The letter from Australia is a weekly newsletter from our office in Australia. Sign up to receive it by email. This week’s issue is written by Natasha Frost, reporting from Auckland, New Zealand.
In a few months, New Zealand is likely to lose around 20 per cent of its TV news journalists and producers.
“We’ve had death by a thousand cuts for at least a decade in New Zealand,” said Colin Peacock, producer and presenter of Radio New Zealand’s Mediawatch show. “This seems like a turning point.”
Last week, Newshub, the news arm of Three, a broadcaster owned by Warner Bros Discovery, announced it would be shutting down by June 30. It means the axing of more than 200 jobs and the death of one of New Zealand’s two free-to-air TV news stations.
Today, its main competitor, TVNZ, said it would also cut dozens of jobs. On the chopping block there are two daily news bulletins. Sunday, a long-running current affairs show. and Fair Go, a consumer rights program that has been running for 47 years.
Many of the shows that have so far survived the ax, such as Seven Sharp and Breakfast, are lighter, with more obvious commercial viability. “They keep those that they can put inline advertising on – basically sponsored content -,” Mr Peacock said.
At both outlets, executives cited tough economic conditions and declining advertising revenue, problems that have also hit the media industry in the United States. TVNZ, for example, expects to lose NZ$15.6 million, about $9.6 million, for the year ending in March.
“There was no one factor that caused this,” Warner Bros Discovery regional executive James Gibbons told local media in New Zealand about Newshub’s closure. “Rather, it was a combination of negative events in New Zealand and globally. The effects of the economic downturn were severe and the recovery did not materialize as expected.”
What is about to be lost in the New Zealand news media landscape seems unlikely to be recovered, said Duncan Grave, media commentator and founder of The Spinoff, a New Zealand news agency.
“So many, really dedicated people – some of the absolute 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 employs about 1,600 journalists, according to the country’s census, for its population of about 5.2 million people.
These journalists do a lot with a little: In addition to its two television stations, New Zealand has nearly two dozen daily newspapers, as well as two Sunday papers. a selection of news magazine brands including The Listener and North and South; and many independent publishers such as Metro and The Spinoff.
Smaller sockets are also under pressure. Pantograph Punch, an online arts and culture magazine founded in 2006, announced this week that it was on indefinite hiatus from the end of the month due to a lack of money, including from public funding bodies.
Unlike some other Commonwealth countries — Australia, Britain and Canada, for example — New Zealand does not have a fully integrated public broadcaster across 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 Chris Hipkins, the Opposition Leader, have urged the government to step up to provide more support for TVNZ. But in comments to reporters, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon dismissed that possibility. “We are unlikely to have further ownership of the media,” he said.
“Their instinct is not to intervene in the media market at all,” Mr Peacock said of the current coalition government, which is led by the centre-right National Party. “They recognize that the media has an important role to play in democracy, in informing citizens, 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 media, Mr Grave said.
“These decisions have an air of finality and don’t seem like a cry for help,” he said. “They don’t want help, because they can’t imagine a world where they can afford to do that.”
Here are the stories of the week.
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