Month: June 2024

Shields insists editorial instinct and control remain critical. For example, keeping the recent Bondi attack news in front of the paywall and open to all, but also choosing not to publish Ash Good’s name, despite knowing early on that she was the woman tragically killed after passing her injured baby to a stranger.  

“I have no doubt if we published that story it probably would have been well-read. A lot of our competitors ran it that night. In my gut, I just thought it was way too soon,” says Shields. 

“If you had a robot making those decisions, it would have run that story straight away. But having instinct, insight and understanding of what is right and where the lines are is still important.”  

Another example is where he says instinct lay behind the decision to campaign hard for pokies reform in NSW.  

“The only jurisdiction in the world with more poker machines per capita is Las Vegas, Nevada. So it’s an absolute source of human misery in New South Wales and Sydney. There was a big report from the Crime Commission that said the government is going to have to deal with this and we used that as a stepping stone to campaign on this issue,” says Shields. 

“My instinct was, there's a moment here and a time here for change, and we went really hard on that. Initially there was very little audience for that story and for that issue. We built that over time, and it did become very good for us and our brand and it led to public policy change. But if you were driven solely by the analytics and didn't factor in anything else you wouldn't touch that story.” 

Rigas agrees. 

“One of the reasons there has been such a keen uptake in the data is because we do acknowledge that if you are an editor and a specialist in whatever field, and you really believe that something is an important story to tell, then we're going to back you,” she says. 

“If we are just looking at data constantly, we're never going to surface any of those original yarns, and that's really what we're about. So, you can't just go 100 per cent on data, and that's also not our strength.”  

Shields says commitment to public-interest reporting, balanced journalism and doing the right thing ethically is why readers come to mastheads like the Herald. 

“We’re nothing if our readers don't trust us. It begins and ends with that, in my view. Readers have to have confidence that we're not some AI robot, that we're actually humans who are making informed decisions and have the readers’ best interests at heart – and also the journalism.”