How a big sign on the Wellington waterfront exposed a problem with local news.

Cringeworthy.

Childish.

Trashy.

Embarrassing.

Tacky.

Encouraging illiteracy.

Stupid.

Piece of junk.

Unimpressive.

Hideous.

Trite.

Frivolous.

Unimpressive.

Pathetic.

Ugly.

Dumb.

An eyesore.

The biggest waste of money yet.

Those are all direct quotes from mainstream media coverage and social media reactions when the Well_ngton sign first appeared on the Wellington waterfront. The $130,000 sign was commissioned by WellingtonNZ, the regional economic development agency, which means it was built with ratepayer money but was not a council decision.

The sign launched with a photo of mayor Andy Foster holding a yellow umbrella à la Mary Poppins, and a press release from WellingtonNZ full of marketing buzzwords about how it was “engineered to invoke curiosity and engagement”.

Nearly universally, Wellington’s chattering class dismissed the idea with deep, bitter cynicism. I was among them. At the time, I was writing for Stuff and The Dominion Post and almost concussed myself from rolling my eyes so hard. My opinion was shared by most of the newsroom. Amid all of Wellington’s other serious issues, it felt insulting that WellingtonNZ thought the solution was a silly sign that didn’t even spell the city’s name correctly.

Three years on, it’s safe to say that I was completely wrong. The Well_ngton sign has been a runaway success. It’s become the default photo for any Instagram post about a visit to Wellington, for tourists and major international artists alike. To take the photo at the top of this story, I had to wait in line behind four other people who wanted the same shot. That $130,000 one-time cost is looking like a bargain now. For about 10% of WellingtonNZ’s typical annual advertising spend, the agency created a long-lasting physical structure that provides ongoing tourism promotion without any additional effort. It’s hard to put a number on the sign’s economic value (any formula that claims to calculate advertising value equivalent from earned media is essentially plucked out of thin air) but it’s safe to say the investment has paid off many times over.

That we were so overwhelmingly wrong deserves some reckoning. The problem, in my view, all boils down to an industry-wide problem with cynicism, which filters out throughout the public.

By their nature, journalists are sceptical people who are suspicious of authority. That attitude is amplified by workplace culture. Junior reporters are assigned the lightest, fluffiest stories and quickly learn that gaining prestige comes from writing critical stories. You aspire to expose failures, ask hard questions and hold power to account. Those are the kind of stories that win awards and praise from editors.

It becomes a problem when newsrooms develop a culture where negative reporting is the only respected reporting. You become blinded by your quest for scandal. You develop a one-track mind and become blinkered to the bigger picture, thinking only about how to generate the most rage-inducing headline. I can tell you from experience that approaching your job from a baseline of negativity is a great way to make yourself fucking miserable – which only leads to more negativity.

It’s compounded even further by the time pressures of daily news reporting, where you may be expected to file multiple stories per day. New Zealand media generally puts too much focus on quantity over quality. Stuff publishes more articles per day than the New York Times. Many newsrooms are still very traditional hierarchical environments, reporters are under a great deal of pressure to fulfil their editors’ demands.

What happens when you combine a system that incentivises negative stories, an unrealistic output expectation, and a strict top-down power structure? You start reaching for stories that may not be there. You stretch the truth a little. You might get a tip or an OIA that isn’t quite as scandalous as you first hoped, so you try to salvage the story by framing it narrowly to sound as outrageous as possible.

Rather than thinking “Is this a story that I’m confident and proud to publish?” you start thinking “Is this a story that will hit my quota and get my editor off my back?” There are a few stories in my career that I regret publishing, and they almost all fell into that second category.

Audiences for local political news are pretty sophisticated. They tend to notice when a story doesn’t stack up. This drags down the company’s reputation and the overall trust in news. Social media commenters might jump to accuse the reporter of being a partisan shill pushing an agenda, but that’s usually not the case. Most of the time when a good reporter puts out a bad story, it’s a product of a system that enables and creates subpar work.

It’s not that holding truth to power isn’t important – it is. But in reality, it’s only a fraction of what we do. Most journalists will be lucky to have a handful of stories in their career that expose genuine wrongdoing and cause any directly quantifiable difference in the world. Those stories should be just a small part of the larger goal to raise the level of public discourse. As media, that’s how we can make the greatest difference in the world.

Every city has to have public discourse so it can make collective decisions. If a city’s citizens are more informed and engaged, they’re generally going to make better decisions, which leads to better outcomes for everyone. Public discourse isn’t just the conversations in the council chambers, but also the ones at the dinner table, the break room, or – for the real sickos – on social media. If a city’s public discourse is dominated by lazy reactionary outrage, that is a damning indictment of the quality of its local media. It shows that readers are not getting the information they need to have productive discussions. As media, we can’t control the public discourse but we can support it. Every story is an opportunity to arm readers with new information or arguments for them to consider and analyse, which will eventually filter out into discussions with their peers.

Here’s my goal for Windbag as we head into the local body elections later this year. You may not agree with all my takes (nor do I expect you to) but I hope you’ll gain insights that make your conversations more interesting and fulfilling.