A week ago, my future journalistic plans were revealed by a Stuff.co.nz reporter, who’d spotted that I’d uploaded a trailer for a new podcast.

Clearly they watch my every move extremely closely, because after uploading said trailer at around 5pm on a Tuesday evening with no promotion or fanfare, there was an email in my inbox at 10:40am the next morning asking why I was launching a podcast. The story was published online six minutes later, so I can’t think they were too interested in my response.

Most other major New Zealand news outlets followed suit, reporting the “resurfacing” of this “disgraced broadcaster”.

(Without linking back to those articles, the short story is that I’m launching a news website called The Balance, and a companion podcast called RE:Balance, where the focus is on context, fairness, and reporting news without agenda)

Pretty soon though, this website - my personal one - was blowing up with hits. In fact, as I write, web traffic to kamahlsantamaria.com is up 169% month-on-month.

So I guess I should say ‘thank you’? I was more than happy to launch quietly at a time of my own choosing and let the word spread organically, but with all these articles and social media posts from New Zealand news outlets, I’ve been given a whole lot of free and unexpected publicity.

Reaction has been mixed (to use a lazy-but-still-used journalistic phrase) and inevitably, comments on some Facebook pages were shut down when they got racist and nasty. Others left them up, or didn’t allow comments from the outset.

This was a nice supportive comment, which was subsequently deleted - by either the author or the moderator (one would hope it’s not the latter):

And other comments like these are encouraging - people who have an open mind, who believe there’s another side to the story, and who are interested in a different way of approaching the news:

I know there’s plenty more of this to come, both positive and negative. It’s how social media works; it’s how democracy works.

And it’s also why I’m launching The Balance - to provide news and information based on fact, rather than rumour, speculation, and hearsay. The Stuff journalist questioned whether my pushback against the current “clickbaity, controversy-first media landscape” (my words) was in fact an agenda in itself. To that I say: since when was wanting to deliver accuracy, facts, and context an agenda?

As for when The Balance will launch… well, watch this space. Admittedly I’d like it to have been online by now, but a nasty bout of Covid-19 (remember that?… it’s still very real) did set things back a bit.

In the meantime, we’re already set up on twitter, Facebook, and Instagram (YouTube will go live with the website) and you can subscribe to the podcast through Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, and my personal favourite Pocketcasts (with thanks to Acast for hosting the whole thing).