Industrial Reporting in New Zealand's Daily Press: A Process Study

Abstract

A lack of studies on the process of industrial news production was noted, especially in the New Zealand context. Accordingly, a series of interviews with journalists and union officials was carried out. The questions in the interviews were designed to test this hypothesis: ’that, for industrial reporting so far, the news-values and needs of journalists and the media interests and approaches of unions have basically been incompatible.’ The hypothesis was found to be largely substantiated. The dominant emphasis of journalists' concepts of newsworthiness concerned negative industrial happenings; these were shown to clash with most of the media interests articulated by union officials. That situation was compounded by the needs of journalists and the approaches to media work of union officials. In many instances, problems tied up with the resources, requirements, priorities, tactics and habits of newspaper and union people were seen both to explain and to aggravate the incompatibilities already discovered.