OPINION
I sold my shares in RadioWorks more than 20 years ago, but I have always retained my love for media and communication. Put me in a sound-proof room with a microphone and a set of headphones and I’m a happy budgie.
So regardless of the whys and wherefores of the news that has rocked our two major television companies over the past 10 days, I’m sad for the people for whom storytelling is a passion and a calling.
The truth is though that this moment has been a long time coming. One of the first rules in broadcasting is to be where your audience is, and the decline in audience for linear TV or what we used to just call television, has been stark.
Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, everyone watched TV almost every night. Now I myself haven’t watched the 6pm news bulletin in years. I thought it might have been due to post-politics stress disorder, but the truth is that by that time of day I’ve seen and heard most of what I want to see online or on radio, and I don’t need to see the overt editorialising that often seems to accompany the news on old-style television.
It’s clear I’m not the only one. I was doing a speech earlier this week in a room of 250-odd people, mostly 40 plus, and asked for a show of hands as to who watches the 6pm news. I didn’t expect many to do so, but I was floored when not a single hand went up.
The 6pm news used to drive the evening schedule, so there is a flow-on effect of all that audience disappearing. In many homes now the big TV on the wall is almost obsolete while everyone watches short video clips on their own phones. The last time we turned on the TV was to see Geordie Beamish’s brilliance at the World Indoor Athletics Champs; and even that came in on a stream.
When I first started in radio all those years ago we were the “dying” medium, struggling against the onslaught of television and a resurgent newspaper industry. Now radio is probably the healthiest of the traditional media, although it too has suffered, particularly on the revenue side, from the digital media onslaught.
Figures suggest that Meta and Google these days take over a billion dollars a year from the local advertising market of around $3.2 billion. A decade ago they took out less than half of that, and a decade before they barely existed.
So what to do? The first thing must be to be where your audience is. There is little point in producing hour-long bulletins in a world where people consume their information scrolling through one and two-minute videos on their phone. You have to package your content to the way they choose to consume it and it has always been so.
The second thing is to pick a niche and own it. Like it or not New Zealand Inc doesn’t control all the media New Zealanders consume any more, and is unlikely to ever again. For too long our news media tried to out-Facebook Facebook, trying to maximise eyeballs and be the biggest, by serving up a similar mix of dross you can find on any social media feed.
The only unique thing about New Zealand media is New Zealand stories and New Zealand angles. The rest is available anywhere.
The other mistake in hindsight was to encourage journalists to participate in social media. In a world where everyone has a megaphone and anyone can broadcast their reckons, you don’t stand out from the crowd by contributing to the reckoning, unless you have some experience and knowledge in the relevant topic.
There is a role for opinion, but I suspect the really under-served niche in the age of “fake news” is verifiable accuracy. Imagine if there was a media outlet known for being the place where people could get a factual summary of what actually happened, as against the view of people with agendas or the potentially unhinged or the plausible creation of the latest large language model. Now that could stand out.
It all needs some zero-based thinking.
Video storytelling from a trusted brand could still be a powerful marketable service, but it needs to be reimagined for the modern media environment.
There is a role for regulators in all this, although perhaps not the one currently before Parliament. I remain completely unconvinced that requiring social media companies which provide traffic to domestic media creators to pay for that privilege makes any sort of sense.
On the other hand, taxing them on the same basis as domestic media companies by refusing to allow them to send inflated service fees home to their international parents that minimise their New Zealand tax, would be both fairer and probably more lucrative.
Forcing New Zealand media companies to pay for legacy infrastructure they have less and less use for is also counterproductive and placing a handbrake on profitability and innovation. Sure, in my day an FM frequency was both rare and a licence to make money so I should pay for it.
Similarly, it (sort of) made sense to pay a government-owned company to broadcast my signal along with everyone else from a nearby high hill. These days both are just one way to reach an audience. They need to be priced accordingly.
While we are at it, the laws on defamation and privacy need work to level the playing field between traditional and social media. Assuming we don’t want the wild west we have on social media in broadcast media, a simple way needs to be found to enforce the accepted norms of civilised behaviour on the social broadcasters – perhaps a small claims tribunal for defamation might curb some of the excesses that drive the more unhinged (yet often popular) content.
Finally, if there is to be taxpayer money handed out to tell “local stories” then it needs to be done even-handedly, with no favouritism to broadcasters owned by the government. For a healthy vibrant media scene we need much more innovation, and that doesn’t happen through making funding decisions based on a nostalgic view of the old NZBC.
Change can be hard, but it also brings opportunity. Computerisation and deregulation of radio back in the day allowed yours truly and a bunch of other university students to challenge the old paradigms and help bring about much greater choice in the radio industry.
These days there are a plethora of ways to tell stories and entertain people. The trick will be to find the way that works and the business model that pays for it. It will be there. We just need to make room for the innovation which will bring it. There is no way that Facebook and Tik Tok are the final word in modern media.
Steven Joyce is a former National Party Minister of Finance and Minister of Transport. He is director at Joyce Advisory, and the author of the recently published book on his time in office, On the Record.
The event is described as a series of aggressive sales pitches.