Innovate Innovate Innovate

"Underpants Underpants Underpants" - C. Gambino

Innovation.

That’s a word being bandied around a fair bit at the moment.  According to our beloved PM the journalists of our country failed to innovate and therefore brought about their own downfall.  But now the apparently innovative Stuff has come (at least partially) to the rescue.  Presumably, in the Newshub sense, this innovation was largely of a fiscal sense.

Innovative.

It’s a funny word.  Officially it is all about new methods and ways of thinking.  Nothing wrong with that, on the surface.

But when you scratch that surface, get past the fact that it is a nice sounding word, it starts to sound glib and hollow. It makes the person saying the word seem like they’re all over everything and have the future in their sights, but what does “innovate” actually mean, in the practical world?

For example, how do you innovate, when it comes to the news? (Apart from making it cheaper and with less actual humans involved.)  Is it all about dressing it up in shiny new clothes?  Or taking all the clothes away if you were one of those Russian news shows from back in the day.

Maybe you could argue that The Project was innovative in that it gave comedians the chance to ask serious news questions on live TV.

You could definitely argue that the single greatest innovation in recent news history was Fox News, which untethered the news from annoying things like truth, accuracy or even reality.

Innovative.

The more I think about the word “innovative” the less it seems to mean.  Seriously, tell me how you innovate news.  Sure, you can refine the processes of making it and the way it looks and feels, but surely the fundamentals of collecting news and then disseminating it in a form people can understand are pretty hard to move away from.  Beyond that what passes for innovation all seems like window-dressing and (again) economics.

I bet if you asked the major players in our governmental threesome what might constitute innovation in the news media, you would end up with three very different answers.  I’m thinking Winston’s ideal innovation would be that the news media would just fuck off in its entirety.  David Seymour would want them to only write and say nice things about him.  I have no idea what Christopher Luxon would say, but then again I have no idea about anything he ever says.  To me he always sounds like a series of bullet points put together by someone else, then fed through a bald man.

Innovation.

Easier said than done.