A journalist kicked out of his local café kicked off hot debate in the media this week, and Gen Z copped criticism in the middle of all that - and not for the first time. But the appetite for a super-long but very popular local podcast shows assumptions about short attentions spans can be wrong.
Photo: Unsplash / Rod Long
Lisa Owen launched into Monday’s episode of RNZ’s Checkpoint with what proved to be one of the top media talking points of the week.
"A growing tribe of office nomads means more people are settling into cafés with a coffee and a laptop to smash out a bit of work. But how long is too long to keep the seat warm? Does it depend on the spend and how busy it is?"
That set up an interview with the man who kicked off the commotion, the aptly-named Hawke’s Bay Today deputy editor Mark Story.
His first-person account of being booted out of Napier’s Smiths café after an hour, despite coughing up $12.50 for a coffee and brioche, proved to be a lightning rod for coverage.
Checkpoint served up the full journalism buffet, with his interview leading into some vox pops.
Newstalk ZB’s café-gate coverage spanned eight hours of programming, with Story appearing on Kerre Woodham’s mid-morning show and chef Martin Bosley weighing in on the topic on Heather du Plessis-Allan's Drive.
Over at Newshub's AM, presenters Lloyd Burr, Amanda Gillies, and Nicky Styris were at odds over whether it was Story or his adversaries at Smiths in the right.
A bit much coverage of one journalist leaving a café a little bit earlier than expected?
That’s certainly the take of Smiths café owner Lisa Caro, who - according to Story - confronted him with the classic line: "Is this newsworthy?" when he called asking for comment. She then barred him from all her Napier establishments.
A café perma-ban may be a bit over-the-top - but did Caro have a bit of a point?
One of the strange privileges of being a journalist is that your minor grousing can get elevated to national significance even if it’s not necessarily significant.
Having said that, it’s not like you can just foist any old complaint on the audience and expect to get cut-through.
Take it from someone who’s repeatedly tried and failed to use their journalistic platform to get the Big Fresh animatronic fruit and veggies into Te Papa — there’s an art form to this.
Niche complaints only get wider coverage if they actually resonate with a large section of the public - and Story’s story did strike a nerve.
But another reason for the mass coverage may be less justifiable.
Ahead of her interview with Martin Bosley on Monday, du Plessis-Allan explained that she's covering the story because - as a senior journalist - Story was "respectable", unlike some "whining Gen Z journalist".
The idea that young people are our nation’s loudest whiners doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Just this week we got the news that campaigners are taking Wellington Council to court for allowing too much housing in so-called character areas, while in Auckland, campaigners have started a Givealittle so they can take the council to court for letting a carpark get redeveloped.
Once Stuff ran an entire column in the form of an open letter from someone complaining that a service station employee hadn’t been apologetic enough for not having sausage rolls in stock.
"Dear Staffer - I was in your petrol station recently and pointed out to you that your hot food cabinet didn’t have its usual sausage rolls. I was ordering a coffee from you at the time, and your response was a great big expressive shrug of the shoulders," it began.
Leighton Smith once began a column complaining about cycle lanes with: "On the cycle lanes, I saw an e-scooter. There was one of the new e-scooters on the cycle lanes."
I’d wager that upwards of 90 percent of our media moans, whinges, grumbles and grouches come from the same demographic - including complaints about young people complaining too much.
Another thing often said about Gen Z is that they have the attention span of a newt.
In the words of former Newstalk ZB host Kate Hawkesby, Gen Z is "entitled, easily distracted, full of opinions, with short attention spans".
Gen Z’s changing media consumption habits get a lot of the blame for the supposed death of journalism.
As they’ve migrated to social media and Netflix, in-depth current affairs has disappeared from our TV screens and long-form interviewing has gone into decline.
Media companies have contorted themselves into making short, snackable content in an effort to entice younger audiences to visit their sites instead of TikTok.
That would indicate that Hawkesby is right and these young whippersnappers she spoke of don’t want to pursue anything at a deeper level.
But go to the media places where young people actually spend their time, and a more complex picture emerges.
YouTube has a lot of silly stuff but also two-hour videos on topics from Greek history to American politics.
Some of the most popular YouTubers carry out insightful interviews. The channel Hot Ones recently got an Emmy nomination for its incisive, hot chicken-fueled interrogations of celebrities and public figures.
Podcasting - another medium where the audience skews younger- offers plenty of in-depth, long-form interviewing as well as highly-produced journalistic investigation, such as RNZ’s Nellie's Baby or Newsroom’s The Boy In The Water.
So has serious journalism and interviewing really been murdered by Gen Z? Or has it just moved house, like a Gen Z renter that’s been evicted by their landlord?
There’s plenty of evidence that younger audiences still want challenging, longer-form content so long as it’s tailored to a medium and a style that suits them.
A case in point is Between Two Beers, one of the most listened-to podcasts in New Zealand.
It has been downloaded more than 3 million times and many episodes feature meticulously researched interviews with well-known New Zealanders that can stretch to two hours or more.
Its hosts Steven Holloway and Seamus Marten told Mediawatch their show is targeted at a slightly older demographic than Gen Z - people 30 to 55 years old - but nearly three-quarters of the audience still listens right to the end.
Holloway said it's less that people have lost their attention spans, and more that they're consuming content at the extremes - either ultra-short video or in-depth interviewing and journalism.
"There's just more space for it on podcasts," he says. "How hard would it be on TV to do a 90 minute show? How hard would it be to find funding or sell the idea? We don't have any guardrails."
That lack of those guardrails and the low overheads for a podcast mean they have the space to hone their product.
Holloway said he's optimistic the low barriers to entry and relative freedom in digital audio will enable journalists to replace at least some of the important work that's disappearing from traditional mediums.
But Marten, who's still a 6pm news appointment viewer, said that doesn't mean it can ever fully replace what a show like TVNZ's Sunday used to provide.
"There's a lot that's coming out now and not all of it's fantastic, let's be honest," he said.
Even so, there's always going to be gems in amongst the dross.
Between Two Beers started out with the pair interviewing Holloway's dad in a Hamilton garage.
Holloway said good products need time to develop, and thankfully in their industry they've been able to take that time without a chief executive announcing they're going to be restructured out of existence.
"We get asked: 'What's your trick to succeeding?' And it's literally just 'keep going'. If it's good enough and it gets shared enough the audience will come."