On the state of the news

Well, it's pretty bloody awful. From 2025, we'll be in a radically different environment. Like, my career in journalism started in 2018, and even then there was a lot more news coverage and a plurality of outlets. -

Now, it's easy to read Bryce's NZ Politics Daily and notice that most stories are being duplicated like 6-10 times, but a lot of that is paywalled. Fucking hate paywalls, so I'm not a paid-up subscriber to The Post or the Herald, but there's an easy hack - switching to incognito mode on Chrome - that makes paywalled Stuff articles visible. Minus Newshub and minus 1News, it starts to look like the fix is in, and most of the jobs are in PR rather than in news. People don't want to say their message truthfully: they want to spin it, and I reckon that the climate change fight is very much a spin war. Everyone's looking to deflect blame. NZ's doing really badly, but the National spin has everyone thinking that we're doing ok. Compared to John Key, who at least did what he said and largely arrested the GFC, the Prime Omelette isn't batting nearly as well. I can see why the Avocado Princess is so upset: the Environment Minister for National is totally inept, and it's somewhat difficult to see the logic in the coalition's decisions. Act is the party of the climate denialists, but it's National's opportunism that is obvious: they've decided that they want to mine to make more money, and Chloe's dreams of a green NZ are an obstacle to that. My career: Two things that NZ does really well - and funds quite well - are short films and investigative documentaries, so I'm probably fairly well set for my thirties if I can find a few established producers that want to work with me, but personally I'd rather do my arts journalism via Substack or something like that. The pirate station that I'm running is what I think the future of public media is going to be. People using these nascent broadcasting media in a sustained way. I think it's fair to say that Meta is going to survive most of this century, as AI hasn't radically altered our definition of what the Internet is, and all those interactive VR tools aren't up to it (yet). I'm actually of the belief that the VR tech is ready, but nobody's asked people to make a longer film for those headsets. I think if you cut out the interactivity, and give people the choice of what angle to view from instead, it'd still be game-like, but with a plot that's not a piece of shit. VR Internet isn't terribly likely, but VR or AR tools are eventually going to have that iPhone moment where somebody designs an interface that doesn't suck, so I reckon that 2040 or 2050 might get really surreal. Re: movies, I think that personal viewing devices are something that could take off. Like those 1970's carousel things: it's easier to simulate the feeling of a big screen via those tools. With earbuds, it'd be bloody immersive.