OPINION
Trust in media has dropped 20 percentage points in the last five years. The AUT annual Trust in News survey was released on Monday with the startling news that New Zealanders’ trust in media has fallen from 53 per cent in 2020 to 33 per cent this year.
What a week. Warner Bros. Discovery confirmed it was closing down its entire Newshub operation, including Three’s flagship 6 o’clock news. And TVNZ confirmed it was closing Sunday, Fair Go and some news programmes, scaling back its digital, youth-oriented service Re:News and making other cuts to its journalism.
A leading social scientist suggested to me on Tuesday that New Zealand might become the first country in the world to lose linear TV.
Linear TV is broadcast TV – the programmes you watch as they are being broadcast – rather than the programmes you choose to watch when you go to a media app or website.
In the media we like to tell ourselves we’re not making baked beans. It’s true. News media isn’t a commodity product, it’s crafted by highly skilled people who work hard to do a good job. Most of them could get much better-paid work doing something else, but they do journalism because they like it and, especially, because they believe in it.
Still, what if we were making baked beans? If people told us they didn’t like the taste, we’d do something about the recipe pretty damn quick.
Journalism has to do the same. In the mainstream we’re losing audiences to social media. In broadcast and print, we’re losing out to apps and websites.
We’re responding by building the strength of our own apps and websites, as we should. That involves the quality of what we offer online, the breadth of coverage and style of how we do it. And, importantly, the revenue-generating potential and the algorithmic wizardry required to succeed. It’s a new and fast-changing world and we’re learning about it, just like our audiences.
But is there enough debate about what news is and what it should be? Is there bias in the ways we choose stories and frame them, the language we use and the values we reinforce with those choices?
The AUT survey contains some telling results. Among them:
In a wider sense, these results shouldn’t be a surprise. Declining trust in all sources of information is one sign of a fraying society and who doesn’t think that’s what we’ve living in now.
But look at those demographics: the trust problem is led by middle-aged Pākehā.
Where have we heard that before? Only everywhere.
I know, I’m one of them. I reckon that means I’m allowed to say this.
Turns out the people who complain the most about media are the people who complain the most about everything. Taxes and rates. Having to drive more slowly in suburbs and on dangerous open roads. Climate change. Housing density. Breaking the cycles of violence and illness associated with poverty. And especially the rise of te reo Māori and all the other ways Māori get “special treatment”.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. Of course the people who complain the most about social and cultural change are the people who complain the most about the media. In the media, we reflect those changes, as they evolve in schools and suburbs, workplaces and sports fields. But those who complain the most don’t want to hear about these things and don’t think they should be happening.
The way most media do this is not exclusionary. Weather presenters, for example, could hardly be more inclusive: they haven’t abandoned the name Dunedin, they’ve just added Ōtepoti. But the complainers don’t want warm and friendly inclusion. They want it all to stop.
And yet paradoxically, because this demographic complains the longest, loudest and most often, their views get into the media more than everyone else’s.
All this makes it easy to think the media is dominated by these issues. TV presenters reflect the changing te reo Māori-infused language of Aotearoa New Zealand and it leads to noisy debates about whether it should be happening.
“Tēnā koutou katoa” has become common, and so has shouting “Woke!”
It won’t have escaped many that the big drop in trust in media has coincided with the age of Covid. We’ve become a more fractured and angry society, and many people are alienated. It shows up in everything from driver behaviour to shoplifting to ram raids, social media abuse to family harm callouts and threats to the safety of bus drivers and politicians.
And in relation to media, the sudden drop in trust last year suggests we’ve reached a tipping point. The shouty arguments of the fringe have moved into the mainstream.
But this has nothing to do with the main reason media is in trouble.
It comes down to one big thing: money. TVNZ boss Jodi O’Donnell says 90 per cent of digital news advertising revenue goes to social media platforms and therefore leaves the country.
As Charlotte Grimshaw put it in the Listener this week, social media platforms are destroying local journalism. The question she asked was: Are we really going to let this happen?
The answer, to date, is yes. Those platforms have not only sucked up most of the available revenue, they feed off media companies for content, they pay very little tax, and we just let them do it. They’re hardly constrained by regulation and they’re among the biggest companies in the world.
And the Minister of Broadcasting, Melissa Lee, has not yet said a single coherent thing about it.
Digital media has a superpower: it can connect advertisers directly with individual consumers whose online behaviour marks them as good targets for those advertisers.
Broadcast TV and newspapers can’t do that. TV companies lost 14 per cent of their ad revenue last year and they know there is little prospect of getting it back.
But it’s not just social media that has the superpower. The apps and websites of mainstream media do, too. This is why media companies are refocusing to “digital first”.
Lack of revenue is crippling. It leads to staff layoffs, so there are fewer stories, less coverage of events and less time available for the remaining staff to keep standards high.
It means broadcast programmes and print titles are shut down. While the big shocks this week are about TV news, in the last few years we’ve lost dozens of community newspapers, magazines and supplements.
An exhaustive head count by the Spinoff this year noted there were 4071 professional journalists recorded in the 2006 census. With this week’s TV layoffs factored in, the figure could now be less than 1500.
Lack of revenue also inhibits innovation. We know it’s essential, but it’s not easy when there’s no money to employ new talent, to experiment and launch new ventures.
Next problem: media consumption is changing fast. TikTok leads the way right now but it’s not even eight years old. What worked yesterday doesn’t work today and what works today may not work tomorrow.
We know we need new ways of doing the news. But what, and how?
I took part in a podcast on Tuesday evening for the Working Group, which pops up in the top five political podcasts listened to by New Zealanders. We debated the political issues of the day.
The podcast itself was watched and listened to live and remains available for anyone to do that at any time. But that’s almost the least of it. With the involvement of a broadcast partner, it also gets sliced and diced into a whole lot of smaller pieces of content, for TikTok, Instagram, linear radio and other platforms.
The reach it can achieve from all that is exponentially larger than what the original show does on its own. Media companies will probably have to get really good at this, but it isn’t easy.
And will it last? Journalists and media companies use social media to promote their work. But social media is becoming less interested in that. Instagram doesn’t want you to leave Instagram and go read something at the Herald. It wants you to stay on Instagram.
Among people under 25, the most popular media form in the world right now is said to be the six-second video. On TikTok and Snapchat.
And it’s thought that the time people take to decide if they want to watch a video is 0.013 seconds. That’s swipe, swipe, swipe, as fast as your finger can move, until your brain goes yep! And then off again, swipe, swipe.
How do you package news into that? Should you even try?
And AI is on its way. Google “Wayne Brown port” at the moment and you’ll get a range of news reports and analysis from the media. How long before you’ll just get an AI-generated answer?
In the search for relevance and profitability, not all the decisions media companies have made seem wise. Why close community newspapers and websites, when we know readers love local news and retail advertisers need to connect to them? Communities are only going to become more important in this fraught world.
Why close Sunday and Fair Go when they’re among the most-watched, loved and best-quality programmes you offer? You’re just telling viewers you don’t care about them.
Why cut back Re:News, which in style and target market seems like the closest thing to the future TVNZ has?
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that such measures – in print and broadcasting – are not about regrouping to a position of strength, so the companies can marshal their resources and go boldly forth. Instead, they seem merely to be managing decline.
Ah yes, but what about all that other bias: the bias intrinsic to all that opinion writing? You might think I’m biased about this myself, but I would say that alongside the news, media have a valuable role in presenting analysis and points of view.
You might think what I write is a beacon of reason and hope, but others tell me it’s absurd propaganda for the left. Conversely, I think what some of the other Herald columnists write is absurd propaganda for the right, although I know they have readers who believe they are beacons of reason and hope.
What the Herald tries to do is present well-argued points of view. We value being a pluralist newspaper: you can read us all and make up your own mind.
How do media manage their way through all this? Who the hell would know.
But in my view, a couple of things are worth clinging to.
First, we need to stake a bigger claim to the hearts and minds of people who believe in a decent, inclusive, cohesive society. Let’s be biased towards them.
I believe we should do this because it’s the right thing to do, and also because it might even work. And yes, this is a constructive way of saying we should stop paying so much attention to all the angry people shouting at us.
Related, we have to keep working long and hard with advertisers to get them to share the dream.
Second, we have to get very nimble with the technologies, the methods and the styles with which we do news, current affairs, commentary and analysis. We have to be constantly upping our skills, and we have to take risks and be brave.
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
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