On Wednesday, TV3 owner Warner Bros. Discovery announced to staff — about 300 of whom would lose their jobs — a proposal to shut down its news services by the end of June and focus on streaming via ThreeNow alongside free-to-air linear channels filled with Warner Bros. international content and some local programming, where it can collaborate with local funding bodies and other partners.
Senior Newshub journalists will put together a proposal next week to slim down their news operation in an effort to save it, but the scale of the losses — $21m in 2021, $35m in 2022, and apparently no improvement in 2023 — make it seem unlikely they will be able to convince their owner to persevere.
Amongst all the commentary since the shutdown announcement, this from Dr Greg Treadwell — a former journalist who works at AUT and is a researcher in its Centre for Journalism, Media and Democracy (and used to bring student groups to The Gisborne Herald for work experience) — is an insight into critics celebrating the imminent demise of Newshub.
Nearing the end of a well-informed piece on the “shocking announcement” for the country’s “already shrinking and fragile public sphere” — that included the dramatic decline of trust in news shown by his own research — he wrote that while scepticism of everything, including news, is healthy, “. . . those serious about democracy understand the mainstream is where society is anchored, stable and productive”.
“The dangers of an increasingly fragmented and reduced mainstream media are real. It includes leaving open ground for radicalised actors to occupy and facilitate further social disharmony. If things fall apart and the centre cannot hold, as the poet Yeats put it, ‘mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’.”
