Mediawatch The death and rebirth of a long-lasting column
The New Zealand Herald column Sideswipe ended in May after a 21-year run. Its creator attributes its longevity to good curation and building a community.
The New Zealand Herald column Sideswipe ended in May after a 21-year run. Its creator attributes its longevity to good curation and building a community.
When Sideswipe ended in May, the question some people asked was how it had survived so long.
The New Zealand Herald column collating quips and oddities from around the internet and sometimes from its readers ran for 21 years.
When it started, the world wide web was still in its dial-up era. There was no Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, or TikTok. Even Myspace did not exist.
When those platforms came along, some predicted Sideswipe's demise. Jokes and quirky news were not just easy to come by on social media; they often arrived unbidden, in a torrent.
But Sideswipe kept trucking along in spite of that, outlasting every other column in the country and a number of media outlets - from Buzzfeed News to myriad local papers - that big tech did manage to murder.
Even its death in May has not been permanent.
Sideswipe has emerged, Jesus, or perhaps, cockroach-like from the grave, finding a place in The Listener's new digital subscription service under a new name, Ana Samways' Digital Bonfire.
Samways said creating a community and careful curation were the keys to her column enduring in the face of online headwinds.
"I started before all that happened so I think I had a captive audience who couldn't be arsed finding their own content so they wanted it curated for them. They're busy people and you just have to scroll through so much to get the gold. So I think that's part of why it worked."
Samways said Sideswipe was partly successful as one of the first "snackable" media offerings.
It also helped that it did not have the same mean tone or toxic content of a place like Twitter, she said.
"Not being horrible because the internet is a nasty, nasty world out there and I think that really made a difference."
Samways said there was not much fanfare at NZME over the end of the column, despite its longevity.
"My understanding is there was still a decent amount of engagement, decent amount of readers. Like everything these days, it comes down to money and you've only got a limited amount and you've got choices to make and you make choices based on what you think is going to be most profitable for your organisation."
Ana Samways' Digital Bonfire might have elements of Sideswipe, but it was more likely to contain more opinion and investigative work, she said…