Media Matters: Playing for keeps during radio sweeps
The inner workings of New Zealand's media industrial complex laid bare on NBR Radio and on demand on MyNBR Radio.
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This week on Media Matters, NBR Radio’s Andrew Patterson chats with Campbell Gibson and Nick Grant about the inner workings of New Zealand’s media industrial complex.
First up is the way in which PR releases are often what initially prompts news stories.
There was a particularly egregious example of the increasingly common phenomenon this week, with at least one mainstream newspaper essentially cutting and pasting a piece of propaganda from a telco, slapping a headline on it and calling it reportage – unlike NBR’s Chris Keall, who did what journalists are meant to by picking up the phone and testing the claims (“It didn’t smell right,” he says).
Next on the agenda is whether broadcast journalist Rachel Smalley’s complaint in a NZ Herald column that John Campbell’s new gig on National Radio is just another nail in the coffin of media diversity was justified criticism or merely self-interested sour grapes.
Given Ms Smalley is a host on Newstalk ZB – owned by NZ Herald parent company NZME – some have claimed her controversial stance was a publicity bid at the beginning of the radio survey period in which radio stations’ audiences are measured (inaccurately, many in the ad industry argue – which constitutes this week’s final topic).
That has certainly been one interpretation of the announcement this week that Polly Gillespie and Grant Kereama – the married hosts of The Hits breakfast show – are separating.
Some have cynically speculated this sad situation is a fiction created to attract more attention to their show during the survey.
Although Media Matters’ commentators dismiss that scenario as ridiculous, they also note it is difficult to observe how a story about the split was the lead on the Herald’s website (The Hits is also owned by NZME) and not wonder whether, when presented with the lemon of this domestic tragedy, Ms Gillespie and Mr Kereama’s employer decided it may as well make some lemonade.
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NBR Radio
Thu, 13 Aug 2015
Thu, 13 Aug 2015
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Media Matters: Playing for keeps during radio sweeps
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