NZ news media need higher productivity – from the rest of us

Even at his most philosophical, columnist Matthew Hooton is a realist. That made his economic alignment of New Zealand with the likes of Kazakhstan just a little scary.

He is entitled to be philosophical (he has a doctorate in the discipline) but last week’s column in the New Zealand Herald was brutally material: If we continue our steady-as-she-goes, borrow-and-hope, growth-will-come economic prescription of the past 17 years our economic peers will be Bulgaria, Russia and Kazakhstan.

I liked his colourful analogy suggesting that we have been kidding ourselves: “There never was a rock-star economy, except in the sense of a once-successful arthritic band loading themselves up on cocaine and methamphetamine to get through the nostalgia tour.”

His bottom line was that our level of productivity sucks. Per-capita GDP growth has stagnated at less than 0.5 per cent since 2008.

Hooton’s focus was on the economy as a whole but his sobering commentary made me think about the long-term effect of gross domestic product growth on media sustainability.

His timing was a little unfortunate. It took the shine off some positive news from two of our media companies in the same week. Continue reading “NZ news media need higher productivity – from the rest of us” →

My feeling of dread can reach biblical proportions

Three short words fill me with a sense of dread when they are linked to the media industry – private…equity…company. Collectively they represent a form of enterprise that never peers over the top of a sterile balance sheet.

Their sole purpose is to provide the best possible return for their investors. There is nothing inherently wrong it that goal, but the single-minded pursuit of profit makes them manifestly unsuited for ownership of companies providing social, cultural and democratic services to the public.

Media companies that produce or carry news and information services have impacts on society that were once recognised as imposing inherent obligations on the organisation.

In the past, owners accepted forms of cross-subsidisation without question. They funded journalism that was important, but which may not have attracted audiences as readily as the salacious or merely entertaining. They sent journalists far afield following politicians, when reporting a rugby tour was arguably more popular. They did so because one of those inherent obligations was holding power to account.

Some owners continue to shoulder those obligations and long may they continue to do so. However, for every organisation that continues to meet social and civic needs, there is another that has been decimated in the name of ‘return on investment’.

The latest manifestation of private equity bitemporal hemianopsia (I chose this form of tunnel vision because it doesn’t just affect the periphery but half of what we see) is what has happened to MediaWorks at the hands of Sydney-based private equity firm Quadrant and the New Zealand media company’s previous owners. Continue reading “My feeling of dread can reach biblical proportions” →

Lack of relevance is the kiss of death for journalism

It was a phrase that rolled too easily off the tongue, as if it was the product of a branding exercise by smart young marketers. Nonetheless, it contained an imperative that should sit at the core of journalism.

The phrase had been around for a long time. It was the title of a column in U.S. News & World Report in the 1950s. Later it would capture what passed for imagination in the minds of media management executives, and become so ubiquitous that it virtually lost meaning.

What was the phrase? It was “news you can use”.

It needs to be resurrected, not as a trite play for audience but as the central element of how journalism will be practiced and how news will be presented.

Why, and why now? Continue reading “Lack of relevance is the kiss of death for journalism” →

Another threat to our news industry: AI slop

AI slop – the 2025 word of the year in several prominent dictionaries – is lazy and often misleading online content generated by artificial intelligence. It presents a major threat to legitimate news outlets, including those in New Zealand.

There is a high risk that the loss of trust that inevitably follows users’ realisation that they have been taken for a ride will widen into a belief that ‘you can’t trust news: Full stop’

Yesterday both RNZ and TVNZ carried stories about the emergence of AI slop in this country, primarily on what purported to be a news site, but which carried no original reporting and distorted visual reality.

They interrogated the site – called NZ News Hub (clearly a take-off of TV3’s Newshub which closed in 2024) – and found numerous AI-generated images that were not identified as such. The broadcasters also found the site consistently dramatised natural disasters and emergencies beyond what had actually occurred. Continue reading “Another threat to our news industry: AI slop” →