ANALYSIS
Sinead Boucher and Glen Kyne sat side-by-side on perfectly aligned chairs in the seventh-floor conference room at Stuff’s Auckland HQ as their media inquisitors filed in and out, in military-like precision, for personal interviews
ANALYSIS
Sinead Boucher and Glen Kyne sat side-by-side on perfectly aligned chairs in the seventh-floor conference room at Stuff’s Auckland HQ as their media inquisitors filed in and out, in military-like precision, for personal interviews about the new-look 6pm news. They looked like a pair of newsreaders themselves.
You have five minutes, instructed the PR organiser. I’ll knock on the door, she added, when there’s just over a minute to go.
She left Boucher, the owner of Stuff, and Kyne, the New Zealand boss of Warner Bros Discovery, to face the onslaught together.
Five minutes is an incredibly short time to steer through a list of questions - and there were certainly a good number after the initial press statement and then press conference on Tuesday to announce that Stuff and Warner Bros Discovery had signed a deal to save the 6pm news on Three (TV3).
Together in the conference room with Media Insider, the pair were upbeat, smiling, happy but also realistic. There is a lot of work still to be done.
From early July, Stuff will provide a one-hour weekday news bulletin and half-hour weekend news bulletins for Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) - the deal starts on Saturday, July 6, the day after WBD’s Newshub shuts down for good, with the loss of up to 300 jobs.
The Stuff deal is positive news for the public in almost every respect - it was couched as such by the two companies and welcomed as such by rivals, including NZME - especially after the dark days of the past six weeks.
It means some jobs will be saved - perhaps several dozen - and viewers will still have a choice of TV news at 6pm each day.
And it’s exciting in terms of what Stuff might be able to come up with in terms of a new news product in 80 short days.
But there’s a far deeper question about just how many people will still be tuning into those bulletins in the coming months and years. For all the PR lines about modernising and innovating the news, the sad reality is that viewers are switching off traditional television.
In reality, the new deal is more an attempt by Warner Bros Discovery - soon to be free of a huge and costly newsroom - to preserve what’s left of traditional television revenue in the short term. That revenue is still substantial, advertising sources say - in the low tens of millions each year for Three’s bulletin, but it is falling.
Warner Bros Discovery’s new deal will see the American giant pay an annual fee to Stuff to provide the daily news bulletins.
Stuff says it’s happy with the financial deal - the annual fee it receives is likely to be in the low millions of dollars - and says it will be enough to give it a margin, once you take out the cost of hiring more staff and producing and broadcasting a daily news bulletin.
So, we know the length of the bulletins and the start date but, beyond that, not a lot else.
We don’t know, for example, what the two companies have agreed to, financially. We don’t know the name of the bulletin, although it won’t be Newshub. Perhaps StuffHub or Stuff at 6?
We don’t know the length of the contract or even who will be hosting the bulletins, although it’s widely anticipated there will be just one newsreader.
Media Insider understands Samantha Hayes is a leading contender for the weekday bulletin - both companies say they will be collaborating closely over appointing a newsreader/s and determining the look and tone of the bulletin more generally.
But ultimately, it will be Stuff’s baby and Stuff’s responsibility - it seems likely there will be up to 30 or 40 new staff (including the newsreader/s) employed by Stuff, although this is not confirmed either. Many will have to have technical experience - camera people, technicians and producers.
Stuff says it will be also relying on its existing journalists and newsrooms around New Zealand. They’re already trained in visual journalism, although some might need a refresher course, Boucher said at an earlier press conference in the Stuff office, surrounded by journalists - those visiting, and those working there.
The deal certainly represents a major step-change for New Zealand media - and is one of the starkest examples yet of the convergence that has engulfed the media industry over the past decade.
As the likes of Stuff and NZME’s NZ Herald have invested considerably in video news in that time, so too have TVNZ, RNZ and Warner Bros Discovery invested in their text-based news websites.
All media companies are striving to focus on the best ways to engage their audiences, especially digitally.
But Stuff’s new deal is a big leap - a company with a proud print and digital background that is now jumping into the traditional broadcasting space. It is bold, brave and not without danger.
Six key points for 6pm:
Bosses of Stuff and Warner Bros Discovery have today spoken of tensions - and excitement.