New Zealand journalism will get a $55 million injection, but likely not without criticism the Government might try to ‘buy’ favour with private outlets. Tim Murphy reports from the funding announcement in Dunedin.
The Government has made good on its promise to inject a further $55m into supporting the news media – with a new, three-year fund to pay for public interest journalism.
And the chances of a new public broadcaster to replace TVNZ and RNZ appear to be firming, with talk of ‘hope’ that further work being done on a new multi-platform organisation could bring it to fruition. Work on that big new broadcaster halted in the last term of government when NZ First pulled on its policy handbrake.
While Friday’s announcement of the $55m fund by Broadcasting and Media Minister Kris Faafoi will be welcomed by many media companies, the spending is likely to be criticised by political opponents concerned about the Labour Government ‘buying’ favour with private journalism outlets.
Faafoi provided details of the fund, a Labour campaign promise, at the Dunedin premises of Allied Press, publisher of the Otago Daily Times. He appeared to have journeyed south especially to highlight the ODT as a serious news provider that had weathered the economic storm while maintaining quality coverage and good representation in its regions.
Businesses like locally-owned Allied and Stuff, the mainly Australian funds-owned NZME, and multinational Discovery with its Newshub brand will be able to apply to NZ on Air for taxpayer funds, alongside existing public broadcasters RNZ, TVNZ and Māori TV, small players such as Newsroom, and Māori, Pasifika and ethnic media.
The fund will offer $10m this year, then $25m and $20m in following years. In part it is a pushback against ‘fake news’ and the misleading of the public on important issues. It also responds to decades of cuts in commercial media to newsrooms which have pulled back from staffing in certain regions and coverage of subjects deemed not popular with readers.
Faafoi said: “Covid-19 and the lockdowns last year highlighted the important role our media plays in providing up-to-date, independent and trusted information to the public. We want to ensure that kind of coverage is supported and developed across all community levels, where media operations have often cut back resources to reduce their costs.”
He said those applying for the money would need to show that the public interest journalism they wanted to publish or broadcast would not otherwise be undertaken.
Last year, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown, the Government paid $38m in wage subsidies to media firms and made available emergency ‘cashflow support’ amounting to around $50m.
Faafoi did not expect last year’s assistance – including relief from multi-million broadcasting charges to state-owned network company Kordia – to form part of the ongoing journalism spend. He’d had no requests from broadcasters for that relief to continue and had the impression broadcasters’ revenues had recovered well.
He made specific mention at the fund launch of the other piece of work – one public broadcaster to replace the existing pair of TVNZ and RNZ – saying the publicly-owned entities would need to adapt and change to a multi-platform, digital world. He was ‘hopeful’ additional work on the proposal that had been mandated by Cabinet would produce a good result for the future. He urged staff at RNZ and TVNZ to keep doing good public interest journalism in the meantime.
Taxpayers already pay for RNZ ($42m a year), as well as $6m annually for journalism through NZ on Air, and a $2.5m fund over two years for 14 ‘local democracy reporters’ nationwide.
While most media businesses have reported improved financial circumstances since the worst of the Covid lockdowns, advertising revenues have been on a long-term slide and pressures on income to fund high, fixed-cost journalism have remained.
In the past year, Stuff and Newshub have been rescued from perilous situations by new ownership, but those businesses still face a reckoning with falling advertising income, competition from global digital giants like Google, Facebook and on-demand video services.
NZME, publisher of the New Zealand Herald, told the sharemarket late last year it had made a strong recovery from the depths of the Covid-19 drop in revenue and would likely better its 2019 second-half performance, when the wage subsidy of $9m was included.
The latest government intervention aims to ensure regions outside New Zealand’s main centres are covered, and that subject areas of public interest which might not gain high clicks online but are deemed important for communities are resourced.
By making the taxpayer commitment stretch over three years in the first instance, and focusing on ‘at risk’ areas of public journalism, the Government wants to fill immediate and short-term gaps.
The money is unlikely to go to individual bloggers and personal newsletters, pure comment sites, paywalled sections of news websites or to support subjects deemed to be ‘clickbait’ like entertainment, celebrity, crime and social media re-writes.
The process of defining what is ‘public interest journalism’ and how success of the funding could be measured will be debated with senior media leaders in coming weeks.
Asked about potential criticism of the state having too great a role in the future finances of the media, Faafoi said Labour understood the vital need for public interest journalism, including scrutiny of politicians and public figures and did not want to contemplate the alternative, where retrenchment in journalism led to less accountability and information for the public.
Applications for this year’s funding will open at the end of April.
Newsroom receives funding via NZ on Air for our daily The Detail podcast for RNZ and our Newsroom Investigates documentaries. We received additional subscriptions from government agencies last year as part of the Covid-19 emergency support and staff were supported by the national wage subsidy scheme.
