Is this the age of Substack?

If mainstream media won’t report on their own then others will have to

The most significant aspect of the Maiki Sherman affair is that it became public because a Substack writer made it so.

David Seymour made his distaste for the year-long media silence on the matter very obvious by calling April 28^th “Ani O’Brien Day.” This was in honour of the woman who wrote an online expose about how the TVNZ Political Editor had homophobically insulted another political reporter, her one time TV3 colleague Lloyd Burr, now at Stuff, at a function in the Finance Minister’s office in May last year.

What Ani O’Brien did required some courage. A lot more than the Parliamentary Press Gallery had shown in the last year. The incident in Nicola Willis’s office where the insult took place was reportedly well known around the parliamentary traps. O’Brien thought it deserved some public airing, taking the attitude that if journalists are constantly holding politicians to high standards of behaviour then it surely behoves them to keep to the same standards.

That’s essentially why she blew the whistle. I subscribe to Ani O’Brien’s work. Her Substack “Thought Crimes” is published regularly and displays great insight of the Wellington political and bureaucratic scene despite her now living, I believe, in Auckland. She admits she is far from popular in media circles and in a self-deprecating way describes herself as “just a disagreeable woman who is devastated by the abdication of duty by the media so set up a Substack.”

I’ve met Ani in person once and been on some panel shows with her. She was actually a foundation staff member of The Platform in 2022. But that didn’t end well.

She’s smart and well informed. Our first encounters would have been around 2019 when she was the “Stand Up for Women” spokesperson in the early days of the trans madness. The mainstream media’s distaste for her no doubt stems from that time. Working in Judith Collins office wouldn’t have improved her standing with the Press Gallery cabal either.

When I read her April 28^th “Thought Crimes” over breakfast that morning – it was in my inbox at 6.32am – my immediate thought was can this story be ignored any longer?

But the breakfast talk shows, to my knowledge, never touched it.

It was Shayne Currie from the NZ Herald’s Media Insider who took it mainstream. He had his story on-line by lunchtime and then updated it again late afternoon with comment from politicians and TVNZ.

By the end of the day all major mainstream media organisations were running the story in some shape or form.

But they were followers, not leaders.

The mainstream media had reacted to a part-time writer’s blog. The same happened when lawyer Philip Crump - writing on Substack as Thomas Cranmer - exposed serious issues in Nania Mahuta’s Three Waters legislation in 2022 and when Cameron Slater blew the whistle on Auckland’s Mayor Len Brown and his affair with Bevan Chuang in 2013.

The latest media trust survey came out recently. There was a small bounce in the number of New Zealanders who now trust the media – it went from 33 percent to 37 percent – but it’s still a dreadfully low number.

If the media can’t report a story like this because they may be afraid of the consequences - or just want to look after one of their own - then how are those levels of trust ever going to improve?

There are more than 17,000 paid Substack writers globally and many more who don’t charge for their musings. There are also other self publishing platforms like Wordpress and Patreon plus the well established blog sites like Good Oil, Kiwiblog and The Daily Blog. And we haven’t even mentioned Facebook and X.

It’s well established there is a wide and varied alternative media world out there. But if the legacy or mainstream types want to reassert their previous dominance they could do well to be leaders not followers.