Commentary
It takes more than global chaos to change the front page
The computer chaos that enveloped much of the world on Friday told us something about almost all of New Zealand’s daily newspapers: Either their deadlines mean they are no longer newspapers, their priorities lie elsewhere, or their "news" values are shot to hell.
I say “almost all” because one newspaper stood out from its contemporaries. The Otago Daily Times was the only paper that led its Saturday edition with the story of the catastrophic worldwide effect of a bad update of security software for Microsoft Windows-based computers.
For the Weekend Herald, it was more important to report on an elderly man’s inability to sell his house – in a story that contained NZME’s magic word OneRoof (its real estate site). The Post thought mouldy old Onslow College trumped global chaos, and The Press was more concerned about contaminated conservation land.
Pictured above: Some of New Zealand's mainstream newspapers responding to the global IT outage. Image: Knightly Views
The ODT led with a seven-column story under the headline “Update causes global IT outage”, combining both a local angle on the impact on local airline and emergency services with an explanation of the global outage from an Australian computer science academic.
The Herald relegated the story down page on page 2, despite an intro which read: “A global IT network outage caused chaos last night, downing banking services, disrupting flights, preventing supermarket purchases and causing havoc for public transport commuters”.
The Stuff mastheads ran no more than a single column story on page 3, devoted mainly to a measured statement from acting prime minister, David Seymour, saying the government was “moving at pace” to ascertain the extent of the crisis.
I would have thought there were enough pointers there to suggest this was a major story and one that potentially affected millions of people. I would have thought that a paragraph in the Stuff story saying a number of airlines had asked the US Federal Aviation Administration to initiate a global ground stop on all flights would have been one of those large, flashing, red pointers.
Stuff’s downplaying of the story in its Saturday print editions was all more extraordinary given that the news bulletin it produces for TV3 led its 6pm bulletin on Friday with breaking news of computer outages affecting banks, airlines, fast food outlets and supermarkets in New Zealand and in Australia where Sky News was also affected. TVNZ’s 1News at Six was interrupted 12 minutes into the Friday bulletin with similar breaking news.
Both the Stuff and Herald websites carried running coverage of the outages on Friday night, beginning at 6 pm. Their rolling coverage included minute by minute updates from both local and international sources, all of which pointed to the growing scale and seriousness of the situation.
What does this tell us?
It tells us that all mainstream newsrooms knew about the growing chaos no later than 6 pm on Friday. Stuff’s first report coincided with the start of 3News at 6pm and three minutes later its website was listing affected banks and online traders. Before 7pm the site was carrying pictures of notices in local store windows apologising for checkout issues.
By 6.18 pm, the New Zealand Herald knew the problem was most likely traceable to CrowdStrike’s security update for Microsoft Windows and was referring to it as a “Global IT outage”. By 7.03 pm the Herald website was reporting the grounding of aircraft around the world.
Both Stuff and the Herald put commendable effort into digital coverage of the growing global catastrophe on Friday night. Stuff’s coverage may have had the edge and updating did not end until after midnight before resuming shortly after 4 am on Saturday.
Therein may lie the reason why neither the Herald nor Stuff splashed the story all over the front pages of their weekenders. Perhaps they were too busy feeding the voracious digital monster to devote any resources to ensuring print coverage matched the online effort.
I accept that the print deadlines for Saturday papers can seem somewhat tyrannical on Friday night, but I do not accept that this story broke too late for any of them to completely remake their front pages and make additional space available on inside pages. Nor do I accept that there was insufficient information available to fill those pages.
Further, I don’t buy the argument that the print edition would be overtaken by events. If that was a tenable position, no breaking news story would ever be covered by a newspaper. The role of the newspaper in such situation is to gather, collate and present known facts in a manner that gives as complete a picture as possible at the time. It stands in contrast to the stream-of-consciousness approach of digital platforms that distribute each development (small, large or irrelevant) as it emerges and often without context.
Newspaper front pages, particularly at weekends, are often fine examples of form over substance. Eye-catching design takes precedence over the real worth of the content. Many are driven by emotional pull rather than significance. How many lead stories can legitimately claim to be the most importance thing that happened in the country or the world during the previous day?
Certainly, none of the lead stories in our country’s latest Saturday editions – the ODT aside – could make such a claim. That is because the single most important thing that happened in the world the previous day was the most disruptive event in the history of computing. A bad cybersecurity patch had accomplished what the world had feared in the lead-up to the Millenium.
CrowdStrike’s bad cybersecurity patch caused the sort of havoc we had all feared from the Y2K bug and had spent billions of dollars to forestall.
Australia’s metropolitan newspapers were in no doubt about the importance of the story. All devoted their front pages (and more) to it. Yes, they had a little more lead time but, as the Sydney Morning Herald reported, systems began to fail at 3 pm AEST (5pm NZT). We are not so slow that a couple of hours lead at that time of days cuts New Zealand out of the race. If our newspapers had wanted to lead with the story, they could have done so.
Dunedin’s daily proves the point.
Disappointed though I was with Saturday morning’s papers, I am a resilient soul. I thought: “Ah, well, they’ll do better tomorrow.”
I subscribe to both the Sunday Star-Times and the Herald on Sunday. The way they were folded into my letterbox, I saw the top of the SST first. The heading sat above the fold: “Special Report: ‘Something goes wrong and it can stop the world”.
Good, I thought, they’ve finally done the story justice (six pages of coverage plus an editorial and cartoon). Editor Tracy Watkins reminded us of Y2K and said it had finally happened “just a quarter of a century later”. It was good to see the magnitude of what had taken place a couple of days earlier was not lost on her.
It transpired, however, that her judgment of the news value of the story was not shared elsewhere.
I turned to the cover of the Herald on Sunday, a kaleidoscope of pretty promos for inside stories. Squeezed in the middle was a single strapline that I admit I’d missed at first glance: Scam warning after global IT outage 7.
At the bottom of page 7 – beneath a real estate story sporting that much-loved OneRoof logo – was a story about “opportunistic malicious cyber actors” taking advantage of the distribution of a fix to perpetrate scams. Twenty five pages on was a Reuters story setting out how long it might take to repair the chaos.
Only the paper’s cartoonist, Rod Emmerson seemed to grasp the significance of the situation. He likened the election of Donald Trump as president to the ‘blue screen of death’ that alerted Windows users to the patch problem. Perhaps if it had been a car crash instead of a computer crash, the Herald on Sunday may have taken more notice.
There is a book on news values written by veteran British journalists Paul Brighton and Dennis Foy. They end the book by saying that in the hourly battle to make sense of events, to check, contextualise and explain them – regardless of deadlines – the journalist will still be working mostly by instinct.
They said the response to the question ‘why is this news?’ may well remain: “It just is”.
My instinct tells me that the front pages our papers on Saturday morning should have looked like those in Australia a few hours later. Why? They just should have.