RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson has just marked a decade in the role.
As he marks a decade in his role, RNZ boss Paul Thompson opens up on the future of media, the RNZ editing inquiry and the public broadcaster’s next big moves, including new content.
Paul Thompson’s 10th anniversary as the CEO of RNZ this month was tinged with sadness. One of his influential former bosses, Peter O’Hara, died that day, aged just 71, after a health battle.
“He was a terrific journo and editor, and a very good boss,” Thompson wrote in an email a day after we sat down for a lunchtime interview.
It was clear O’Hara regarded Thompson equally highly. Just a few weeks ago, O’Hara – an esteemed journalist and a former editor-in-chief at Fairfax – had emailed me himself about a Media Insider column at the height of RNZ’s troubles with a production journalist who had added pro-Kremlin content to Russia-Ukraine war stories.
O’Hara wrote of the piece, in which I outlined my own troubles with a staff member when I was an editor (in this case fabricating stories): “It’s an astute, frank and open assessment of the situation, informs the reader, and perhaps takes some weight off Paul Thompson’s shoulders.”
Thompson has certainly had to bear some heavy weight this year.
He and the RNZ team were deeply disappointed when the proposed merger with TVNZ was called off: “I thought it was a missed opportunity – we put our heart and soul into arguing the case and actually trying to influence it.”
The pain of that decision had barely eased when the editing saga hit the headlines. The production journalist was found by RNZ to have inappropriately edited 49 stories – while an independent review panel found RNZ’s processes to be at fault and criticised some of the broadcaster’s responses to the saga.
Meanwhile, one of RNZ’s top stars, Karyn Hay, resigned as Nights host after being absent from the airwaves for many weeks – it was later revealed she had been subject to an internal complaint. Two days ago, RNZ announced the retirement of its biggest star, Kim Hill, who will leave her Saturday morning show in November.
And two weeks ago, it was revealed RNZ’s radio ratings had taken a tumble over the past three and a half years, with the station falling from essentially number one in the market to number five.
Over lunch, Thompson, a former national league footballer – he played for Gisborne City as a teenager and went on to play 100 games for Waikato United – gives every impression of a striker who has dusted himself off after a string of sliding tackles and is ready for the next test.
That challenge is already well upon him, and it is arguably far bigger and more important than most if not all of the previous issues – a new, boosted RNZ budget and an opportunity to redefine the broadcaster’s position in the New Zealand media industry.
“It was a bit disappointing,” Thompson says of the failed merger.
“But the flip side of that is we came out of it in good shape and with the extra funding, new expectations and a vote of confidence in RNZ as a stand-alone organisation.”
He says he is being “very careful” about the budget injection – an extra $25.7 million a year.
“I’ve actually slowed down our planning. I think the key thing is to not just look at the additional money, but look at all of the money and have a thoughtful strategy.
“Our big challenge is to deliver more against our charter. It’s not to be carnivorous around other people’s audience or to grow for the sake of it. We have to actually deliver to the charter.”
Thompson was taking no prisoners when he appeared on Nine to Noon on Monday, June 12.
“It’s so disappointing that this pro-Kremlin garbage has ended up in our stories,” he told host Kathryn Ryan.
The comment came from a hurt and angry place. It also earned him a surprising rebuke from the independent panel hired to review the circumstances of the editing scandal.
I can imagine other media leaders would have used equally fierce words.
“We accept the chief executive was under pressure at the time (both from his own staff and competing media) and that his aim was to demonstrate leadership in the handling of an unfolding crisis,” said the independent panel, in its final report.
“However, the choice of language like ‘pro-Kremlin garbage’ was, in the panel’s view, unhelpful in maintaining public trust.
“At the time these comments were made RNZ was acting on incomplete information, as the circumstances and extent of the inappropriate editing was yet to be fully considered. Listeners and others may have believed the editing had been a deliberate and orchestrated exercise in propaganda, rather than a failure of journalistic decision-making or practice. As is now evident, this panel finds the latter.”
Early on in our interview, Thompson made a passing reference to the editing “crisis”.
As we came to talk about it in more depth later, I asked him if it really was a “crisis”.
“I’m trying not to either underplay it or exaggerate it, but it felt very tough,” he says. “Having had the problem, we did a good job of being open about it, doing the audit, doing the independent review.”
He’s right. The way RNZ handled the matter was indeed a case study in transparency – they placed the ongoing editorial audit at the top of the RNZ news website for weeks, keeping their audience fully informed.
In the end, 49 stories were found by RNZ to be inappropriately edited.
The independent inquiry found the production journalist had breached RNZ’s editorial standards by adding content – in the journalist’s view, more balance – to foreign stories, but that he was not a rogue actor and the vast majority of his work was appropriate.
Nevertheless, there had been a breach of trust, said the inquiry, which also found RNZ’s systems, processes, and response at fault.
“It was a hell of an experience,” says Thompson.
“As you’ve written about, you’ve had your moments. I think every editor has them, right? Our challenge was to treat it seriously, not to be consumed or defined by it.
“We’ve got 22 recommendations to implement, and [we’ll] just get on and do it. You have to come out of it stronger, and we will do.”
Thompson says it “just felt really difficult to be under that kind of scrutiny and you do a bit of soul-searching”.
“It was a hell of a thing to go through, but I think we navigated it as well as we could.”
Thompson says the panel’s recommendations were “really constructive”.
“Their findings were their findings,” he adds. “Overall, it was a really robust testing process and Jim [Mather – RNZ chairman] said no stone left unturned, which is always painful – but it’s good that we did that.”
The journalist, Mick Hall, spoke exclusively to senior Herald journalist David Fisher this week, defending his position. “I think that they (RNZ) have a lot to answer for and I don’t think that they have, really. I’m surprised that nobody resigned over it, to be honest,” said Hall.
I ask Thompson if he stands by the “garbage” comment.
“At the time I made the comment, that was the narrative. The editing and the changes to the story affected the balance.
“It was strong language, though.
“I was able to be reflective on the moment, but at the time, I was trying to make it really clear that I was taking it seriously and I wasn’t trying to obscure or downplay anything and, look, you get the benefit of an independent review, you have to think about it.
“I think they’re quite entitled to their view on it, and you have to just take it on the chin and move on, really.
“I can’t think what else I can do.”
Thompson, a former newspaper editor and executive editor of Fairfax (now Stuff), says he still loves his role, 10 years on. He is, easily, New Zealand’s longest-serving chief executive of a major media company.
“It’s one of those amazing, privileged roles. They’re bloody hard – they really are hard. You have to be asking yourself that question [of tenure and commitment], but it’s such an interesting time.
“Having been through lots of things in my time at RNZ, just the opportunity to be there when we’re actually able to invest and have a think about our role and actually do some of that renewal we need to do … I definitely wanted to contribute to that.”
He has long been touted as a future TVNZ CEO. Indeed, he was considered a frontrunner to be the boss of a merged public broadcaster.
TVNZ’s top role is up for grabs following the departure of Simon Power.
Does he want it? I sense he is well-prepared for the question.
“I’m only focused on my job,” he says. “Literally, I’ve had no more time to think about it other than making sure I feel energised and up for the challenge of the next little while.
“I never talk about my career because as soon as you do, it becomes sort of a talking point, which I don’t really want it to be. But I’m really enjoying what I’m doing, still. It’s a great job, a great organisation.”
He now has a unique challenge – how to appropriately commit RNZ’s big funding boost, while also playing a key role in a sustainable media landscape.
Just about every media business is restructuring teams and platforms to handle the rolling waves of digital disruption – RNZ is really the only one that has any extra money to do it.
The others are all in tight cost-management mode – essentially rebuilding a Boeing 747 into a lower-cost, more efficient Boeing Dreamliner while still flying the plane.
Thompson is also fully aware of the need to focus on his own house.
While RNZ’s radio ratings are reported separately from those of the commercial stations, the public entity has gone from essentially number one in the overall New Zealand market in 2020 to number five today, based on total cumulative audience.
At the start of 2020, RNZ had a healthy overall national audience of 654,306 with its radio news competitor Newstalk ZB (owned by NZME, publisher of the Herald) in fifth spot, with 536,499 listeners.
Those positions are now reversed. Using the same comparison, ZB now claims the top spot with 677,643 listeners and RNZ is in fifth spot (behind three music stations) with 532,351 listeners.
At the start of 2020, RNZ’s flagship show Morning Report enjoyed an audience of just over half a million listeners. That has fallen by more than 120,000 in three years to sit today at 380,152.
Newstalk ZB breakfast host Mike Hosking was more than 100,000 listeners behind Morning Report back then. But today he is almost 100,000 ahead.
“We definitely want the station to perform better and we’ll get it there,” says Thompson.
He says live listening remains vital to the organisation but it’s not the major or only focus in a converged world. He indicates an overhaul of some content, particularly in the digital space.
“We are in the strategic thinking piece [with the new budget].
“One thing we don’t want to do is allow the cost escalation in our business to take all the money. I don’t want us to get back to the point where we’re constrained by funding, which is where we’ve been basically throughout our whole history.
“So we’re playing a bit of a longer game.”
He says there are three big areas of focus: creating, curating and commissioning richer and more diverse content.
“That’s obviously what we need to do.”
He says RNZ needs to maintain its news strength, but broaden its range, by pushing into “more entertainment and different forms of content coverage of the arts [and] coverage of things like comedy”.
“We are quite a news-heavy organisation. Broadening our content mix has to happen.”
RNZ, he points out, is in a fortunate and privileged position in that it doesn’t need to bring audiences back to a “home property and commercialise them”.
Through content sharing and the use of off-platform sites – including social platforms like YouTube – RNZ has less stress and more of a focus on striving to “being where people want to be”.
They share content with TVNZ, but he agrees “we’d love to do more with TVNZ … we’d love to do more with Discovery as well”.
New Zealand has always had an interesting public media mix, says Thompson: a funding agency, NZ on Air, investing in public content on commercial channels; a publicly owned but wholly “commercial beast” in TVNZ; and a charter-led radio broadcaster.
“I thought there was always an opportunity to make New Zealand’s system work better. Then you think about the context of the times we’re in, where the media sector is looking fragile.
“It’s adapting – there is some amazing stuff happening. Every media company in New Zealand is trying to adapt to the challenge, and with success, but it’s bloody hard.”
He thinks RNZ can help play a part, working collaboratively with other media companies with the likes of training and developing new talent and continuing schemes such as Local Democracy Reporting – a team of journalists funded to cover councils and other public interest journalism stories across 14 New Zealand regions.
He is very proud of the partnerships that RNZ has forged with other companies – it now shares content with more than 60 other media companies and services, including NZME.
“I’m also aware that every media company has got its own content and audience strategy and our content is not always going to be useful for other companies to pick up and use, but there’s still a fair bit of content sharing going on.
“What does that look like, if we evolve that? I think part of that is figuring out where the needs of the media sector are.”
He floats the idea of a return to a nationwide news agency, much like how NZPA operated for many years. While that was a newspaper-based model, reflecting a time when there were one or two deadlines a day and essentially just one platform, could a new model be established recognising all media companies are now converged, offering multi-media content around the clock?
“Are there elements of reporting in New Zealand that could be done better by doing it once?
“And are the economic challenges such that that’s now a better idea than it may have been five years ago?
“I don’t know. What I don’t want to do is come up with a whole bunch of fancy ideas that are just going to not help or aren’t meaningfully supported with the wider sector.”
RNZ has started talking to some of its content partners already.
“Maybe early next year we have a bit of a wider conversation, but I’m really reluctant to be seen to be coming with a whole lot of ideas that aren’t just going to be useful for the sector. It’s a collaboration.
“I think it’s time the whole sector thought more about it.”
Thompson believes trust in media can be rebuilt.
“I don’t think we can necessarily turn back the clock and go back to how things were. But I think there are some things we could do as an industry. Part of it would be getting a sustainable set of business models across the sector. That, to me, feels like the biggest thing.”
The Government’s digital content fair bargaining bill is a good step, but “I think it could be one of 20 things we’ll need to do”.
He doesn’t want to see New Zealand media “beholden” to the global digital giants, relying solely on contributions from them alone.
He reiterates RNZ is taking the next six months to plan its budgets. “Being thoughtful and considered … caution is the word.”
“The public will see some really great things happening in the next six to 12, 18 months, two years, but we’re taking the first six months to plan our way through that.”
So, how does New Zealand’s longest-serving boss of a major media firm celebrate his 10 years in the role?
“I hadn’t thought about it ‘til our chat yesterday,” he emailed me the day after our interview. “So I’ve no plans, though no doubt there will be a toast with family over the weekend.”
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