RNZ National may have the circuit breaker it sorely needs.

 

I will start with a confession. I was a loyal wake-up-to-it-Monday-to-Friday fan of RNZ’s Morning Report. I no longer am.

I am not alone. Morning Report had a peak cumulative audience 10+ of 531,000 in September 2020, but today that audience stands at only 333,000 – down by more than a third. Once the undisputed leader in breakfast radio, the programme is now far outstripped by NewstalkZB’s Mike Hosking Show.

The plight of Morning Report was highlighted last week in a blunt review of RNZ National by the state-owned broadcaster’s former head of news, Richard Sutherland. The details of the review were revealed in a scoop by the New Zealand Herald’s Media Insider Shayne Currie, who obtained it under the Official Information Act.

Sutherland is a vastly experienced journalist and broadcaster whom I greatly respect. His findings are to be taken very seriously: No more so than in relation to what should be RNZ’s standout flagship programme.

Currie quoted Sutherland saying that, overall, RNZ “suffers from a lack of audience clarity, internal cohesion, and urgency”. Interviews with staff revealed “blame shifting, low ambition, and a belief that radio is in terminal decline”.

RNZ once led the radio market in terms of cumulative audience. It now sits at eighth. It has made impressive inroads into the digital market but that has clearly been at the expense of its traditional medium.

One of Sutherland’s suggested solutions to Morning Report’s decline was to move it completely to Auckland, instead of having hosts there and in Wellington and producing it from RNZ’s headquarters in the capital.  He said producing the programme from Wellington created editorial distance from the wider audience and “reinforces the feeling of political insulation and dependence on government.”

I have no doubt that Sutherland is right and that a move could set a new focus. The recommendation has received only partial support from RNZ, which says the breakfast programme “will have a more Auckland-focussed team”.

However, I see a more basic issue with Morning Report. It comes down to the format and the performance of the hosts.

Morning Report has become breakfast television without the pictures. They may not sit together on a couch but Corin Dann and Ingrid Hipkiss adopt the familiar, light tone that characterises television-to-wake-up-to.

Both are veterans of the genre – Hipkiss on TV3’s first breakfast show Sunrise, and Dann on TVOne’s Breakfast – and, although both have solid news backgrounds, their approach to their current programme is redolent of their time trading small talk with co-hosts, sipping coffee, and gently leading us into the day.

I don’t need a gentle introduction. If I did, I would be watching One’s Breakfast. I don’t, because the chitty-chatty exchanges drive me as insane as does TV One weather man Dan Corbett’s nightly balletic variations (with sound effects). And I’m afraid Morning Report started to have a similar effect.

As a result, I channel surf the global services then switch to Ryan Bridge’s Herald Now on YouTube for a traditional approach to news and interviews. I’m sure part of the attraction is the fact that he hosts alone and is not distracted by the need for contrived repartee.

I would probably listen to Mike Hosking because I regard him as one of the best interviewers New Zealand has produced. Unfortunately I find there is too much ideology and egocentricity on his breakfast show for my taste (large numbers obviously have a different view).

Morning Report was once a hard-hitting, informative way to start the day. It was a straight, no-nonsense news analysis programme. It canvassed what had happened overnight, what was due to happen, and interrogated those involved. It had authority. So what went wrong?

Corin Dann was with the programme when it was still beating Hosking but beside him was the waspish Susie Ferguson. That followed a pattern established when the painstakingly polite Geoff Robinson had co-hosts that included Lindsay Perigo, Maggie Barry, Kim Hill, Sean Plunket and, yes, Mike Hosking.

Sutherland’s report does not call for any specific changes of personnel but I’m afraid the hosts of Morning Report have turned off some listeners.

They are, of course, working to the direction of a producer. Executive editor Martin Gibson has been in the job since 1999 – through much of the heyday of Morning Report – but announced his retirement a month ago. It is likely that Gibson, too, is working to an approach not of his own making.

That approach clearly needs to change if the programme is to regain audience and to retain the core listeners who are yearning for a return to the decisive interviewing for which Morning report was once renowned. Dann and Hipkiss have many fine attributes as journalists but neither has Kim Hill’s stiletto, Mike Hosking’s rapier or Sean Plunket’s broadsword about their person.

There needs to be a new lineup – which could (heaven forefend) be a single host – and a recognisable return to the public radio approach that characterises RNZ counterparts like Britain’s BBC, the US’s NPR, and Australia’s ABC. No more trying to beat commercial radio at its own game, producing television without the pictures, and placing undue emphasis on reporters’ own opinions.

That would tick one RNZ National box and may, in fact, be the easiest to achieve. The other boxes drawn by Richard Sutherland are more like moving targets.

RNZ CEO, Paul Thompson, made a brave move in commissioning Sutherland to review RNZ National. He must have known the resulting report would pull no punches.

Sutherland’s report found RNZ lacked clarity in its understanding of RNZ National’s audience. It pointed to internal disconnects, and (my interpretation) an almost dismissive attitude to radio.

Thompson would not have been oblivious to these attitudes and failures but he clearly needed a shock tactic to wake up the organisation’s thinking.

His former head of news has given him precisely that. Sutherland lists nine areas for immediate action – from defining the audience and lifting on-air standards, to strengthening the office culture and reasserting RNZ’s role in a crisis.

Not all of his recommendations will be fully accepted but judging by what has emanated so far from RNZ one thing is very clear: Radio will reassert itself or there will be hell to pay.

That is simple common sense.

Yes, the radio transmitters will eventually be switched off. Let’s not bother to put a date on it. However, Sutherland correctly points out that there continues to be a large audience that is radio-oriented. He says the focus should be on the 50-69 age group for RNZ National but I go further. The focus should be on the 50 to death age group. We are talking about  1.8 million people, compared to Sutherland’s target of just over 950,000. A significant proportion of the larger cohort started life with radio (not television, let alone digital) and see it as a natural part of their lives. Why discount them?

I can answer my own question and it represent one front of the perfect storm that Thompson has been fighting. New Zealand suffers from systemic ageism. There is no magic age at which people cease to be significant. RNZ National has a ready core audience just waiting to be regained. However, parroting commercial media, it has been unduly influenced by an advertising industry that seems blind to the realities of purchasing power. There is a preoccupation with the young because it is seen to have ‘longevity’, when the reality is that there is life in the 50-plus audience…right up until they die.

The two other fronts in Thompson’s perfect storm are digital domination and polarising politics.

The digital dominatrix has ensured that strategic policy had been driven by technological determinism: What digital needs, digital gets. The result of this digital-first thinking has been that traditional media have been repurposed to carry content neither designed for their existing audiences nor desired by them.

The polarisation that began a decade ago but reached fever pitch during and after the Covid pandemic has seen growing intolerance of the pluralistic approach that the RNZ charter demands. The broadcaster is accused of being woke…and worse. It is not helped by a surfeit of Wellington beltway thinking within the organisation that privileges politics over issues that are engaging older residents of Auckland, Christchurch or Dunedin.

Sutherland’s report has a useful subtext that points to the likelihood that staff have seen RNZ National – radio – as having the principal responsibility for meeting Charter objectives. Put crudely, it has been the dumping ground for good intentions.

“RNZ National should no longer be considered the only outlet for the wider organisation to meet its Charter obligations,” Sutherland says. “There are other platforms available to meet the needs of audiences outside the suggested target demographic (50-69).”

I read that as saying digital’s free ride is over. The head-banging, discordant, incomprehensible new music that has driven older listeners from RNZ National can now find its rightful home on one of the organisation’s digital platforms. So, too, can the stories that fill 20-somethings with wonder but leave the 50-plus audiences bewildered and annoyed. Neither has a place on a radio network whose true target audience was born before 1975, the year Glen Campbell took ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ to Number One.

From what I hear, Paul Thompson has embraced Sutherland’s report as a circuit-breaker.

 That is clear from the fact that he has accepted Sutherland’s recommendation to create the new role of Head of Audio to champion radio, will base that person in Auckland, and has already made an interim appointment. I will put money on the permanent appointee having a gold-plated radio pedigree.

The review throws a range of challenges at the RNZ chief executive. Let me add one more: Give me a good reason to be woken by Morning Report rather than by my radio-alarm’s cardiac-arresting buzz.