Up to 300 jobs are expected to be lost as one of our biggest commercial media company’s newsrooms - Newshub - is set to close at the end of June. Video / Chereè Kinnear | Ben Dickens
Opinion by Heather du Plessis-Allan
Heather du Plessis-Allan is the drive host for Newstalk ZB and a columnist for the Herald on Sunday
The first newsroom I saw the inside of was Newshub in Wellington. Back then it was called TV3 and it was run by an old-school journalist everyone called Flash.
Flash had cut his teeth back in the days when journos still smoked at their typewriters and thecountry still sat down for breakfast, lunch and the evening news.
When I first walked in it was 20 years ago and I was on work experience. I came back to the same newsroom about 18 months later as a radio journalist with my own desk next to the glamorous TV journos. And then I walked back in about a decade later as a host of a 7 o’clock show that would ultimately fail.
I’m telling you this to underscore how small this industry is. Many of us in the media have either worked in TV, currently work in TV or really wanted to work in TV.
Which means too many of us are too sentimental to be completely honest about Newshub.
We need to let Newshub go. Its closure was a long time coming. It is not worth saving.
I can give you a list of what’s going wrong for media in general and TV news in particular. Everything from viewers’ growing distrust of legacy media through to them simply being too busy to watch an hour-long news bulletin.
But none of that is what really killed Newshub. What killed Newshub is that linear TV is close to dead because we don’t want to watch it any more.
Take a look at the numbers of 18 to 34-year-olds watching. At this age, people are establishing their habits at the start of their working lives, and are the big spenders of the future. Back in 2000, 129,000 of them watched TV. Now, fewer than 46,000 of them do.
The drop is even starker when you factor in that the country’s population increased by 33 per cent.
TV is dead because Netflix and Neon and Apple TV are better. Photo / 123RF
TV is dead because Netflix and Neon and Apple TV are better. There is more to watch, whenever you want to, not just when they tell you to.
TV is the new video rental shop. The only people still using it regularly are the people who can’t afford Netflix or can’t understand how to set it up.
There is no point trying to save Newshub’s newsroom. Throwing money at it is only wasting money because the number of viewers will just keep dropping until it closes again. Saving it will only delay the inevitable. It will eventually close, just like the video shop.
The only justification for pumping money into Newshub to save it would be to give it more time to innovate into a product we might actually use in the future. But this product already exists. It’s every news site that carries video online. We have plenty of those already.
The Prime Minister was right. All media need to innovate to survive. Many have. They’ve gone online, prioritised digital over whatever it was they were doing originally, and found a way to make money off it.
