening. Not only here on campus, but in New Zealand and the world.
The second was to provide a wide array of features to encourage thought and provoke debate about issues. Ideas to challenge you: political responses to the recession, how this campus should look and feel and how VUWSA should operate. Three was to invest time and effort into making salient.org.nz a better news carrying platform, easier to navigate, search and easier to provide feedback and encourage debate.
The media is headed where you want it to head. Demand quality news and analysis from journalists and you will get it. Rely on blogs and we’ll end up down the toilet.
