Public Address: Party on, dudes
Russell Brown
12 November 2012
Ten years ago today, the first post appeared on this website. It asked “are we on in Iraq or not?” I’m not very good with calendars, but I know this because a certain government
minister recently insisted that blogs didn’t exist way back then, and I had to look it up when someone asked.
Things seem to happen in November. The sixth anniversary of the launch of Public Address System, initially as a separate
community site, snuck by a couple of weeks ago. Until that point, we had a strong reader community, but no commenting
facility – a consequence of my own damnable cowardice, according to any number of angry people on the internet, but
actually more to do with budget and wanting to do it properly. In the post announcing PAS, I wrote:
The Public Address Café and Forum: Yes, finally, comments – although yer standard blog comments is precisely what I’m seeking to avoid. You’ll need to
register to post, our preference is for people to register and post under real names, and we will be moderating for
quality. I’m keen to expand the pool of people engaged in online discussion and I think an atmosphere of respect is
vital to that aim. For the time being, only our bloggers will be able to launch new topics, but I’m open to suggestions
for those. As we proceed, I’ll make a practice of inviting in people with knowledge and experience relevant to the
question under debate. There are several topics running already, so get in there. You’ll note there’s also a “discuss”
button at the bottom of this post.
I think it was worth the wait.
It was also around this time of year that Hard News began as a weekly radio rant on 95bFM, after Graeme Humphreys called
my bluff when I told he needed some informed comment on his station. That, believe it or not, was in 1991.
The text of Hard News, which I’d previously binned on my way out of the studio, began appearing on the internet in, I
think, late 1993.
By 2002, I felt tapped out with the radio format, and I liked the look of this blogging thing. A couple of mates had
started up their own web dev company. We’ll do you a site for free, they said. And here we are.
Many of the people I call friends now I have met through the forums here – too many to name, in fact. But I’d like to
make special mention of two readers I never met, but greatly wish I had.
One is Dorothy G. Dean of Bluff, a grandmother and self-described “liberal, staunch Labour feminist sceptic atheist,”
who wrote to me often in the early days of the blog. When I wrote about her after she died in 2004, a group of young gay men were so touched that she’d paid to put her name to a pro-civil unions
ad in the newspaper that they chipped in and sent a huge bouquet of flowers to Bluff. It probably helped that I titled
the post ‘Friends of Dorothy’.
The other is Finn Higgins, who some of you will recall from discussions on Public Address System, where he was a
keen-minded, literate, witty and sensitive debater. Fittingly, his last post here was a firm, calm dismissal of a particularly persistent troll.
Finn was a self-diagnosed Asperger human, and a couple of precious emails from him helped me immeasurably in getting
through a really difficult time with our younger boy, Leo. Finn was also prone to a major depression that had first
occured in his teens, and – after being badly let down by our mental health services – he fled his home and took his own
life in 2008. I still wish I’d met him. Even more, I wish Leo had met him.
You can read some more about Finn, and one of his emails, here at Humans.
Did I say trolls? Bless them and bugger them and thank the gods there haven’t really been all that many. I’ve
consciously erred on the side of tolerance, especially when it’s me getting the distress, and sometimes it’s been
unpleasant. I’ve engaged offline to try and bring people around. But I’ve only rarely had to ban people. (Flouncing out
is more common.)
The secret to that? The environment. We’ve been periodically accused of being a clique, of practising groupthink.
Perhaps sometimes there’s been some truth in it. But there’s far, far more truth in the idea that you’re a social,
sensitive group of particularly able debaters.
But most of you are not commenting; you’re lurking. That’s cool. No one makes the commitment of commenting at ever site
they read, and many people never do it. It implies a degree of public performance that is quite an odd thing. When I
urge people to share their experience here, sometimes I’m expecting them to give up a little privacy. Some people just
fret about looking silly. I get that.
But every month, Nielsen splits out a particular metric from its internet panel. One of those metrics is sites by
proportion of readers who are “active contributors” to blogs and internet discussion boards. Public Address has topped
that table every time it has been generated. Anecdotally, quite a few of you seem to have been arguing the toss online
since we were all thrashing about on Usenet.
As I have noted to various audiences, one key to good discussions is having warm bodies present to moderate. Much of the
time (although it’s been a boon having Emma’s wise counsel and mad skillz at hand) that warm body is me, and that can be
emotionally exhausting. I don’t have a particular moderation system (you’d be amazed how non-systematising I am) and I
think demerit points and the like can be worse than useless. Moderation through active participation suits me. I’m fuzzy
like that.
In aggregate, you are highly educated, high-earning and highly confident about using the internet – you appalling shower
of middle-class technocrats.
As individuals, you’re a bunch of oddballs. Quite a few of you seem to identify as being on the autism spectrum (not me:
I’m totes ADD) and I remain very proud of the way that Steven Crawford (where is he these days?) worked so hard to get
through his severe dyslexia and become a valued contributor. Crucially, you have brought what you know – and some of you
seem to know a hell of a lot.
Anyway, you’re all great and I’d say so to your mothers.
Big thanks also to everyone on the masthead: Damian Christie (the only OG apart from me), Keith Ng, Jolisa Gracewood,
Graeme Edgeler, Emma Hart, David Haywood, Hadyn Green, Craig Ranapia – and all the people who used to be there: David
Slack, Graham Reid, Fiona Rae, Che Tibby, Chad Taylor, Debra Daley, Rob O’Neill and the amazing Tze Ming Mok. To
everyone who’s ever given me a guest post for publication – there are too many of you to look up, but thanks.
There’s another anniversary this week too: it’s a year since Jackson Perry, Jon and Sophie Ganley and Robyn Gallagher
launched our photoblog, Capture. Capture has been a revelation; not only for the pictures in the posts, but for the coversations in pictures that flow
from them. The latter was something of an accident – we happened to have some legacy funtionality that just needed a
brush-up – but I have honestly never seen its like anywhere else.
There are important people outside the tent too. Deborah Pead saw the value in what I was doing long before most of her
peers did, and she and others at Pead PR are basically responsible for the fact that we’ve been able to run the Great
Blend events over the years. Those events have not only been enormously satisfying to curate, they played a significant
part in me having a job in television.
My dear friend Alastair Thompson, the publisher of Scoop, has been a friend of Hard News since long before there were blogs. Along with Rob Cawte, Mark Proffitt and 95bFM, he
republished the text of my Friday rants right up until this site launched. More recently, Scoop has run our ad sales
network – and taken the brunt of the punishing trends in internet advertising. I’m happy to say that recent developments
at Scoop bode well for its future, after a very tough couple of years.
And then there is CactusLab. I always thought Matt Buchanan and Karl von Randow were the smartest guys in the room, and it’s been a real privilege
to have the ’Lab design and develop our site. They’re amazing. And very patient about money.
But no one deserves more credit than Fiona, for (mostly) calmly putting up with my distraction, obsession and irrational
exuberance all these years. Love you, babe.
In terms of personal highlights here, I can’t even list them all – but how about that Keith Ng? His #wtfmsd story
recently attracted the biggest daily audience in the site’s history: 36,000 people came to visit that Monday. But
Keith’s reality-based groove started long before that day. I’m still immensely proud of the way he and Tze Ming debunked North & South‘s infamous ’Asian Angst’ story. That mattered.
I’m also proud of the role we were able to play in the wake of the Christchurch earthquakes. It’s hard not to feel
distant and useless when your friends face that kind of challenge, but we offered a place to share and talk and I think
that helped. The fact that some of the most valued members of our reader community came to us in that context and then
stuck around is hugely gratifying.
Then there’s Great New Zealand Argument. That transcript and recording of David Lange’s Oxford Union speech? They’re in the public domain only because we fought to put them there. (I’d also
like to thank the kind soul who ignored his bosses and gave me the recording to work with in the first place. And I
promise I’ll put the fully-corrected transcript up there one day.) Bill Pearson’s Fretful Sleepers was decades out of print until the lovely Donald Stenhouse ignored the counsel of his friends and let me post it. It
was a great joy to be able to later write Donald two cheques off the sales of the Great New Zealand Argument book.
Oh yes, books. Public Address Books. What a marvel David Haywood is. And, on the evidence of The New Zealand Reserve Bank Annual 2010, what a sick man. (You’ll note that Public Address Books is functionally offline at the moment. Perhaps we should do a
Christmas thing.)
In terms of the things I’ve written here, from that multitude of words, this little thing about my grandfather still makes me cry when I read it.
But I think my favourite thing we’ve ever published here is David Herkt’s A Very Simple Stroke, a sensitive, crafted, brutally honest account of his severe and disabling stroke and the recovery that followed. In
some small part that’s because it was published in the same week that Lance Wiggs wrote a blog post ticking me off
because posts here were longer than blog posts are supposed to be (350 words or something, I forget). Publishing a brilliant post of 6000 words was a lovely way to say
Do.Not.Care.
And I don’t. Really. In some ways, publishing on a bespoke platform has made things more difficult, but it lifts us out
of the constraints of “proper” blogging. I’ve been a little disillusioned with political blogging in the last couple of
years, because it seems so circular – and sometimes because I just feel exhausted. I’ve been doing this for 21 years and
I do find my historic productivity a little daunting sometimes.
I’ve basically given up any idea of making proper money out of this, but it would be nice if there was a bit more
income. I don’t think advertising’s going to do it – it’s not irrelevant, but the growth in internet advertising is
going to Facebook and Google, not little indies like us. When I saw Keith recently and asked him what he needed, he said
a good micropayments system would be nice, and I’ll work on that for next year. As things stand, your responses to to my
occasional appeals for donations have been tremendous. Have I ever told you that you’re good-looking, smart and generous?
But even though the energy comes and goes, and it’s been a wearying year, I can’t see that we’ll be going anywhere soon.
My sense is that, as has generally been the case, any additions to the masthead will come from the reader community, but
I’m aware that with the best of intentions, it’s hard for anyone to sustain a blog over time.
Most of what I’ve done as creative work in the past couple of decades has been tied up with the idea of drawing a crowd.
The only thing I’ve ever been really good at organising is a party. Similarly, running a discussion is, I think,
analogous to being a DJ – it’s a matter of trying to make other people’s music flow, and knowing a tune when you hear
it.
Well, we’re still open late. Keep dancing – and party on, dudes.
ENDS