John Roughan: TVNZ hard-pressed to recapture chemistry

One of the pleasures of working in news media is that anybody who has a passing acquaintance with it is perfectly qualified to criticise it, and does.

Mention that you work for a newspaper and invariably you will receive unsolicited but welcome advice on how to improve it. I don't imagine this happens quite as readily to those employed in the manufacture of fruit juice or much else.

But it certainly happens to television, which receives frequent, gratuitous and not especially qualified advice from the press as well.

To run any sort of news operation requires a certain sort of filter in the ear. It is vital to discern what people really want as distinct sometimes from what they say or even think they want. Not much is done to the format of this newspaper without subtle audience research, and no doubt the same is true of radio and television.

So how has TVNZ come to grief? Departing chief executive Ian Fraser must have lost his ear filters when he allowed Bill Ralston to wade into One News like a fox in a fowlhouse and send all those highly paid presenters fluttering from the coop.

True, their pay was obscene. Yes, quite a lot of people could do what they did. No, I didn't know of anybody who said they liked Paul Holmes either.

Yet somehow TVNZ was ruling the roost. The Government-owned company held its audience astonishingly well after the arrival of TV3 and Sky's expanding selection of subscription channels.

Whatever the chemistry of successful audience connection may be, TVNZ had it. One News and Holmes made TV One the default setting for a serious programme and TV2 had the fun. Sky bought the best sport but for the most part TV3 and the rest were feeding on scraps.

TVNZ seemed unassailable and likely to remain so, until the election of Helen Clark. She came to power with a three-point agenda for TVNZ. It would be reconstituted to remove any possibility of privatisation, it would get a charter to run programmes that were not necessarily popular, and it ought to stop paying the people who interviewed her salaries vastly greater than she got.

All three were reasonably popular, especially the last. And this was long before Ralston had to pay double the rates in his impatience to purge the news of personality. Judy Bailey's $800,000 was still to come. Susan Wood had yet to discover that Holmes' sudden departure would see her given $450,000 to slip into his chair.

Those sums are indefensible. Even with a $100,000 reduction for a second year in the chair, Wood was naive to expect public sympathy at her arbitration this week.

But before the fox went in, presenters' salaries were defensible. TVNZ could argue that the people who provided the human face of the broadcaster were essential to its earnings and knew their worth.

Yet once the popular complaint comes from your public owner, the Prime Minister no less, what can you do?

In accord with her agenda, TVNZ ceased to be constituted a state-owned enterprise (because those have to be profitable and can be saleable), received a contradictory charter to provide both profits and non-commercial programmes, and acquired Fraser.

Well known from his time on television as a chin-stroking interviewer, Fraser has probably never understood why he was eclipsed on the screen by Paul Holmes. A believer in Labour's charter, he was given charge of TVNZ three years ago. His reasons for resigning this week sounded as weak as his leadership seems to have been.

The board, hearing that Wood had gone to arbitration, wanted Fraser to take an interest in negotiations that Ralston is having with the next likely leading faces of the channel, notably Simon Dallow.

Fraser declined, declaring confidence in his head of news, which was his right. But he went further, announcing he would quit because he had "lost confidence in the board", which sounded more than a trifle precious. It was also a curious way to stand by his head of news.

Still, Ralston is a more robust character. He is almost the last television practitioner you would expect to want to take personality out of the news. His own work has always been blessed by eccentricity.

Even as a reporter Ralston preferred stories he could present in his own oddball style. I wonder if it is not so much the personalities he wants to change as the pay rates. He was a celebrity for TV3, which means he probably could not command the pay of counterparts on the more prosperous channel.

He was never the sort to be consumed with envy of rivals who received more, but once he got the chance to bring them back to Earth he jumped at it. Mike Hosking went, then Holmes. The 16-year One News duet ended with Richard Long's departure, and now Bailey, too.

No successors had been prepared, no continuity ensured. How hard would it have been to bring new faces, on more reasonable pay, into the broadcaster's front window before dispensing with the stars?

Ralston inherited an operation that needed a sharper news-gathering edge but there was no need to take the personality out of the presentation for that purpose.

It was high risk, and you wonder what research was done. Or was it a rush of blood to heads that might be more accustomed to the freedoms of writing and broadcasting than the disciplines of business management?

Whatever, it was wrong. One News has been steadily losing audience share to TV3 this year. This is the audience response that belies all the loose talk of overpaid news-readers and glorified auto-cue performers.

It is hard to see what TVNZ can do about it now. Once the chemistry is lost it must be hard to revive. The broadcaster had a winning combination of personalities on its platform, and the failure of Holmes at Prime proves the platform is equally important.

Now TVNZ has been deflated as much as its old faces. It is a reminder that popular wisdom can seldom be taken at face value.