Sellout TVNZ should be sold

Comment: Before Labour was voted out, Broadcasting Minister Willie Jackson took some not-so-subtle revenge on TVNZ. He replaced the right-leaning board with a left-leaning one headed by Labour’s good friend Alastair Carruthers who is also chair of the Film Commission.

Just one of the new six-member board, Linda Clark, has any significant broadcasting experience. Clark, a former political editor of 1News and now a lawyer, has, in the past, provided media training for Labour leaders.

Jackson was hoping the new board would steer TVNZ towards more of a public interest approach after the collapse of the proposed merger with RNZ. It seems to have done the opposite. After appointing its head of sales, Jodi O’Donnell, to the CEO role TVNZ appears to have become even more commercially focused. 

O’Donnell’s first major move in the job has been to axe Fair Go and Sunday – two of the last remaining programmes that saw public interest journalism as part of their (unstated) mandate. Prior to this, the TVNZ board had rejected the idea of helping Newshub stay alive by sharing some of the costs of news gathering. Newsroom understands that the idea put to TVNZ by TV3 boss Glen Kyne was vague, but it hardly seems to have got much consideration from the state broadcaster.

Both moves make financial sense. Once-a-week current affairs programmes are expensive and offer limited sales inventory. Helping the competition to survive in some shape or form doesn’t help the bottom line either. But, in the current environment, the moves feel tone deaf and out of touch.

Sunday and Fair Go were the last two current affairs programmes left on local television, if you discount the NZ On Air-funded Q+A which runs on Sunday morning.

The two shows rate well and would’ve brought in a decent amount of advertising so the loss per show would not have been huge. They would have also delivered good audiences to the programmes that follow them. If TVNZ can’t take a loss on these quality shows, then it must in dire straits.

Even Fair Go reporter and presenter, Garth Bray, posed the question on TVNZ’s own news, “surely it can’t be all about the money?”

Unfortunately, Garth, it is. If Carruthers and the board ever had any of the vision Jackson was hoping for it has disappeared in the rear-view mirror as they hasten to grab every dollar.

Act leader and Associate Finance Minister David Seymour was criticised for asking what sort of return the Crown is getting on its equity and suggesting it might be time to create a level playing field (presumably to help TV3). 

These are fair questions. TVNZ has built up a $100 million dollar war chest, mainly by forgoing dividends to the Crown, so it can “transition” to digital.

The transition is running behind schedule and now TVNZ looks like it will have to spend some of that accumulated booty covering operational losses for the next few years. It is possible it won’t return to profit until it switches off its terrestrial and satellite distribution and delivers all its content over the internet.

Even when it gets to that point it still may not be able to compete with the likes of Netflix, Disney, Apple, Amazon Prime, You Tube and Sky TV’s multiple channels. Most of those providers are also moving to advertising supported channels to supplement subscriptions – which will further impact TVNZ.

It is distinctly possible that TVNZ will need a taxpayer-funded handout at some point in the future.

The case for selling it before it becomes a liability instead of an asset (it is currently valued at $240 million) must be on the minds of Christopher Luxon and Seymour.

Perhaps the only reason for not selling is if you believe that 1News represents an insurance policy against misinformation and a complete economic meltdown in the commercial media sector. Even if that happened could 1News provide the ultimate bulwark against the providers of fake news? As a local news service it is hardly a shining star, even though its trust ratings remain relatively high. Not many stories are broken by TVNZ reporters and there will be even fewer now that Sunday and Fair Go are gone. Newshub and other commercial media frequently hold the powerful to account ahead of 1News.

Digital platforms are already the dominant news providers and the apparatus and artifice of 6pm news bulletins will soon be redundant. A well-funded RNZ, if it keeps investing in its digital platforms, would be capable of providing that backbone service the country requires. Already, video, has proliferated well past the TV networks so providing “pictures from the scene” is no longer the preserve of 1News or Newshub.

There will some consternation in the production sector at the thought of TVNZ being sold but this is countered by the shifts in audience habits.

According to NZ On Air’s 2023 ‘Where Are The Audiences’ survey the most popular media options were YouTube (for video) (44 percent) Netflix (42 percent), Facebook (for video) (36 percent), TVNZ 1 (34 percent) and Spotify (33 percent).

The case for selling a commercially focused TVNZ gets stronger by the day. – MJ

Change in the south

Publisher NZME doubled down on its push into the regions this week, buying the newspaper and website assets of the Gisborne Herald, a firm in which it has long held a 49 percent stake. The deal, which could see staff numbers cut in coming weeks as NZME centralises roles beyond the East Coast town, came a week after the Auckland publisher bought Tauranga-based Sun Media.

Both regional firms have successful news sites, with the Gisborne Herald relatively early to have introduced a subscriber paywall. NZME also picks up legacy print mastheads the Weekend Sun, the Gisborne Herald, across five days Tuesday to Sunday, and associated local publications.

But NZME’s dealmaking might have gone the other way in the deep south, with its longstanding content sharing agreement with Allied Press, the independent publisher of the Otago Daily Times, said to be coming to an end. Allied Press has been deeply proud of its independence and its control of costs over the years.

The change in sharing of stories is most likely an issue of the fee NZME would seek for its end of the service.

NZME has provided a considerable daily range of stories for the ODT, regularly filling space in the paper’s political, business and general news pages, while the Otago paper’s journalists’ work from the region can appear in the New Zealand Herald and its website.

There has long been an imbalance there, and with publishing costs being a big factor for all media firms, NZME’s option now is to appoint its own NZ Herald journalist(s) in Dunedin to cover the region.

For the ODT, an option to cover national stories is to make even more use of re-cycled news from RNZ.

An NZME spokesperson says of the southern situation: “NZME has had a reporting operation in Dunedin for some time. We hope to continue to provide content to ODT/Allied Press publications under commercial terms in future.”

– Tim Murphy