The year in journalism ended much as it began: with layoffs, downsizing and existential dread.
I’ve worked in the industry for 30 years and never seen a year like it.
TVNZ has spent the year lopping off its limbs in a bizarre “destroy the village to save the village” strategy.
Fair Go and Sunday are gone. A new round of cost-cutting is underway. If the point of public ownership of TVNZ is for the broadcaster to tell local stories, then crippling its news and current affairs arm makes no sense.
Newshub is severely wounded, living on as a vestigial rump on the Stuff website. The anecdotes that spill out about its paucity of resources are told with the dark humour of a death row inmate keenly aware of the long odds of clemency.
The Secret Santa at Whakaata Māori was 27 job losses, as government funding dropped from $48 million to $38m. Te Ao Māori News, which ran for 20 years, is gone, leaving Te Ao with Moana as the last news and current affairs show on the channel.
Even the digital start-ups, which held promise as new media ventures, are now struggling. The Spinoff had just celebrated its 10th birthday when a fiscal hole opened up. Staff numbers are being culled, projects put on ice and a mayday was sent out calling for donations to keep the site afloat.
NZME, one of the few media companies to actually make money, is closing 14 local newspapers, most of which have been published for decades (the Horowhenua Chronicle for more than 130 years).
Shuttering local newspapers robs communities of news, information and connection and closes off opportunities for young journalists to learn their craft.
I began my journalism career working (initially without pay) for the Christchurch Mail (closed in 2018) and then Auckland’s Western Leader before my first daily reporting job on Wellington’s Evening Post (RIP).
I go into the new year with a sense of survivor’s guilt. RNZ has the benefit of secure public funding. I started a new TV and podcast interview show this year - 30 With Guyon Espiner - at a time when many of my colleagues lost their jobs as programmes were axed. Outside the taxpayer funded media, there are few rays of hope.
The New Zealand media is in an especially parlous state - in Australian media circles they warn, “don’t become like New Zealand” - but it is not alone.
The fragmentation of the media, the collapse of the business model and declining trust, amid a polarised political environment fuelled by social media algorithms, have upended the information landscape worldwide.
At RNZ, we made a modest gesture with the 30 interview show - promising uncut interviews so the audience knew that what they saw or heard was exactly what was recorded, without edits.
Others are taking more extreme measures to try to win back trust.
The billionaire owner of the LA Times is introducing a bias meter, powered by AI. “It’s not entirely clear how it’d work, but it is supposed to analyse a story to understand if it’s skewed in favour of a specific point of view, and then provide, on demand, a different version of that story from another perspective,” Forbes magazine reported recently.
The US media is bracing for another Trump term. “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig Presidential elections,” warned Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to lead the FBI.
“Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out,” he said, on a podcast hosted by Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, who had just been released from prison after defying a subpoena from a congressional committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
In the UK, The Observer, published since 1791, is being sold to a loss-making digital start up Tortoise Media, sparking the first strike at the newspaper for 50 years.
All this is occurring with AI, which promises to unleash a new wave of media disruption, still in its infancy.
No one has the answers.
“There is seriously no light at the end of the tunnel to fund journalism,” Earl Wilkinson, the chief executive of the International News Media Association said on a recent visit to New Zealand.
In comments reported by Pattrick Smellie of Business Desk, Wilkinson said the big tech firms “control the ad-tech ecosystem” and no one has figured out a way to get around that.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon sacked Media and Communications Minister Melissa Lee in April, saying the portfolio had become too complex for a junior minister.
Paul Goldsmith is more highly regarded by the industry but appears to have few answers. The Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill is stalled, with Goldsmith saying it’s not ready to be introduced to Parliament. Meanwhile, Google is threatening to pull out of voluntary arrangements made with local newspapers.
It’s not news that is under threat: natural disasters, Prime Ministerial press conferences and All Black squad announcements will always be covered.
It’s not free speech and opinion that is under threat. Podcasts are having a moment right now and that’s good. But before an issue can be properly debated - or even discovered - a journalist had to bring it to light. The media ecosystem doesn’t survive without the groundwork.
It is journalism that is under threat. How do we pay for journalists to dig deep in search of the truth and to hold decision-makers to account? We haven’t figured that out and we haven’t properly reckoned with what our world will look like without it.
