Bringing you the News

Bringing You the News.
A tsunami has washed away Auckland. Wellington has been crumbled in a massive earthquake. An alien race that feeds on coal has invaded the West Coast. The Queen and Tom Cruise had a baby.

 

Okay, I made that all up, but how do you know? Some very real events sound just as crazy. Two of the world's biggest skyscrapers got hit by planes and fell down. More than 800,000 people in Rwanda were killed with machetes in 100 days. Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise had a baby.

 

We know all that really happened (well, some people still aren't convinced about the baby) because we saw pictures in the paper, saw footage on the TV news, or heard interviews and announcements on the radio.

 

Telling us the news is the most important job of the media, whether it uses TV, radio, newspapers or the internet. This job hasn't changed much over the years, but the way the media does its job changes all the time. Say coal-munching aliens had invaded the West Coast. in 1960. How would the girls in their swishy skirts and boys with their slicked-back hair have found out about it?

 

Not right away, that's for sure. There was no TV in the South Island until 1963. Radio news in New Zealand didn't even begin until

 

THE NEWS

 

1962, when the New Zealand Broadcasting Service set up our fi rst news service in Wellington. Before that, 'news' was a few bulletins a day from the BBC. Local reporters read out articles from the day's newspapers, but by the time they got the papers everyone else had them too.

 

So, if everyone got news from newspapers, how did newspapers get news?

 

PAPER ROUNDS

 

First of all, local 'newspapermen' would have all rushed to the scene - yep, back then nearly all journalists were men. After fi lling up their little notebooks with facts and interviews, pretty much the same way reporters do now, they would rush back to the offi ce and start typing. On a typewriter, that is.

 

Newsrooms were super noisy places, with reporters typing each paragraph on a separate page, using carbon paper (a kind of paper coated in black stuff on one side) to duplicate it - no photocopiers then.

 

If the story was urgent - like our alien invasion - the reporter would race to the nearest phone booth, fi ghting off journalists from rival papers.

 

There were 41 daily papers back then (by 2000 there were only 26), and most towns had a morning and afternoon paper. Our brave reporter would feed the phone pennies and dictate the story to a copy-taker at the newspaper office.

 

When the story was ready, it was sent to the typesetter and printer. These guys had the worst job of the lot. They worked with huge, noisy, smelly machines that bashed plates of hot metal against paper to print it. There was no colour on any of the pages, and if there was going to be a photograph it had to be organised way in advance.

 

The took a lead stamp of each letter and laid it a metal tray, one letter at a time. Whole pages were set out painstakingly by hand. Things got a lot easier after computer desktop publishing programs were invented in the 80s.

 

Wait. Did I just say 80s? Sure did. Let's skip forward 25 years.

 

What if the West Coast alien invasion happened in 1985? How would the girls with their permed hair and boys with their tight, ripped jeans have found out about it?

 

Newspapers had kept on printing almost exactly the same way they had in 1960. Some were starting to print a few pages in colour - but only the ads. Some of the fl ashier journalists had huge mobile phones for calling in stories. More journalists were women. Computers were about to change everything, but not for another few years.

 

TURN ON THE TELLY

 

But if you wanted to fi nd out about an alien invasion in 1985, you wouldn't have to wait for a newspaper to completely freak you out. You'd just turn on the TV or radio.

 

The NZBC was split into Radio New Zealand, TV1 and TV2 in 1975, around the time TV went from black and white to colour. TV3 didn't start until 1987 and there was no Sky until 1990, so everyone's telly would have been locked on channel one.

 

And of course, everyone had a TV by then. Video cameras had replaced fi lm cameras in the early 80s, so live reporting was suddenly much easier and cheaper.

 

A news crew would have fl own to the West Coast as soon as the alien story broke. New satellite technology meant the news could have been sent around the world right away, and our national news could be broadcast live from the scene, instead of having to rush tape back to the station the way radio had to.

 

Radio reporters recorded their interviews on huge, heavy tape recorders that had to be slung over the journalist's back and taken to the radio station to be broadcast.

 

Things had changed a lot since 1960. By 1985, breaking news happened on TV and radio. People didn't want to wait till the next morning to read serious stories in the paper. They wanted to see pictures and feel the emotion of interviews and live footage.

 

People were worried that TV was killing radio and newspapers, just like people are wondering today what today's 'new media' digital technology will mean for 'old media'.

 

TURN OFF THE TELLY

 

Let's fast-forward another 25 years. It's 2010. Aliens have landed on the West Coast and they're trying to fi nd out where all that yummy coal went. How do you know?

 

Maybe you hear the news on digital radio via your MP3 player on your way to uni.

 

Maybe you read about it in the full-colour, customised (just the fi rst three pages and the sports section, say) newspaper you download and print every morning at work.

 

Maybe the LCD advertisement screens in your train carriage broadcast the TV newsfl ash on your way to school. It sounds fl ash, but so did colour TV in 1960. Anyway, it's still radio, TV and newspapers, right? The biggest change ahead for the media is what's called 'citizen journalism'.

 

Say your mate in Westport emails a video of an alien licking his barbeque to your PDA. You forward it to TVNZ, who checks it's not a fake and shows it on a news update 15 minutes later.

 

Meanwhile, your mate posts the video on his web log, his blogger mate in the US links to it, and the next thing you know the whole world is reading coasterboiz.

 

blog.com for regular updates on what it's like when your town is invaded by aliens. That's citizen journalism.

 

Some people think it will be the death of 'real' journalism, just like people thought TV would kill off radio. More likely, people will still want the offi cial news, with its access to important people, fact checking and good spelling, as well as the unoffi cial citizen news.

 

The way media gets the news to us has been changing constantly, and really fast, for decades. Colour TV didn't hit New Zealand until 1973. An early version of the internet was invented four years earlier, in 1969. The 'world wide web' has been around for 15 years.

 

Whether you fi nd out what's going on from TV, the internet, radio, newspapers or your favourite video blogger, the media is still doing its same old job: telling you the news. (Disclaimer: At the time of writing no aliens had ever invaded New Zealand ... as far as we know.

 

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