Tag: Newshub

What if Newshub’s owners had been walking our streets?

When Newshub met its end last Friday night I was left with a niggling question: If Newshub been owned by local interests rather than an American corporation, would it have been summarily executed?

You see, I have a theory that local ownership exposes proprietors to pressures that are not felt by directors and executives sitting thousands of kilometres away.

If owners walk the same streets as the people they serve, they are confronted and held to account. Even the most isolated find themselves being questioned by the members of the social sets in which they move. They are forced to consider the impacts and consequences of their decisions.

Anonymous overseas executives and directors do not see the results of their abstract decision-making, apart (perhaps) from a small blip on the next set of financials.

TV3 has been losing about $35 million a year and, although no owner wants to see continued deficits, the amount ($21.5 million in US dollars) is not much more than a rounding number for WBD, which last year earned revenue of $US41.3 billion from its worldwide operations. That was roughly what this entire country earned from its goods exports.

There is little doubt that Newshub was costing TV3 too much money and something had to change, but was total closure of the news division the only option? At the time of its announcement, WBD said “there was nothing anyone in our New Zealand network business could have done better”. Maybe not, but could they have done things differently? Continue reading “What if Newshub’s owners had been walking our streets?” →

Silent majority must speak out to save vital journalism

In the wake of the announcements on Newshub’s closure and TVNZ’s cuts, I received an email from Pat, who lives in the Auckland suburb of Orakei. The email asked a simple question: “Is there anything a member of the public can do to register shock and horror at the loss of current affairs programmes and the talented people who make and present those programmes?”

I replied, suggesting Pat join the advocacy group Better Public Media. More importantly, I believe people like Pat must speak up in defence of what I now call democratically significant journalism.

‘Democratically significant journalism’ describes the sort of journalism that serves the interests of those living and interacting within a public sphere. It enables individual communities to know about themselves, and for communities to collectively share information to inform a broader consensus. In the past I would have said ‘public interest journalism’ but that phrase has been so maligned by people with agendas that benefit from destroying trust in journalists that I have stopped using it.

Pat’s dilemma is shared by all ordinary New Zealanders sensible enough to see the importance of journalism in a democratic society: How do they make it clear that they value it? Continue reading “Silent majority must speak out to save vital journalism” →

Newshub bell is tolling but who can hear it?

I had two visions when the imminent demise of Newshub was announced last week. One was comical and the other spiritual. Both carried a message.

The initial government reaction to the news that a significant portion of the country’s journalism could disappear at the end of June was comical. It brought to mind the Black Knight scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when King Arthur cleaves the knight’s limbs from his body, and the knight responds: “Tis but a scratch!”

It came to mind because neither Prime Minister Christopher Luxon nor his communications minister Melissa Lee seemed to grasp the significance of a decision made in New York that will reduce this country to one mainstream – and state owned – television news service and take out a sizeable percentage of New Zealand’s journalists and news crew.

Lee suggested there was plenty more where that came from, and the prime minister fell back on his lexicon of business school phrases, the most dismissive of which is ‘market forces’.

Coalition partner David Seymour brought only confusion to the table with his suggestion on how to even out those market forces. His solution – the logic of which escapes me – was to look at making the loss-making TVNZ pay a dividend. And the opposition had no meaningful suggestions either.

Only the other coalition partner Winston Peters seemed to grasp the impact that such a culling would have on a functioning democracy. Given Mr Peters’ long-standing combativeness toward journalists and their employers, he couldn’t resist an after-thought on media ‘wokeness’. Nonetheless, his recognition of the impact on democracy was a welcome reality check. Continue reading “Newshub bell is tolling but who can hear it?” →

Time to rethink the nightly news and current affairs offering

 

It may be time for television broadcasters to see the writing on the wall and cut their early evening news offering to a total of an hour – 30 minutes of news and the rest devoted to current affairs.

They have ample reason to think that the days have gone when they could hold large audiences until 7.30 pm with material that was even loosely news-based.

Warner Bros-Discovery NZ is already partway to that conclusion, announcing last week that The Project will not be renewed next year. TV3’s owner did say it would be replaced by “a redefined news show in the 7 pm slot”. The as yet undefined nature of that programme has led to speculation that Patrick Gower may be the beneficiary of the vacated timeslot.

However, both Discovery and TVNZ had a very hard 2022-3 financial year. In spite of both networks cracking hearty about prospects for the current year, the fact is that broadcast television is looking into the same sunset that newspapers have long contemplated.

Added to that is a drift away from news bulletins. When NZ on Air started its Where Are The Audiences? surveys in 2014, the total television audience peaked at about 70 per cent in the 6 pm to 8.30 pm timeslot. This year, the peak in that time slot was 37 per cent of the potential audience. Given the rate of decline, next year the news slot is likely to attract less than half the audience it boasted a decade earlier. Continue reading “Time to rethink the nightly news and current affairs offering” →