Serious questions for Jared Savage & the NZ Herald

So, further to the Cameron Slater email that felled Judith Collins, there’s a particular line in the email that’s rather troubling:

I am maintaining daily communications with Jared Savage at the Herald and he is passing information directly to me that the Herald can’t run and so are feeding me to run on the blog.

Perhaps Jared Savage might like to explain what precisely he as a journalist was doing feeding information to Cameron Slater that Savage couldn’t publish himself. If the NZ Herald can’t use certain information in a story, it’s presumably because they’re worried about the legal consequences. So why would a reputable journalist then pass that information on to a blogger to use?

Let’s look at the Len Brown sex scandal story. It wasn’t something any mainstream media outlet was going to touch. Until it was all over the Whaleoil site, which meant that it was now news. Was/Is there a similar modus operandi here from those working at the Herald? We can’t run the story, but if we give it to Slater we can report on what he’s “reported”?

Or was it simply a Herald smear campaign against the then-SFO director? “We can’t report it, but we want to take him down.” Because if that’s the case, that’s not journalism; that’s a vendetta. Worse, it’s a vendetta performed in secret by the very people we are supposed to trust as impartial reporters of fact.