Karl du Fresne: Meanwhile, down a blind alley ...

That worked out well, didn’t it?

Just six months ago, Stuff announced the appointment of Caitlin Cherry as editor of what was then The Dominion Post.

Both she and her new employer made rapturous noises. “We’re thrilled to have Caitlin leading our newsroom in the capital,” cooed Stuff’s Joanna Norris at the time. “She is a fierce advocate for the city and as a lifelong Wellingtonian, she is inherently aware of all that is newsworthy in the city and region.”

Not mentioned, unsurprisingly, was that Cherry was taking on the job with no previous experience in newspaper journalism. None.

Cherry, meanwhile, said she was looking forward to “working with the team to ask the big questions, look at the best solutions, and talk to those people who are doing all they can to make life better for the community.”

Now she’s gone – just like that. But you had to read the New Zealand Herald, Stuff’s main competitor, to find out. A leaked internal email ended up in the hands of Shayne Currie, the Herald’s editor-at-large and media columnist (and many years ago a young and very savvy chief reporter of the old Evening Post, from which today’s Post got its name).

No surprises there. These days the Herald is often the first to break Wellington stories, which is itself a telling measure of the steady decline of a newspaper publisher that once, in the heyday of the Dominion and Evening Post, owned the city.

Why is Cherry going? That wasn’t clear from the email to staff in which Bernadette Courtney, Stuff’s newsrooms editor-in-chief, lavished praise on the now ex-editor, saying she had made a “huge impact” and been a “champion for Wellington”.

Cherry’s energy, news judgment and passion for journalism would be missed, Courtney said. In that case, what happened to make her quit?

All Courtney’s email said was that Cherry was moving on to “take on her next challenge”. It’s perhaps another measure of Stuff’s decline that the company apparently expects its journalists to fall for this obfuscatory corporate flim-flam, which comes straight from the HR Manager's Handbook of Euphemistic Cliches.

As Currie commented in his story, Cherry’s departure appears to be linked to other changes in Stuff’s editorial leadership team. Her resignation was foreshadowed in a Newsroom story two weeks ago which speculated that the capable Tracy Watkin, editor of the Sunday Star-Times, would take on responsibility for the editorship of the Post (confirmed today) as well as Stuff’s press gallery team. The rationale for this rumoured transfer of control wasn’t apparent.

That story also mentioned that some high-profile Stuff journalists would be quitting, starting with #MeToo crusader Alison Mau, in what appears to be yet another downsizing.

All this follows a series of changes that included the rebranding of the former Dominion Post, the creation of an unorthodox partial paywall for three of Stuff’s dailies and the announcement last month of a new corporate leadership group with the company’s owner, Sinead Boucher, in the new position of executive chair and publisher.

Under the revamped structure, Laura Maxwell (ex NZME) will replace Boucher as CEO and three newly appointed managing directors will look after various segments of the business. Boucher presented this makeover as preparation for “the next big disruptive force of the digital era – the advent of new generative AI technologies”.

Trying to make sense of what’s going on behind the scenes at Stuff, to say nothing of the constantly changing job titles, is a bit like trying to track shifts in power and influence behind the walls of the Vatican or the Kremlin.

If there’s a consistent, coherent strategy, it’s well concealed. There’s a random, ad hoc look to it which suggests Stuff is making it up as it goes. Suffice to say that Stuff makes Chris Hipkins’ government look like a model of stability.

One of the most dismaying aspects of the upheavals, from a journalist's point of view, is the torrent of flatulent PR jargon that accompanies the company’s every move. If you accept the theory that corporate hype expands in inverse proportion to performance, the outlook is not promising.

One of the worst offenders is Norris, who becomes managing director of Staff Masthead Publishing. In a statement accompanying the recent restructuring, Norris gushed: “Our mastheads are totally focused on our subscribers and delivering beautifully told journalism from across the country in print and digital channels. Drawing on our 160-year history of journalism, we are reinvigorating and growing the portfolio of iconic journalism brands which are embedded in communities across New Zealand.”

This is the type of empty, self-congratulating puffery you expect from ad agencies. A former journalist like Norris should know better. The bullshit detector she was equipped with during her time as a reporter has clearly been disabled.

Besides, it's bordering on flagrantly dishonest. Stuff has shown little respect for those "iconic journalism brands", most of which it has gutted.

Nadia Tolich, managing director of Stuff Digital, wasn’t far behind Norris. “I’m looking forward to reaching New Zealanders at scale, serving up lively, bold and entertaining content that stokes the interest of the nation and builds on our position as the number 1 digital site in NZ. That unrivalled reach, combined with the hyper-local power of Neighbourly and connection with nearly a million members across the motu is an exciting proposition,” Tolich was quoted as saying.

Oh, please. Give us a break.

The sad thing is that there are still good people at Stuff. They will be looking around their increasingly deserted newsrooms and wondering whose job will go next. They could also be excused for wondering who’s going to magically produce the "lively, bold and entertaining content" that Stuff keeps promising to deliver in the wonderland of the future.

They have been let down at every turn by bosses who adopted a perverse business model. That Stuff prioritised digital at the expense of the traditional print product, and in the process destroyed much of the value in its mastheads, could perhaps be forgiven as monumentally bad judgment. What was not excusable was that the company alienated and antagonised its most loyal readers by haranguing them and bombarding them with a relentless barrage of woke propaganda. It effectively declared war on some lifelong subscribers by declaring them pariahs and refusing to publish any more of their letters. It was a novel way of building customer loyalty and it has had the inevitable result.

The Otago Daily Times and the Herald both serve as evidence that daily newspapers can survive and flourish in the digital era. Stuff, on the other hand, has blundered down a blind alley.

And so the agony continues. Cherry is leaving a paper whose steady downward trajectory sadly parallels that of the city it purports to serve. Both the paper and the city have lost their way. Each may have been a factor in the other’s decline, leading to a gradual ebbing of public morale and confidence.

The Post is still capable of breaking gutsy stories, as it proved with Monday’s front-page exposé by Tom Hunt of mayor Tory Whanau’s entitled behaviour at a Wellington restaurant. It was gutsy because the Dominion Post had unashamedly promoted Whanau’s mayoral aspirations last year (remember all those free publicity shots?) and vigorously supported her radical Green agenda, even to the extent of haranguing readers week after week with tedious pro-cycling propaganda under the “Mode Shift” banner.

Perhaps Monday’s story slipped through while the editor was distracted by other things, in which case it sent the reassuring message that a journalistic heart still beats somewhere within Stuff.

Unfortunately the paper then sought to redeem itself with Wellington’s noisy woke minority by publishing a strident opinion piece in which Whanau’s close friend, sometime Green Party publicist David Cormack, indignantly defended her.

Readers were left to conclude that publication of the Monday exposé was a momentary lapse of editorial judgment and that normal service had resumed. This is not to say there was no defence to be mounted on Whanau’s behalf; merely that it looked less than wholly convincing – and certainly not impartial – coming from a man who I understand sometimes accompanies her to events.

All this may sound cruel to Cherry, but it’s not meant to be. I think she made a mistake in taking on a job that was beyond her. (I recognise this situation; I've been there myself.) But the bigger mistake was made by Stuff in appointing her in the first place when she lacked the appropriate credentials. She now appears to have been made to pay for Stuff's misjudgement, which may explain the glowing tribute paid to her on her departure.

Cherry can’t be held responsible for the Post’s decline; for that, the blame rests with the Stuff leadership and with Cherry’s predecessors in the editor’s chair - notably Anna Fifield, who disastrously allowed the paper to be captured by a journalistic model that didn’t reflect the values and expectations of its readers.

Karl du Fresne, a freelance journalist, is the former editor of The Dominion newspaper. He blogs at karldufresne.blogspot.co.nz.