A ‘tipping point’ for news in New Zealand

The Australian letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australian bureau. To register to receive it by email. This week’s issue is written by Natasha Frost, reporting from Auckland, New Zealand.

Within months, New Zealand is likely to lose about 20 percent of its journalists and television news producers.

“We’ve seen thousands of cuts in New Zealand for at least a decade,” says Colin Peacock, the producer and presenter of the Radio New Zealand show Mediawatch. “This feels like a turning point.”

Last week, Newshub, the news division of Three, a television station owned by Warner Bros Discovery, announced it would close as of June 30. That means the elimination of more than 200 jobs and the death of one of the country’s two free TV news stations. in New Zealand.

Today its main competitor, TVNZ, said it would also cut dozens of jobs. On the chopping block are two daily newscasts; Sunday, a long current affairs show; and Fair Go, a consumer rights program that has been running for 47 years.

Many of the shows that have survived the ax so far, such as Seven Sharp and Breakfast, are lighter fare, with clearer commercial viability. “They keep the programs where they can put integrated ads (basically sponsored content),” Mr. Peacock said.

At both outlets, executives cited challenging economic conditions and declining advertising revenue, issues that have also affected the media industry in the United States. TVNZ, for example, expects to lose 15.6 million New Zealand dollars, about $9.6 million, for the year ending in March.

“There was no single trigger that caused this,” James Gibbons, a regional director at Warner Bros Discovery, told local news media in New Zealand of Newshub’s closure. “Rather it was a combination of negative events in New Zealand and globally. The consequences of the economic downturn have been severe and the recovery has not materialized as expected.”

What is lost in the New Zealand news media landscape appears impossible to recover, says Duncan Greive, media commentator and founder of The Spinoff, a New Zealand news channel.

“So many really dedicated people – some at the very top of the profession in this country – are likely to lose their jobs,” he said. “And it’s hard to imagine them doing similar work with similar impact in this country.”

New Zealand currently has work approximately 1,600 journalistsAccording to the country’s census, the country’s population is approximately 5.2 million.

These journalists do a lot with little: in addition to the two television channels, New Zealand has almost two dozen daily newspapers, as well as two Sunday newspapers; a selection of news magazine brands including The Listener and North and South; and several independent publishers, some digital-only, such as Metro and The Spinoff.

Smaller outlets are also under pressure. The Pantograph Punch, an online arts and culture magazine founded in 2006, announced this week that this was the case goes on an indefinite hiatus from the end of the month due to a lack of money, including from public funding agencies.

Unlike some other Commonwealth countries – Australia, Britain and Canada, for example – New Zealand does not have a fully integrated public broadcaster for radio and television. Although TVNZ is a state-owned company, it is commercially funded through advertising. (Radio New Zealand is the country’s only fully publicly funded broadcaster.)

Some, including Leader of the Opposition Chris Hipkins, have urged the government to take action to give TVNZ more support. But in comments to reporters, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon dismissed that possibility. “We are unlikely to see further ownership of media assets,” he said.

“Their instinct is not to intervene in the media market at all,” Mr Peacock said of the current coalition government, led by the centre-right National Party. “They recognize that the news media play an important role in democracy, keeping people informed, but they really don’t want to commit to any kind of bailout.”

It was hard to imagine any individual or company stepping forward to save the day or support the country’s news media, Mr. Greive said.

“These decisions are final and do not appear to be a cry for help,” he said. “They don’t want help because they can’t imagine a world where they could ever afford it.”

Here are the stories of the week.

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