Author: Gavin Ellis

Gavin Ellis is a media consultant, commentator and researcher. He holds a doctorate in political studies. A former editor-in-chief of the New Zealand Herald, he is the author of Trust Ownership and the Future of News: Media Moguls and White Knights (London, Palgrave) and Complacent Nation (Wellington, BWB Texts). His consultancy clients include media organisations and government ministries. His Tuesday Commentary on media matters appears weekly on his site www.whiteknightnews.com

Legion of wake-up calls embedded in news trust report

I shudder at the sheer horror of it all!

There we were: Stuck in a remote part of East Cape with no cellphone coverage, no satellite tv feed, and a radio that did no more an emit an angry hiss.

We were victims of news deprivation – a cruel form of externally imposed news avoidance.

I know that some people would relish the thought of finding themselves in a news blackout but, like people suddenly deprived of their daily tonnage of caffeine, we get withdrawal symptoms if we are deprived of the news media’s daily version of reality.

The fact you are reading this commentary confirms that we did survive the ordeal. Our travels took us further down the East Coast of the North Island and normal services were resumed. Now we are back home.

Our personal news desert meant I did not see or hear coverage of JMaD’s 2025 Trust in News report until I was reintroduced to my computer (any attempt to take it on holiday would have had unfortunate consequences).

I was pleased to see a slight drop in the number who sometimes avoid the news – down from 75 per cent to 73 per cent. I now know what they are missing. Continue reading “Legion of wake-up calls embedded in news trust report” →

Slow death of the newspaper editorial

Newspaper editorials are disappearing, crushed under an avalanche of opinion from the well-informed, the ill-informed, the misinformed, and the malicious.

It is a slow death, with the institutional voice of the newspaper being heard less often and with less authority.

It is not solely a New Zealand problem. Last year in the United States, the Virginia Press Association scrapped its editorial award after receiving only one entry in 2023. That was the year America’s major newspaper chains such as Gannett began cutting back on editorials.

In New Zealand, most of our regional newspapers only run an editorials a couple of days a week at best and, often as not, the same editorial is shared by all newspapers in each group. Stuff’s metropolitan titles The Post and The Press and the Waikato Times follow the same pattern as the group’s regional tiles. Only the New Zealand Herald and Otago Daily Times continue to carry a daily editorial.

For reasons that frankly elude me, the Weekend Herald (the week’s largest circulation paper) has decided that its editorial column should almost always be devoted to sporting issues. There is nothing that warrants their elevation to the leader column. They belong on the sports pages. And they stand in stark contrast to the Sunday Star Times’ wide-ranging and well-argued editorials, which are accorded a prominent position on page 3 and are signed by the editor Tracy Watkins.

Perhaps there is an inevitability about the slow death of editorials or leader columns. Continue reading “Slow death of the newspaper editorial” →

Time to treat social media like a cancer-causing industrial chemical

Answer me this (a simple yes or no will suffice): If there was a product that had the potential to cause your child serious and demonstrable harm, would you expect the Government to place controls on it?

The logical answer is yes. And there are many such products that the Government does control to prevent harm to children. Age restrictions on the sale of alcohol and tobacco are the most obvious examples.

Three news items I saw in the past week convinced me that the Government – and society as a whole – is falling tragically short in the control of one product that does more harm to young people than liquor and cigarettes combined. It is social media.

No parent could have read the lead story in the Weekend Herald without feeling enormous empathy for Cambridge Middle School principal Daryl Gibbs. The headline on that story was ‘I put to tool in her hand’: Principal shares daughter’s online ordeal. It told of how within three weeks of giving his 13-year-old a smartphone, she had downloaded Snapchat and received her first ‘You should kill yourself’ message.

He shared his feelings of guilt and admitted he was naïve to think that placing limits on her connections would keep her safe. It did not. She suffered anxiety, depression, and absenteeism from school as a result of what she saw on her phone. What was most disturbing was the fact that her contacts were being monitored by her parents. The harm was coming through people she knew. Continue reading “Time to treat social media like a cancer-causing industrial chemical” →

BUT WAIT…THERE’S MORE (BEING SUCKED AWAY)

First there was Dracula, followed by Nosferatu. Buffy the Vampire Slayer despatched a few, but then we were shown What We Do in the Shadows. However, for the cold-hearted realities of vampirism, nothing beats that on-going series The Advertising Standards Authority’s Advertising Turnover Report.

In a chillingly sangfroid fashion, its latest episode indicates that yet again the transnational platforms have sunk their fangs ever deeper into the media’s jugular.

I have been charting the ad revenue fortunes of the New Zealand media almost since the birth of the Advertising Standards Authority in 1990 and have been paying particular attention to statistics since 2007. That was the year that newspaper and television ad revenue peaked and also the year we started to see digital platforms posting exponential increases in their annual take.

In 2007 those platforms – the likes of Google and Facebook – attracted a relatively modest $135 million. Last year their share of the advertising spent was $2.171 billion. By comparison, the newspaper share has dropped from $826 million to $274 million while television had dropped from $654 million to $490 million. In total, the digital-only spend last year was almost twice that spent on all other advertising. Let’s put that is some perspective: The last time New Zealand media recorded a total as low as what they earned last year ($1.1 billion) was thirty years ago.

Only radio has been holding its own in advertising revenue, but it has been basically flat lining for the past decade. It has bumped along at between $260 million and $280 million a year, apart from the COVID dip experienced by all local media (but not the digital-only platforms). It was up $5 million in 2024, but $4 million below the $276 million it recorded in 2022. Allowing for inflation, even radio is not in the best of health.

Admittedly, the digital-only gain for 2024 was slightly down on the previous year – up a mere $59 million against the previous year’s $87 million. That could mean there are signs that the rate of growth may be slowing. Alternatively, it could be only a sign of the economic times and recovery will signal a return to exponential growth.

Either way, the lifeblood is being sucked out of most of the media on which we depend for our news. Continue reading “BUT WAIT…THERE’S MORE (BEING SUCKED AWAY)” →