Greg Treadwell: 14 community newspapers due to close....

With 14 community newspapers due to close, too many parts of NZ are becoming ‘news deserts’

When media company NZME proposed the closure of 14 community newspapers last week, the so-called “news desert” encroached a little further into the local information landscape.

Greg Treadwell: With the end of Newshub.....

......the slippery slope just got steeper for NZ journalism and democracy

If journalism in Western democracies has been on a roller coaster in recent decades, in Aotearoa New Zealand this week it threatened to come right off the rails.

Today’s shocking announcement by owners Warner Bros Discovery of the closure of Newshub by the end of June will leave only state-owned TVNZ and Whakaata Māori providing public-interest, free-to-air broadcast news.

Point of Order: How Fire and Fury sparked a journalism teacher’s call for old-fashioned notions of fairness and balance to be abandoned

Point of Order too often has drawn attention to issues the mainstream media have overlooked or partially reported. But we apply old-fashioned values and – perhaps – should go back to school.

More specifically, we should think about taking lessons from Dr Greg Treadwell, head of journalism at Auckland University of Technology, who (we understand) will impress on us the case for dumping our quaint ideas about fairness and balance.

Ben Espiner: First we tweak democracy - now we tweak journalism

That’s convenient, isn’t it? The pre-existing rules around fairness and balance in journalism that have worked for decades are suddenly in need of some tweaking, right as Stuff’s ‘Fire and Fury’ documentary is due to come before the Media Council for voiding its bowels all over a group of very disillusioned Kiwis and not bothering to speak to them.

Our very own Doctor of Journalism, Greg Treadwell, took leave of his senses this week for just long enough to publish an astonishing piece of writing in Newsroom, which lent itself almost entirely to being a literary back massage for Paula Penfold and her propaganda riddled documentary.