How to make my journalism better

1. Pay for it. To do interviews, I need two cameras and a soundie. I'd rather like to pay those people rather than merely giving work experience to students. I got paid by Emanuel and others for my early films, including as a student.
   

2. Communicate corrections formally. Everyone's been giving themselves options to plausibly deny that they read our posts, but then drop hints that they are reading.

   That's not helpful. I make mistakes, like any journalist, but I'm an army of one.
   

3. Step up and edit my stories. I've got lots of editor friends, and it's rather difficult to keep juggling the journalist role and the editor role.

   The whole saga over my ancestry became a big deal in large part because of a lack of communication from others. It wasn't my decision to open up those files via the privileges that I had. Michael B did that to verify the composer, and it happened to have consequences for my whakapapa. While the other half of it was iwi groups. I wish they'd emailed me, but it appears as if their facts were solid, and RNZ stepped in to verify the entire story. Now that I'm an established journalist, it's fair to give me the same protections and access as those who work for legacy media, in order to prevent a repeat of this saga. - Regarding my ethics: journalists routinely defer to expert opinion. Just because it was happening via a back channel doesn't mean I wasn't doing my job in an ethical sense. That was simply the medium where the information was being given to me, but it was established that it came from papers that they'd seen. My uncle contributed a huge amount to the research, but he'd probably admit that the family history specialists were able to find rare files that the rest of us wouldn't have been able to find. As I say, the Dakumentary makes it plain that the surveillance is real, though that was largely talking about police surveillance. Since I Was Romeo is a song that's born from the fury of being constantly stalked, with a Five Eyes slant.