In the Herald again

The Timaru Herald was always my newspaper when I was growing up. Back before the internet, when there was still so much money in media advertising, the daily paper was still a vital source of local and world information and I read every edition from cover to cover for years.

So when I first trained as a journalist in 2004, one of the greatest thrills I would ever have in my reporting life was getting published in the Herald on a regular basis while training at Aoraki Polytech. The paper took full advantage of a class of young journos able to provide for free copy, and during the year of my diploma in print journalism course, I got multiple stories published in the Herald.

I still have them in a clippings book. Some of them were pretty good, a few made the front page of the paper. And I never got paid a cent for any of it (although the paper did use us for some advertising copywriting when the course was winding up, and after a year of student life, that felt very fucking lucrative).

I've been around a few places since them, and haven't worked for the company that publishes the Herald since the late 2000s. But now I work for the national public broadcaster, and we have a content sharing arrangement than means the country's other media companies can publish our shit on their websites and in their newspapers. And since they get to use our copy for free, sometimes you see entire pages of newspaper that have nothing but our stories on them.

So it really isn't a surprise to open the local paper in a local cafe, and see a quick spot news story that I wrote up the night before right there on the page, with the exact phrasing that I had been wrangling with in our front room the day before.

Huh. Still a thrill.

Needless to say, I still ain't getting paid, so after 20 years as a professional journalist, I'm still getting published in the Herald, and still not getting anything out of it. This has been a great, big and useless metaphor for the state of the modern news media.