Posts by Nik Dirga
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” In the hour after it was revealed yesterday that bomb threats had been made against several New Zealand schools, its lead story was the weirdly irrelevant tale of a woman in Texas who “publicly shamed” her racist father on Twitter, lifted whole from The Daily Mail.”
Yes, that was an embarrassment. The Daily Mail has its own website, and not sure why we need to be force-fed its clickbait tripe on the other side of the world. The New Zealand Herald should NEVER lead with a Daily Mail story. Period. "In the mix," sure, but using Mail clickbait blather as your lead indicates contempt for New Zealand readers.
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Magnificent piece. I'm getting a real echo of the US 2004 election here, where I was in a kind of bubble of anti-Bush supporters and truly shocked when he won re-election - how could so many people ignore what seemed so obvious? The comedown from this buzz will be harsh....
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I find it extremely depressing how many ostensibly serious news sites are aping the "You won't believe what happens when..." relentless click bait trivia approach of Buzzfeed. There IS a place for that sort of thing, but it devalues the brand when used without restraint.
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Growing up in small-town America in the 1980s, discovering 'The Young Ones' for the first time was revelatory. It made me realise there was a world outside my country, and that I'd like to see it. (And here I am 30 years later, living in New Zealand.)
Rik was the anarchic, frenzied heart of that show and for those of us in my small-town high school who knew 'The Young Ones,' it was like a secret club of underground cool that nobody else knew about.
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Famous people aren't allowed to have problems or whinge about anything that happens to them because they're FAMOUS! Don't we KNOW that?
And rubbish like this is why I stopped picking up the SST
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Noticed that DHC's column seemed to have disappeared entirely from the Herald of late.
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The dismaying thing (to me anyway) is seeing how avidly "mainstream" sites jump all over the Buzzfeed model of "hey, isn't this thing cool?" rather than actually trying to advance the dialogue or educate readers about something more interesting than the fact Lady Gaga got vomited on. There's a place for all of that, but too often we're seeing all newspaper sites fall on the Buzzfeed model of journalism.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to James W,
Yeah, I knew about that rule, but it's curious as the SST used the word suicide repeatedly in their paper to refer to it -- curious if they got permission or just went for it?
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There's been a real race to the bottom overall on coverage of this. There's some media's bizarre reluctance to actually use the word "suicide" (sorry, I don't think this helps the discussion one bit, and I'd really like to hear some defences of NOT saying suicide when someone does it and resorting to bizarre euphemisms like "the police said the death was not suspicious".).
And then DHC's bizarre take on it (she died because she feared age, you see - or her brand fading, not sure which). And the hilarious irony of seeing revolting twitter trolls then turn on DHC with much of the same language and abuse that Dawson herself faced - it's enough to turn one's head about. Nobody has looked good during this, really.
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It's been declared word of the year elsewhere, but "selfie" has been utterly ubiquitous this year and really sums up something about the zeitgeist in general.