Business at 6.30am: Good move but watch for knock-on effects

NZME’s latest video venture, Herald NOW Business, had a solid launch yesterday into an uncertain world strategic environment. It also raises some strategic questions for the media company itself.

The 6.30 am business programme, available on the Herald app and streamed through ThreeNow and YouTube, is anchored by the thoroughly professional Garth Bray. He was an obvious choice and represents some of the greatest depth of television talent within NZME.

A former London correspondent for TVNZ and then a stalwart of the (sadly, axed) consumer show Fair Go, Bray is already a regular on the new programme’s companion show Ryan Bridge Today. His professional ‘home’ is the NZME-owned BusinessDesk.

Herald NOW Business (let’s abbreviate that to HNB) could not be described as innovative. It follows the familiar look and content of morning business programmes elsewhere. That, however, is not a criticism: Why change an established formula just for the sake of looking different?

Different to what? TVNZ scrapped its own morning business show, AMP Business, in 2011. Created in 1997, it was hosted for a decade by Michael Wilson, then by Nadine Chalmers-Ross. It was subsumed by Breakfast and simply became part of the news offering.

Yesterday’s HNB launch was without fanfare. Bray led straight into the show as if he’d simply returned after the weekend. And, in a way, he had. His regular business reports have (for me, anyway) been a standout on Ryan Bridge’s show.

Ongoing military action in the Middle East permeated the first programme and, for that reason, I would have liked to see a little more time allowed for market data. The vision mixer flicked through the markets and commodities charts at a speed that allowed little time to reflect on them. The speed may have been due to the full run sheet. Bray conducted four comprehensive interviews in the show’s half-hour.

In advance of the show, I had wondered whether it would be no more than a video version of stories in that morning’s New Zealand Herald. In fact, only one item had appeared in the newspaper and it was a legitimate follow-up. Bray interviewed Bridgewest Ventures’ CEO Saum Vahdat about the tech incubator’s current capital raising. There was a tinge of irony in that Bridgewest’s founders are the sons of Iranian exiles.

The uncertainty of oil supplies was a theme running through yesterday’s show.  Shane Solly of Harbour Asset Management provided a comprehensive market update and some tentative forecasting, while another Ryan Bridge regular, Herald columnist Fran O’Sullivan, provided some erudite analysis that included a look forward to the US mid-term elections that could see President Donald Trump’s powerbase up-ended if the Iran situation persists.

The half-hour programme was rounded out by another in-studio interview with Mercury Energy CEO, Stew Hamilton, on renewable energy generation – another pertinent topic for the day, given precarious oil supplies.

There is always a temptation with new programmes to pre-shoot some items while there is the luxury of time to finesse them. HNB avoided that temptation. The entire show looked – and was – live. So much so, that Ryan Bridge was caught on camera slipping into his own chair on the common set, ready to take over at 7 am.

HNB had a good start and there is every reason to expect it will continue as it has begun. However, its launch cannot help but raise some strategic issues for NZME.

The business programme, together with Ryan Bridge Today and existing early morning radio commitments like NewstalkZB’s Mike Hosking Show, place a call on resources that is at the opposite end of the time spectrum to usual production cycles in the medium that continues to provide the company with the largest slice of its revenue – its morning newspapers led by the New Zealand Herald.

Ah, you say, but what about digital? Yes, it contributed $80.7 million to NZME’s coffers last year, but print accounted for $111 million. Together, they outweighed audio revenue of $122 million and I have absolutely no doubt that the company’s digital offerings – and news production – would be a fraction of the current level without the print component of the business. Frankly, print and digital revenue should be seen as virtually indivisible. As such they represent 60 per cent of NZME’s EBITDA.

Yet the demands of morning broadcasting and streaming services must put pressure on manpower resources required to fill the Herald and other newspapers in the stable. Print deadlines are significantly earlier than were a couple of decades ago but they certainly demand bums on seats long after the departure of those who have started work at 5.30 or 6 am.

NZME has increased the resources in its business team with the acquisition of BusinessDesk but HNB could very easily have the effect of bringing forward its daily timeframes: More emphasis on the beginning of the day and less emphasis on the end of it (‘let’s leave that for the morning’). Already the focus in NZME’s Graham Street headquarters after 5 pm is on page production, not on story writing. That’s a stark contrast to a few years ago, in the old Herald Building, when the keyboards clattered well after sundown.

Of course, NZME is not alone in facing the demands of multiple media where previously it might have focussed on one. It’s a problem of the digital age that all news media operations face.

Nonetheless, NZME has a difficult balancing act to maintain if it is to avoid throttling the goose while it is still laying eggs. To mix my metaphors, it needs to be very careful that it doesn’t neglect the older sibling while doting over its new baby.

That is not the only strategic issue raised by the launch of HNB. Its birth also highlights the problems NZME faces with distribution pathways.

Fragmentation has long been an issue for both media and advertisers. If I ask ChatGPT whether New Zealand is one of the most fragmented media markets in the world, it tells me: Yes, it is.

NZME is a step ahead of Stuff in that it has radio as well as print/digital distribution, but neither is in a position to rival TVNZ or Sky in the video market. At best they are clients of the television broadcasters/streamers.

HNB is available on the Herald website, ThreeNow, and YouTube. Ryan Bridge Today can been seen live via the Herald website, ThreeNow, and YouTube. In the second half of this year Bridge’s programme (and presumably HNB) will also be broadcast on Three.

These multiple distribution channels may provide a reasonable cumulative audience, but it is less certain than a mass outlet, subject to different viewing habits, and less attractive to advertisers. The need to use such a range of distribution options also precludes NZME from paywalling the video content.

There is no easy answer to the distribution issue, short of simply becoming a production company and selling the programmes to either TVNZ or Sky in the same way as Stuff is contracted to provide ThreeNews.

The inability to secure a single major point of focus for the two programmes (that I think are far better sources of morning news and information than TVNZ’s Breakfast) must hamper NZME’s ability to make either venture profitable.

That is another reason why it must take great care in achieving the right balance in how it deploys its already diminished physical and financial resources.

Yes, I like watching Garth Bray and Ryan Bridge over my first and second cups of morning coffee, but I also expect my New Zealand Herald to contain stories that broke after yesterday’s schoolhouse home bell rang.