New Radio New Zealand chair Brent Impey has told every journalist who has interviewed him about his new role that he will not interfere in operational matters. He does not need to meddle because he has now made it abundantly clear where changes have to be made.

He told Colin Peacock on RNZ’s Mediawatch that there were four priorities. Audience numbers on RNZ National and Concert must improve. So, too, must the state-owned organisation’s level of trust, and the size of its various digital audiences. Finally, it needs to become country’s most popular digital news platform.

Earlier in the week he threw down the gauntlet to a principal target.  He told the New Zealand Herald’s Shayne Currie that RNZ was “coming after” the Herald’s NZME stablemate NewstalkZB. He also highlighted a point of difference between RNZ and the commercial network – 18 minutes of advertising to which RNZ audiences did not have to listen. That may have sounded odd coming from a man whose background was in leading a company that had fought hard for every advertising dollar it could earn. However, Impey’s experience as chief executive of MediaWorks for a decade taught him more about audiences than advertising.

That was clear from what Stewart Sowman-Lund reported in The Post. Impey told him young people were not interested in radio, which was the province of people over 50. And he acknowledged that the habits of this older audience were harder to shift. He told The Post that adding 28,000 to the listenership of RNZ National by the end of the year (a goal the broadcaster had set itself) was “actually quite a challenge”.

The over-50s may be harder to shift but they have already moved…away from RNZ.

Five years ago, RNZ National audiences peaked at 607,000 but today they sit around 500,000. Where have the 100,000-plus gone? Yes, part of the loss is natural attrition (a euphemism for death) but that does not really account for the decline because, at the same time, NewstalkZB increased its cumulative weekly audience by almost 60,000 to now sit at 657,400 – well ahead of the non-commercial network it once trailed.

It was plain and simple: RNZ National listeners changed their listening habit because the state-owned broadcasters was no longer meeting their preferences. It was no more apparent than in the premier breakfast timeslot.

Five years ago, it was a reasonably tight race. RNZ’s Morning Report led The Mike Hosking Breakfast on ZB by about 12,000 listeners and commanded an audience of 434,000. Today, Hosking’s programme draws an audience of 458,5000, with Morning Report trailing by a massive 122,000 listeners. There can be only one reason for that: RNZ has not been delivering what its audience wants.

Overall, RNZ sits at number three, behind NewstalkZB and The Breeze.

RNZ has been making good progress in the digital environment but it still lags behind Stuff, NZME, and streaming platforms. It must up its game to build audiences, particularly in younger demographics with which it is demonstrably unfamiliar.

However, on radio, Impey has signalled that he expects RNZ to win back audience. His comment about it not being a young person’s medium suggests there must be more emphasis on giving older listeners what they want. What he said to Colin Peacock about the over-50s audience may sound like stating the obvious – “you have got to make sure that what you do appeals to that audience” – but there have been times when that message appears to have been lost in the increasingly desperate quest for a younger audience (that isn’t there).

This is no more apparent than in RNZ National’s choice of music, which someone near and dear to me describes as “headbanging”. Why has the Breeze captured the top music radio spot? It has done so with music “from the 80’s through to today” and more emphasis on the familiar than the cutting-edge. RNZ has made the mistake of thinking that contemporary music is its way into a young person’s ears, even when the spoken bits between the “headbanging” are likely to interest an entirely different audience…and the young aren’t sitting by the radio anyway. In the process, it has lost listeners it did have.

Older listeners have also been turned off by other strategies in RNZ’s search for modernity. Parts of the RNZ offering have become infected by the chatty style of presentation that has been a by-product of the informality of social media and, hence, younger people’s approach to engagement. This is no more apparent than in Morning report – the biggest audience casualty – and allowing new recruit John Campbell to slip into that chatty-chatty format with Ingrid Hipkiss is a mistake.

Some listeners migrated to NewstalkZB in response to well-orchestrated claims of leftwing bias by the public broadcaster. Others were attracted by Hosking’s non-nonsense approach. Now NZME is about to provide a further alternative when Ryan Bridge Today finally becomes easily accessible on broadcast TV. It will start screening on Three next month. Bridge, too, takes a no-nonsense approach that is a welcome alternative to TVNZ’s chatty Breakfast. If Morning Report is to recover the audience it has lost, it must return to its practical journalistic roots – providing and explaining the news that sets you up for the day.

Impey recognises that drawing back RNZ’s old audience is “a challenging goal” and that the challenges do not end with programme formats. The broadcaster has made other strategic missteps such as over-interpreting its charter obligations.

A qualified lawyer, Impey knows how to choose his words carefully. So, when he was asked on Mediawatch last Sunday about Māori-related content on RNZ, he said simply that there needed to be a balance. I read that as recognition that, at times, that balance has not been maintained in the programming interpretation of charter obligations to tangata whenua.

For example, the use of untranslated te reo Māori on air has been a source of irritation to generations brought up in the less-enlightened times before opportunities to learn the language blossomed. Similarly, large programming segments focused on Te Ao Māori or the Māori worldview have sent older listeners in search of more familiar ground. RNZ’s lost listeners are not bigots, but they don’t tolerate feeling alienated by the unfamiliar, be it untranslated words or programmes produced in such a way that they feel excluded.

Brent Impey has clearly articulated the board’s view on where RNZ must focus. Perhaps more importantly, by conducted a series of interviews in his first week in the chair, he has created a subtext that the executive of RNZ – particularly the replacement for retiring CEO Paul Thompson – can usefully employ in meeting the board’s priorities.

 Impey’s measured views contrasted with the waspish comments by Michael Laws while announcing his NZ First candidacy in the forthcoming general election. Perhaps just a little presumptuously, he assumed a return to Parliament and announced his desire to take the broadcasting portfolio. In an equally cavalier tone, he stated that he intended to scrap RNZ.

Before we get too excited, we should see Michael Laws’ comments for what they were. They were designed to get him noticed. And they succeeded admirably. However, a lot of water must flow under the Waitaki Bridge before Mr Laws can be assured of any of those desires.