Closing of Newshub, job losses at TVNZ point to New Zealand media needing a fair go - Ben Goodale

OPINION

The cosy relationship between advertising and media has facilitated journalism and entertainment over the last 150 years. It isn’t a surprise that the reduction of advertising revenue for media owners in New Zealand is having a drastic impact on our news and entertainment industries, as eyeballs have moved from local media creators to international aggregators and streaming platforms, in a much wider world of content.

We can’t fix everything, but trying to reconnect the revenue pipeline between advertisers and the creators of content is at least a good starting point.

However, being popular doesn’t seem to help some - Sunday, Fair Go and 1News all featured in the Nielsen top-10 rating shows for the first week of March, in the all-important 25-54 age bracket. So if you are a top-10 show and getting axed or cut, what hope is there for other shows, albeit perhaps cheaper to make? We’ve already lost shows that seemed to matter, such as The Project, but losing Fair Go, a voice for those who need help, is disappointing. I know the team at TVNZ won’t have taken the decision lightly, but it’s still quite a surprise, especially given its ratings and social good.

The Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill is now even more important. Maybe it needs work as it passes through Parliament, but if we don’t take action to ensure that players such as Meta and Google either recompense our media outlets for running their content, or force them to pay more tax, or both, then it seems an opportunity to support local media will be lost.

Australia is the poster child for this, and they fought hard for local media. Sure, Meta has subsequently decided not to carry links to Australian news. But I’d argue that Meta not carrying Australian news is preferable to distributing it for free. It means for news, you go to a news source: one that earns revenue from that process and is in the country where the news is generated. Supporting genuine news gatherers and reporters makes sense in this context, rather than leaving it to the wild west of blogs and conspiracy theorists.

Stuff and NZME have innovated in a very tough landscape (let’s not forget Stuff was sold by Fairfax for $1 not that long ago). But it’s hardly an easy industry and a government with a laissez-faire attitude to it could end up with a worse scenario than we now have, where the state broadcaster is set to be the only creator of television news. What government of any political persuasion in a free and fair democracy can think that’s a good idea? We need NZME, Stuff, broadcasters like Sky who bring in overseas news channels, and let’s not forget the Ashburton Guardians of the world, who bring a lens to our communities.

With Minister for Media and Communications Melissa Lee having stated that the Government should “not be involved in the business of the Fourth Estate”, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon telling Mike Hosking just the other day, “I just think media companies can do their own individual deals with those tech platforms”, and David Seymour’s recent apparent petulance indicating he doesn’t like it when media doesn’t just like his ideas, the inclination of the Government to step in appears slight.

I’m not sure they’ve thought this through. Lee, on hearing about Newshub, seemed unfussed, declaring there’s “a whole lot of other media about”.

Presumably she’s referring to some other media the rest of us haven’t heard of, rather than the rest of the New Zealand Fourth Estate who spoke at the select committee a couple of weeks ago about their very survival.

Do Lee or the Prime Minister believe local players like the Ashburton Guardian can negotiate well with Meta and Google?

This is not about government intervention. The Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill is about the Government creating a more level playing field where - not unreasonably - firms who aggregate, share and profit from content produced by others actually have to pay for that.

I think RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson put it best: “The stakes are really, really high. If we don’t tell and own our stories and if New Zealanders don’t have a range of media to come to - public, private, community, commercial, print, digital, radio, TV - if they don’t have a range of choice, they will get their information from somewhere else and it will break our democracy.”

So let’s ensure that our advertising dollars support local first, not last. And that Meta, Google and the rest pay their fair dues. In fact, let’s give New Zealand media a fair go!

- Ben Goodale is CEO of strategic advertising agency Quantum Jump and a big fan of democracy and journalism (where he started his career).