Tag: Mike Hosking

Herald streaming breakfast show’s best ingredient – news

NZME’s new streaming video breakfast show Herald NOW has debuted. And it’s refreshing to see that from start to finish it is about news.

It stands in stark contrast to TVNZ’s Breakfast and its giggly magazine format punctuated by obligatory bulletins and couch-bound conversations.

Ryan Bridge fronts Herald NOW. He is, of course, no stranger to breakfast television, He was a mainstay of TV3’s AM Show before Warner Bros Discovery axed it as a prelude to walking away from news production entirely.

However, the new show is not a remake of AM, in spite of the scheduled reappearances of familiar political panellists David Seymour and Chloe Swarbrick (the former was interviewed on the first show, but his fellow panellist was absent), and Mark Richardson who is swapping sports commentary for financial observations. Richardson’s role – he is now a financial advisor at Forsyth Barr – was previewed last week but the inaugural financial slot on the show was filled by his colleague Zoe Willis. Bridge previewed the lineup in the Weekend Herald.

The new show’s strong news focus was obvious from the outset. It comes from a glassed-off space in the Herald’s Auckland newsroom, with busy journalists all-too-obvious in the background. The set has none of the enforced casualness of couches: It is a radio studio with video cameras. And Ryan Bridge has no coffee-sipping co-hosts with whom he is expected to exchange inane banter to ease you gently into the day. Continue reading “Herald streaming breakfast show’s best ingredient – news” →

Radio ratings: Finely chopped, stirred and spun

Radio audience figures can be sliced and diced. Last week’s release of the first quarter’s ratings was cut so many ways that even the bobby dazzler of the chopping board Jamie Oliver would have been impressed.

NewstalkZB could afford to play it straight (almost) with figures that showed breakfast host Mike Hosking has well-and-truly eclipsed RNZ’s Morning Report as the most-listened-to programme. It stated on its website that “already king of the airwaves” Hosking has “surged to a new record of more than half a million listeners”. His 511,700 listeners – compared to Morning Report’s 429,100 – was certainly worth crowing about.

So, too, was ZB’s place as the top commercial station in the GfK commercial survey with a cumulative weekly audience of 744,000 people. That, too, topped RNZ National’s weekly audience by 117,000 listeners, although ZB wouldn’t draw the parallel because the commercial broadcasters have assiduously avoided a single radio market survey where non-commercial audiences are included in the comparisons.

However, what ZB and its sister, the New Zealand Herald, didn’t tell us was that in its biggest market – Auckland – both Hosking and the station’s overall audience  have come off the boil. The breakfast host’s share of audience in that market has dropped 4.6 percentage points to 30.3 per cent and his weekly cumulative audience is down by almost 6000 to 217,800. The station’s overall share in Auckland is down from 24.3 per cent to 21.5 per cent. Continue reading “Radio ratings: Finely chopped, stirred and spun” →

New snap and crackle in breakfast radio

Santa has already sent my Christmas present, and I confess to taking a sneak peep. I can’t wait to fully unwrap the 2022 Breakfast Battle Royal.

Before we have vacuumed the sand out of the car and packed away the folding chairs, New Zealand broadcasters will be hard at work finessing the line-ups they offer in the most hotly contested and crowded part of the market.

It is the space where not only do the two broadcast television networks fight each other for audience but must also compete with radio stations that are determined to hook morning listeners before they start their commute to work. And, somewhere in that mix, newspaper publishers and news sites also are vying for eyeballs. Continue reading “New snap and crackle in breakfast radio” →