Buckle up because 2025 is going to be a rough ride for news media.
It has started inauspiciously with NZME’s announcement of 38 job losses at the New Zealand Herald and NewstalkZB, the full impact of which has yet to be seen. That followed the closure of 11 of the company’s community newspapers at the end of last year, plus the loss of 11 roles in its regional newsrooms last July.
We began the year with the effects of TVNZ’s cuts, announced last November, starting to appear. Familiar faces on its sports team reappeared on Sky and Trackside over the summer break, and yesterday Breakfast was back with a reduced lineup but no reduction in forgettable chitchat. The state-owned broadcaster has lost almost 130 staff since 2023. The latest tranche took out 50 jobs and adverse effects on its newsgathering are inevitable.
In December Whakaata Māori cut 27 roles and ended its news programme. Jobs have also gone at Stuff, although musical chairs have made it difficult to determine exactly how many have gone. Earlier, of course, TV3’s American owners walked away from their responsibility to provide its own news service.
What more, you ask, could be lost when news services have been cut to the bone? The answer: A lot. Our commercial news media are in a worrying financial state.
It is highly likely that at least one regional newspaper will cease print production this year and its website largely served from elsewhere – if that digital component survives at all. Combined with the closure of more community papers, we are likely to see the emergence of significant news deserts of the type that are causing growing concern throughout the western world.
And job losses in metropolitan newsrooms will continue.
Unfortunately, I can say that with reasonable certainty because the year began badly for the starting point that determines many of the media’s revenue outcomes. The ANZ-Roy Morgan Consumer Confidence Survey (released last week) fell back into negative territory, dropping four points. A companion business confidence survey fell even further – by eight points – and views of companies’ own fortunes was also down.
Nothing on the horizon gives one the confidence that better times are just around the corner. Even leaving aside gestating domestic economic policy, the uncertainty that the Trump administration has wrought on international trade – 25 per cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico and 10 per cent on China are just the beginning – will have destabilising effects that will be felt here.
Ultimately, consumer spending and company profitability determines how much is spent on advertising. When the latest cuts were announced, NZME chief executive, Michael Boggs, put a positive spin on the digital side of the business – and its OneRoof division appears to be delivering – but, in reality, online advertising produces a fraction of the revenue that a print advertisement attracts. Declining consumer confidence may also affect the ability to attract and retain digital subscription revenue.
When traditional media income falls, newsrooms feel the effect. This year will see more of that, and it will certainly not be limited to NZME.
Cutbacks, however, are not the pathway to sustainable future.
The New Zealand Herald’s ‘Media Insider’, Shayne Currie, last Friday provided insights into his company’s latest cuts and quoted (rather boldly, I thought) Jarden’s head of research Arie Dekker saying “It’s difficult to shrink to greatness”. Dekker did not think up the quote. It was the subtitle of a book by business guru (and author of In Search of Excellence) Tom Peters. Its title was The Circle of Innovation: You can’t shrink your way to greatness. However, it was a particularly appropriate borrowing of the phrase.
Our news media have tried to innovate but I think their misses outnumber their successes. Their greatest failure lies in embracing digital ideas that take them away from the tenets of public service journalism and into the arms of faceless people – who manipulate both media and their audiences through equally obscure algorithms – and the tyranny of analytics.
The dominance of analytics in current newsroom thinking was evident in NZME editor-in-chief Murray Kirkness’s statement that, in conjunction with the cuts, the Herald would be “publishing fewer stories, cutting those that don’t engage with audiences”. While the first part of that statement was self-evident – you can’t expect greater productivity from the remaining people who are already under the hammer – the latter part suggests an overt swing to yet more populism driven by online analytics.
Of course, news media need to engage with their audiences but that should not mean diminishing the civic and social roles of journalists as independent providers of information that helps to hold society together, assist us in our daily lives, and hold power in its various forms to account.
Fewer journalists producing fewer stories mean fewer areas subjected to enquiry. Although the context in which he uttered the phrase was almost farcical (allegations in 2002 that Iraq was supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists), US Secretary of State, Donald Rumsfeld, was correct when he said that unknown unknowns – “the ones we don’t know we don’t know” – tend to be the difficult ones. If journalists are driven in the direction of matters with which the public has already engaged, their ability to seek out and illuminate the unknown unknowns is, at best, diminished.
Common sense might suggest pooling resources and taking a collective approach to day-to-day newsgathering. RNZ helps by making its stories available to other media, but that is a shadow of the cooperative effort the country’s newspaper publishers enjoyed with the New Zealand Press Association (abolished in 2011 in the industry’s single greatest act of shortsightedness). Industry-wide content sharing remains an option, but I fear that ‘cooperation’ has become a dirty word as at least some pursue a ‘last-man-standing’ strategy in the (most likely mistaken) belief they will survive to inherit everything. That approach is far more likely to leave the survivor standing miserably amid ashes than inheriting remaining riches.
But I should turn on the tap and find the glass is at least half-full, rather than half-empty. Donald Trump could hold the key to the resurrection of journalism as a public service.
When the current president began his first term in 2017, the New York Times had fewer than three million print and digital subscribers. By applying the tenets of good journalism and by overtly demonstrating their use – particularly to coverage of the Administration – it began rapid audience growth that now sees its subscriber base sitting at more than 11 million. If the first week of his second term is any indication, there will be a worldwide call for the sort of journalism that the New York Times has pursued. It could be an incentive here, too.
However, in order for journalism to be put on a sustainable basis in this country, the media ecosystem and the structures within it will need to change. That will require policy shifts and action on the part of government. To do that, the Coalition will need to accept that journalism is a public good that transcends what the market alone can provide. To date, its muted answers to the media’s woes have been almost entirely market driven.
The Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill has been such an initiative, albeit one inherited from the previous government and now paused. ‘Paused’ may be an understatement. By including withdrawal from the OECD Base Economy Profit Shifting taxation regime in his first 100 executive orders, President Trump signalled he will support his digital oligarch friends against any attempt to extract money from them. That will, I have no doubt, bring legislated ‘bargaining’ with Facebook and Google to a shuddering halt.
There are many other ways in which government can foster a media ecosystem that supports sustainable journalism. The Communications minister, Paul Goldsmith, has the ability to champion support for journalism and to articulate the need for such policies to the public. However, he will need to raise media’s priority well beyond the mere afterthought it warranted in his start-of-year strategy overview. He must develop a raft of initiatives to prevent irreparable damage to journalism on his watch.