Our media are no strangers to doing battle and 2026 is looming as a cross between Game of Thrones and Adolescence.
The GOT analogy is easy: It relates to territory, treasure that is real or imagined, and a touch of fantasy.
Our mainstream media will continue to wage the ongoing war for whatever territory in Westeros (or is it Essos) they can get their hands on. They will send raiding parties to snap up what remains after the Iron Throne of the Seven (transnational) Kingdoms has plundered the treasure house. And, symptomatic of the paranoia borne of years of attrition, they will scan the skies for signs of dragons.
The battle plans for territorial gain have been progressively revealed over past weeks and will be primarily fought out in the once-glittering realms of audio and video.
RNZ has signalled that it will deploy new forces in the fiercely contested territory of breakfast radio. This is a strangely undeclared war: Although the state-owned broadcaster is desperate to reclaim the crown from NewstalkZB’s Mike Hosking, it maintains a fiction that they cannot be directly compared. Yes, one is commercial and the other is not. Yes, they have separate rating surveys. However, at the end of the day their conflict is simple: they are both fighting for as many sets of ears as they can get.
Last week, New Zealand Herald Media Insider Shayne Currie produced two interesting graphs that accompanied a story about RNZ bouncing back to more than 500,000 overall listeners, according to the latest GFK survey.
The first graph showed RNZ regaining audience throughout 2025 while NewstalkZB’s audience had declined. The commercial broadcaster continues to have a significant 100,000 listener lead but that gap has closed to where it was in 2021, a year after RNZ lost the overall lead.
The second graph related to the breakfast radio audience – Mike Hosking versus Morning Report. Back in 2020, Morning Report commanded a 100,000 lead over Hosking. Two years later the positions were reversed and NewstalkZB (give or take a few variations) maintained that sort of margin until the middle of this year. The latest surveys, however, show Morning Report has narrowed the gap by almost 28,000. It now has 352,200 listeners to Hosking’s 424,400.
Mike Hosking’s audience has been slowly falling this year. He is still in a commanding position, but his castle no longer looks quite as impregnable as it did over the previous four years. It may take more than a year of campaigning, but the stage is set for RNZ to regain the breakfast time slot if it gets the strategy right.
That strategy hinges on who is chosen to replace Corin Dann as Morning Report co-host, and on whether RNZ returns it to a hard news programme rather than the Breakfast-without-pictures it has become. There has been plenty of speculation over who the replacement might be – Paddy Gower, John Campbell, Jack Tame, Tova O’Brien, Lloyd Burr, and Rebecca Wright among them. The final choice will send a clear signal on how serious RNZ is about reclaiming that breakfast crown.
The public broadcaster has already shown it will up its game in 2026 by moving Guyon Espiner into the Midday Report hosting role. No disrespect to Charlotte Cook, who has done a good job, but Espiner is a veteran and will be a heavier hitter in election year.
In the video realm there will be multiple battles fought in 2026, not least in that early morning environment.
NZME semi-announced last week that its breakfast video show Herald NOW, hosted by Ryan Bridge, is set to be run on Three’s streaming platform Three Now. I say semi-announced because the Herald made a show of being ‘in the know’ before the ink was dry on an agreement. I think we can take it as read that it will happen. It will mean a considerable advance for Herald NOW which is currently available through the Herald website or YouTube, where it is plagued by sound issues.
What we don’t know is whether there are any plans to also carry the breakfast show live on Three. Were that to happen, TVNZ’s Breakfast would be in a real fight. In spite of its technical limitations, Herald NOW is a strong news offering with your cornflakes and is thankfully free of the banal chitty-chatty that characterises its rival on TVOne. Ryan Bridge is a stronger interviewer than Chris Chan or any of the stand-ins following Jenny-May Clarkson’s departure. Here again, the permanent replacement will send signals about how well prepared TVNZ will be if Herald NOW does join battle head-on.
It is already apparent that TVNZ plans to respond to the business component of Herald NOW, which has Ryan Bridge interviewing BusinessDesk reporters. That is usually the erudite and television-seasoned Garth Bray. TVNZ has advertised for the host of a new business show, “working alongside the Breakfast team”. One name being suggested is TVNZ business journalist Jason Walls, who would be an excellent fit – if he continues to also contribute to the 6pm news.
What we may be witnessing in the NZME/Three arrangement is an escalation of the alliances between publishers and broadcasters. Three already has its evening news bulletin supplied by Stuff and there is considerable scope for the news-gathering resources of publishers to be repurposed. Would TVNZ be open to joining the alliance, or could Sky (now Three’s owner) seize on opportunities to augment its digital subscription international news offering with some local content? Next year may see some advances.
It may also see a David and Goliath battle between Sky and Netflix if the latter is given permission to acquire Warner Bros Discovery (and in Trumpian America I suspect market dominance is seen as a win, not a danger to consumers). A sizeable amount of WBD product is carried on Sky, the most significant of which is HBO. If those programmes and services are moved to Netflix, Sky will be left with a large hole in its inventory.
Netflix is already fielding calls about the future of HBO on Sky. It has emailed New Zealand subscribers telling them to sit tight and not cancel their existing arrangement. The tenor of its messaging is that it does not want to pre-empt confirmation of the sale of WBD but that should not be read as indecision on its part. It will have a clear strategy for the repositioning of whatever comes out of Warner Bros studios or sits on its streaming platforms.
However, the repossession of all WBD content is not a foregone conclusion. It will all come down to money. If Netflix can get more revenue from leaving HBO on Sky – rather than absorbing it into an already burgeoning offering of movie titles – it will likely do so. On the other hand, if the giant does covert the spoils, Sky will need to act fast to find new inventory in a market soon to be dominated by Netflix.
Market dominance by Netflix will also represent an obstacle to TVNZ’s ambitions to become a primarily (eventually fully) digital streaming operation. It needs to find alternative sources of revenue as its advertising market continues to shrink. That means paid subscription services. The first objective it must win is political agreement for it to supplement, then move away from, a free-to-air model. A tougher obstacle will be a market to which it will effectively be a late comer. It has an existing streaming presence with TVNZ+ but no-one is yet being asked to pay for it. It will need to deploy some clever tactics in the face of a superior enemy. A frontal assault on a stronger opponent’s main front is generally considered poor military practice.
Netflix, of course, is only one member of the Axis. Our mainstream media will also face continuing assaults on the treasure house by transnational platforms. Media organisations are incapable of stopping the plunder. Only governments have the power to overcome algorithmic manipulation, AI asset stripping, and wholesale tax-avoiding profit shifting that characterise the activities of the likes of Meta and Alphabet. We can only hope that in 2026 our government starts to act against them. It would be wise to do so in collaboration with other nations, creating an alliance too large for Donald Trump to intimidate with a worn tariff club.
Now to the other analogy: Adolescence is a much more nuanced parallel. I’m not suggesting that our mainstream media are about to turn into misogynistic teenage killers. Rather I see them as parents who simply do not understand their teenagers.
This battle is not a new one, but it will only grow in intensity and bad outcomes if the coming year passes without significant attempts to engage and win younger audiences. It is important for all forms of mainstream media with traditional revenue sources, but it is no more important than for news organisations. Continuing failure to interest teenagers in values-based professional journalism spells long-term problems for civic discourse and, ultimately, for democracy.
Three international studies in the past month have filled me with dread over the future for journalism with digital generation audiences. In military terms we might regard them as situation reports or sitreps.
The first to cross my desk was from the United States. Produced by the News Literacy Project, it was titled ‘Biased’, ‘Boring’ and ‘Bad’: Unpacking perceptions of news media and journalism among US teens. From the title, you can guess the news was not good. Among its key findings were that the majority of teens view news media negatively; more teenagers believe journalists are skilled at lying and deceiving than informing the public; and more teens believe professional journalists regularly engage in unethical behaviour. Their advice to journalists: Get the facts right and minimise bias.
The second was an Australian report by Youth Insight and Student Edge that found 81 per cent of young people hate advertisements, 74 per cent skip ads and more than half simply ignore them. Forty five per cent found advertising “extremely intrusive” and around half thought they were boring or inauthentic. Gen Z likes branded content when it is informative and explanatory. Almost a third trust other content rather than advertising in media outlets.
The third report was another American study, produced by the Pew Research Center. It looked at young adults and the future of news. It found that only 15 per cent of them are close followers of news and, when they do see news, three quarters get it on social media. Half trust what they see there, a similar number to those trusting national news organisations. The report quotes a 24-year-old female participant saying: “I try to avoid it (the news) for my sanity”. However, one of the most striking observations was that adults under 30 are more likely to consider someone a journalist if they write their own newsletter about news or make their own news-related videos, or post on social media.
Taken together, these three reports (and many more like them) pose an existential challenge to the sort of journalism and methods of delivery that were the norm throughout my professional life. That career extended from hot-metal print production to the Internet and (hand on heart) was based on ethically based principles of truth, fairness, and balance.
Those principles should be immutable but there is clearly a battle to re-articulate and redeploy them in a way that Gen Z not only understands but embraces. There have been many efforts to win the hearts and minds of the Under-30s. These reports suggest they have yet to make much ground.
I’m left with the image of media people looking like Eddie and Manda Miller, parents of the killer in Adolescence: At a loss to understand what goes on in the teenage mind.
- Illustration created using artificial intelligence via ChatGPT.