Senior writer Anna Rawhiti-Connell subs in for Madeleine Chapman and reflects on observation, Facebook groups and what makes the grade as a story.
My husband and I frequently discuss getting cameras installed at home so we can keep an eye on our dogs when we’re out. We inevitably realise we’d just be watching them chew on the couch from a distance rather than discovering that when we get home. There’s a kind of enhanced impotence and anxiety that comes with being able to do something for the sake of it rather than solving a problem.
Gabi Lardies has unravelled that feeling and so much much more in her Cover Story this week: Selling security, delivering anxiety: The rise of home surveillance cameras. We publish these during the week, but in many ways, they’re also perfect weekend long reads.
I talked with her about this more in this week’s episode of Behind the Story, but the idea came from her simply observing something that was happening in local Facebook groups.
It takes skill, instinct, curiosity and research to figure out whether something you see on social media is a story. As we both realised, it also weirdly positions journalists as observers in online environments where most people are just living their lives. In many ways, we are always at a distance, always watching.
Gabi’s feature made me very grateful that the social-media-to-homepage pipeline has thankfully become a lot longer than it used to be, and “people doing things on social media” isn’t a novelty in and of itself. To become a story, it needs longer legs, and unlike the unregulated and unfettered posting of security camera footage online, taking a social media spark to fully-fledged story requires craft, work, no judgment and integrity.
This week’s episode of Behind the Story
Gabi joins me in this week’s episode of Behind the Story to discuss her observational instinct as a journalist, how she substantiates those observations, and how she balances empathetic and human storytelling with very big and often morally questionable forces on a topic like this.
So what have readers spent the most time reading this week?
- Bulletin editor, Stewart Sowman-Lund, looks into what’s going on at The Warehouse.
- Joel MacManus outlines why the internet’s favourite tax could soon be coming to the capital in his weekly Windbag column.
- Lyric Waiwiri-Smith unpacks the ‘Magic handjob’ remark made by commentators during last week’s All Blacks match and reflects on the return of “lad banter”.
- As featured above, Gabi Lardies’s Cover Story: Selling security, delivering anxiety: The rise of home surveillance cameras
- In our ever-popular Cost of Being series, a coffee-loving law student living in a freezing Wellington flat reveals how they spend their money.
Comments of the week
“What an excellent article and I do love a good sammy or is it a sammie. One thing I do find awkward is when I can’t actually fit the sammy into my mouth. That many are just too big and that their contents spill out and over onto my face and clothes and I have to use multiple serviettes to take evasive actions. I long for the old fashioned club sandwich, with a layer of egg salad, a layer of crisp cos lettuce and a layer of staunch cheese. I found a delightful one at Martha’s pantry last time I was in Welly: cream cheese with dill and cucumber. Simplicity itself but divine.”
— Kathycooks
- On Hera Lindsay Bird’s Hear Me Out: Ban all celebrities from reality TV game shows
“This is unbelievably accurate, and the only thing I find worse than full celebrity casts, is half celebrity casts. The first season of The Traitors US was half tv celebrities, and half normal people, which resulted in the kind of David vs Goliath gameplay that just made me feel sad for the normies. Nothing is worse than seeing a Below Deck castmate roasting an ER nurse for sport….”
Pick up where this leaves off
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