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Photo: TVNZ / Design: Archi Banal
Photo: TVNZ / Design: Archi Banal

MediaSeptember 7, 2022

TVNZ’s Sunday showed devastating scenes from Rotorua and the enduring power of TV

Photo: TVNZ / Design: Archi Banal
Photo: TVNZ / Design: Archi Banal

Sunday’s powerhouse story on the emergency housing disaster in Rotorua’s motels should be a marker of things to come, says Duncan Greive.

The man sits in high-vis, on a single bed, and sums up what we’ve just witnessed. “There’s all this drama out here,” he says, looking slightly embarrassed. “It’s hard to stay out of it, especially when you’re right beside it.” He’s one of more than a dozen tenants of Rotorua motels featured in Sunday’s bombshell package over the weekend, that rare piece of journalism so powerful it bends the entire news agenda to address it.

Spread over three segments and running to more than 30 minutes, Kristin Hall’s work is more like a short documentary than a typical current affairs package. It examines what happens when one of the most important parts of our tourism infrastructure – the motels on and around Rotorua’s Fenton St – are requisitioned to become emergency housing. 

The story was hardly the first to drill into this highly complex situation, but thanks to its location on the last remaining primetime current affairs show on mainstream TV – one which regularly hauls in around 500,000 viewers – its power fused with the audience scale to create a storm impossible for those involved to ignore.

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It started with archive footage of the city in the 50s and 60s, when many of those iconic Miami-style motels were constructed, while Daphne Walker’s Haere Mai (Everything is Ka Pai) plays breezily atop. It foregrounded the growth of Rotorua as a tourism icon trading off natural and geothermal wonders and its packaging of Māori culture. 

This runs headlong into a sequence of social media sourced scenes of brawling in the street and a car mounting the footpath, a witness describing a “crazy bitch… trying to run this dude over”. A map reveals the 50 motels housing 500 households in a densely packed area, while news footage shows four fires in less than a year. It is the story in miniature – what happens when the government takes over your city’s tourist accommodation and uses it to solve homelessness? 

The fiscal scale involved is staggering, with around $1m a day spent on motels, and tiny units costing $1,000 per week or more. The story is so densely packed that one of its most powerful moments is essentially an aside: a motel owner explaining that guests pay $150 a night, or $209 if it’s the ministry of social development footing the bill, “because [its tenants] use more electricity”. Hall inspects the rooms and finds black mould, cigarette burns in the pillow, a rusted out microwave and a doorframe shattered due to someone trying to gain entry. The reviews on booking.com are, unsurprisingly, irate.

Photo: TVNZ

Watching Sunday on demand, another dimension of the story was made bleakly clear. An ad from Tourism NZ, the government agency tasked with getting people to visit our country, played out. It was set in Rotorua, and showed children walking in the forest. The voiceover intoned that “something unexpected lurks too”, but “you can’t really see it from down here.” The irony was almost too intense to bear.

The main thrust of the story, though, is Tiny Deane. He’s the CEO of Vision, a charity which is also the biggest provider of transitional housing in the area through its motels. He’s usually a very accessible figure, and a supercut shows him greeted warmly on Breakfast and The Project. Sunday reveals him as also heading up a private security company which is contracted to all Vision’s motels, and seems completely out of control. There are allegations of Black Power members working, of guards having sexual relations with vulnerable tenants. Of a pregnant woman in labour being tossed from her sister’s unit to go through the early stages of childbirth in her car, only to lose the baby two weeks later.

Deane’s tenants, visibly fearful, tell Hall a series of heartrending stories, inside and outside of housing which the government pays huge sums for, but is manifestly unfit for human habitation. We see women with their tamariki choosing to live in tents rather than stay in Vision’s units, with footage of gazebos torn apart in wind and rain. Sarita talks about the ready availability of P in the motel she first moved into on Fenton St, “there’s a shop down there you can go to,” she says. “Room 5”. She moved to a Visions-run motel to get away from the drug, but encountered a new problem – security guards frisked her on the way in and took her key when she left the premise, conducting invasive inspections of her rooms. 

Deane, usually so happy to chat, wants no part of a conversation with Hall when she tracks him down after a month of refusing interviews. He orders her off the property, and locks the door. This is the biggest provider of transitional housing in the city, completely unwilling to engage with a journalist asking questions on behalf of his tenants. Later, when Hall puts questions about this to housing minister Megan Woods she is largely dismissive of the allegations.

It was incredibly harrowing viewing, a masterfully-produced package which captured the grim reality of life for tenants, the aloof indifference of a supposed community hero and the desperation of those watching it happen to their city. It has also catapulted the situation into a sustained position on the news agenda. 

After TVNZ’s Sunday, the Rotorua disaster dominated the main news sites in Aotearoa. (Screengrab: Duncan Greive)

Te Pāti Māori’s Rawiri Waititi called the situation a “trainwreck” on RNZ’s Checkpoint the following day, calling for an independent inquiry into what has occurred there, a rare issue on which he and National are in complete agreement. 

It showed the enduring power of TV current affairs to impact the world. Because while Sunday is far from the only show producing work of this nature – Q + A, The Hui, Te Ao and Stuff Circuit regularly do too – it’s the last one remaining with an audience at this scale. It also benefits from having the 6pm news and Country Calendar, by far the most popular shows on linear TV, as lead-in. As we set out to merge TVNZ and RNZ into a new fit-for-digital-purpose public media entity, it seems mandatory that figuring out how to make a product like Sunday hit as hard online must be top of mind.

Over the past couple of years, Kristin Hall has quietly become one of Aotearoa’s most impactful journalists. Along with Michael Morrah, she used the 6pm news to expose multiple failures of the MIQ system in ways which manifestly improved it. Earlier this year she did courageous reporting in the teeth of the occupation of Parliament. Now, newly recruited to TVNZ’s flagship current affairs show Sunday, she has produced an unimaginably powerful half hour of television, showing what happened to Rotorua’s ‘golden mile’ of motels when they were converted to become emergency housing. 

It’s a wildly complex issue, as Minister Woods is right to point out. Yet it also seems impossible that it carry on the way it is, despite there being no clear plan to amend the situation in the foreseeable future. Should that change – and after viewing this, it surely must – mark that down to Sunday, and the still awesome power of the right story put in front of the right audience.

Correction: this story has been updated to reflect that Serita’s experience with a P dealer in her motel was prior to moving into a Visions-run premise, and that Visions is a transitional housing provider, rather than a community housing provider. Apologies.


Follow Duncan Greive’s NZ media podcast The Fold on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider.

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Question time
Question after question after question. Image: Archi Banal

MediaSeptember 1, 2022

Why do headlines ask so many questions?

Question time
Question after question after question. Image: Archi Banal

Headlines that tempt readers to click with random questions have gone from a special occasion event to an everyday occurrence. Why?

Where is New Zealand’s best city for you? (New Plymouth.) Are you ready for Barbiecore decor? (No.) Why do my shoes squeak and what can be done about it? (Buy a new pair.) What’s going on underneath Lake Taupō and should we be worried? (Hmm.)  Live in New Zealand? (Yes.) At the top of your game? (Umm … no?)

Did you click on one of these headlines? Don’t be ashamed – you’re not alone. Every day, Aotearoa’s major news sites churn out pages of content that dangle a tantalising opportunity in front of readers. If you want to know the answer to the topic at hand, these headlines say, you’re going to need to give us a click. 

“It’s the ultimate in clickbait” says The Spinoff’s live updates editor Stewart Sowman-Lund. He admits to occasionally putting questions in headlines himself. He also clicks on those posted by other sites too. Recently, the fast-food fan read the story, “How do you get your Macca’s the fastest?”, a Stuff investigation into which app was quickest to deliver a Big Mac to the company’s Ponsonby office.

McDonald's
Screenshot: Stuff.co.nz

What was the answer? Sowman-Lund can’t remember. (For the record, dining in is the quickest way to get your Filet-O-Fish and fries, not Uber Eats). But it doesn’t matter. Stuff got their click, and in the world of online news, as Facebook and Instagram switch up their algorithms to focus less on news and more on short-form videos to rival TikTok, the click is the most important thing.

It didn’t used to be this way. Twenty years ago, before internet news came along and ruined a good thing, newspaper front pages used questions on only the rarest of occasions. That means they’re entirely a creation of the internet, a trend driven by lifestyle and travel sections that’s grown entirely out of control. It’s less about telling readers news, and more about daring readers not to click on a topic they may not have thought about until they were challenged on it. It’s a daily dose of pub quiz mentality mixed with the constant churn of clickbait roulette.

news headlines
Twenty years ago, newspapers had no need to use question marks in headlines. (Design: Archi Banal)

When you start looking, these kinds of headlines are everywhere. There’s an avalanche, a tidal wave, an onslaught of questionable headlines. Across the past three weeks, I’ve been informally analysing New Zealand’s biggest news sites – yes, that includes The Spinoff, where I admit I pose the occasional question too – to see just how much they’re being used. The answer? Often.

Top marks to the Otago Daily Times and TVNZ, who save them for a rare treat. At Newshub and RNZ, they’re used sparingly, often to great effect. The Spinoff posed five questions on its homepage on one survey day, all of them entirely clickable and including the wonderful alliteration: “What’s behind Aotearoa’s seafood boil boom?” (I clicked.) 

But, if there was a Voyager Media Award for posing headline questions, just two would be at the top duking it out to the death. That’s NZ Herald and Stuff, the mighty local news behemoths who pose questions to their readers so regularly they seem to be attempting some kind of brutal back-and-forth slam poetry competition. Twenty-two question marks could be found on Stuff’s homepage on one visit, and a whopping 52 on NZ Herald (some of which were repeated headlines in sections further down the page).

Are there trends? Thank you for asking. The answer’s yes. Mostly, these kinds of headlines fall into three distinct groups. Firstly, there are headlines that pose super-niche questions, possibly in an attempt to answer a question no one’s ever asked on a news site before, then sit on top of Google’s search engine results in perpetuity for anyone taking to Google to fix their squeaky shoes.

News headlines
Some of the niche questions headlines ask readers these days. (Design: Archi Banal)

The second category is reserved for headlines that use questions in an inappropriate way. These kinds of headlines make serious topics sound far more flippant than they probably should be, forcing readers to click with a weird combination of errant chirpiness and impending doom.

headline questions
Why so serious? (Design: Archi Banal)

The third category is saved for headlines that ask questions then answer them themselves, thus negating the need for a click. This happens a surprising amount. (I refused to click on one of these. Can you guess which one?)

headline questions
Headlines that answer themselves risk missing a click. (Design: Archi Banal)

There’s one more category, a personal favourite that I call the “WTF is this? Okay you got me, I’ll click” headlines. Full of abstract entries or those perhaps cut to fit into small spaces, they seem to have become lost in translation. They’re so good, and so strange, that if you put them on a T-shirt, I’d wear it.

News headlines
What are these headlines even doing? (Design: Archi Banal)

Is there a winner? Good question. Yes! Over the past three weeks of scouring and screenshotting news sites around the country, one stood out from all the others. The crème de la crème, the icing on the cake, the question to end all questions, the Voyager-winning entry for a category that doesn’t exist, is this stellar effort from RNZ.

Are you ready? Maybe sit down for this one.

breath

It’s timely, it’s relevant, it’s almost every category rolled into five exquisite words followed by a three-quarters circle and a dot. It’s a poem for the ages. Ladies and gentlemen, our back alley slam poetry competition has a winner. Chef’s kiss. (Didn’t click.)

But wait there's more!