Subscribe to RSSHerald’s Train Coverage Old School
I have long given up the ritual of reading the Herald regularly either in printed form or online, (where it’s constantly beaten for breaking news and variety by Stuff, let alone trying to decipher the Herald’s confused over-bearing over-crowded home page).
In its attempt to be relevant it has become irrelevant to its community, with its ignoring of what’s going on locally and it’s obsession with stories about mothers grieving for their child who behaved badly and died.
Twice this week I have caught a train story on nzherald using the same ancient photo.
Like this story about a train derailment in Dunedin.
The photo, not captioned, is not of Dunedin and not even how I picture Britomart.
As the Herald is based in Auckland city, shouldn’t a photographer at least wander a few metres down to Britomart to update their library?
And readers tell me the Herald has yet to show any photos of Onehunga’s train station being built.
I guess on Monday, if we are lucky, they might acknowledge it opened at the weekend and use this same photo.
9 Comments
I guess the same can be said then about photo’s published of security guards at Britomart that presumeably work at Newlynn!!!
@Kelly Good spotting. Actually, the debate about security guards behind the scene did actually involve their activities at Britomart as well.
Stuff is better, but they don’t really do Auckland news (unless it’s of the “How Much Better Wellington is than Auckland” variety).
The last couple of stories they have done on the Overlander they keep using a photo of the Bay Express which hasn’t run for years.
Further to it not being in Dunedin, the photo is of a passenger train. The story is about a freight train derailment.
Thats two very different things, especially as a passenger train derailing has the potential for a lot of people on board to be hurt.
I’ve actually noticed the Herald has 3 or 4 (maybe even 5) photos they use for train stories…. all are at britomart, and all have a platform to one side of the photo, and a train on the other, possibly with some people in the foreground. At least the other ones are of our nice refurbished trains…. but you’re right,it really is a bit lazy- especially for a freight train at the other end of the country
Interesting discussion. Myself, I used to favour Stuff over the NZH website, until Stuff changed their layout last year, and started sourcing more and more of their stories from Australia. Frequently I would start reading an article, thinking it was New Zealand based, then as I got further into it, realised it was Aussie.
So, now, NZH is my first source of news (after AKT!).
While I’m talking about Aussie takeover of our news here, TWorld on Telecom mobile changed to Yahoo!Xtra TWorld earlier this year, and it is TERRIBLE! TWorld used to be an exellent news headline page, and good links to local sites. Now with Y!X running it, it too has mainly Aussie headlines. It appears to be auto-generated headlines, but has been poorly developed, such that it frequently links to the same article multiple times.
On more than one occasion, I have seen the one section have all three headlines on the same story (and each section links to three only three stories!), and at least one more time in another section. They also don’t respond to feedback on this, which is really bad.
It is more than 12 hours after the Onehunga line has opened and there is still no news on NZHerald on this.
I had a look at Stuff and their main rail report is that the Matangi trains have broken down.
“it really is a bit lazy”
A BIT lazy? It’s pitiful. Especially when for example they could use images from Wikimedia Commons or Flickr that have appropriate licenses (they’ve done that before, so it’s not that they have a policy against it, apparently).