With 81 days until Stuff’s new TV bulletin premieres, a former TV3 news boss warns the new show can’t be run “on the cheap” as the online and newspaper publisher faces the challenge of competing at 6pm.
This morning, Warner Bros Discovery revealed Stuff would take the job of producing a nightly bulletin from July when Newshub would go off air for the last time.
Stuff owner Sinead Boucher said it was unclear how many jobs could be saved as a result but it would be fewer than the 40 or 50 mooted in a Newshub staff-led proposal.
Warner Bros Discovery confirmed the end of in-house news production and a significant downsizing of local production, last week, with the loss of hundreds of jobs.
Boucher’s company operates New Zealand’s largest news website and legacy newspaper mastheads like The Post, The Press, and The Waikato Times.
Former TV3 news boss Mark Jennings hesitated when asked whether he was sceptical about the new bulletin’s prospects. He now co-edits the news website Newsroom.
“There’s just not enough detail to understand what they are proposing,” he told 1News.
“It’s almost as if they’re not sure themselves, but whatever they produce has got to compete with TVNZ and it’s got to compete pretty well if it’s going to stand up — in terms of share of audience.”
The first hour-long bulletin produced by Stuff on TV3 will be on July 6, the day after the final Newshub bulletin airs. The programme will be broadcast for 30 minutes on weekends.
Jennings continued: “I don’t think they’re going to hire many Newshub reporters or staff but, in the end, they’re going to have to hire some because there simply is not the television expertise sitting within Stuff at the moment.
“They talk about innovative ways and modernisation of different things, but they can’t really explain what it is.”
Speaking to media earlier today, Boucher said Stuff would be “investing in proper equipment” to set up the new bulletin and that “there’s certainly no sense that it’s just an on-the-cheap iPhone-only thing”.
Jennings was the head of news for TV3 between 2005 and 2016.
He warned that to compete with the “slick” TVNZ offering any kind of “on the cheap” product would be “fraught with problems”.
“Trying to do it on the cheap is fraught with problems and you’ve got to remember you’re up against TVNZ’s one-hour news bulletin. It’s a slick product, and this is going to have to compare and hold its share of the audience.”
Boucher spoke to 1News shortly after today’s announcement was made.
Asked whether she might be committing her company to too much, she told 1News: “People told me I might be getting into something a bit much when I took on ownership of the company, and that hasn’t proven to be the case at all.”
Boucher, who was Stuff’s chief executive until last year, led a management buy-out of the company from its Australian owners for $1 in June 2020.
It came after failed attempts by Fairfax Media to sell the company to other buyers or to merge it with major competitor NZME, the publisher of the New Zealand Herald.
Boucher continued: “Stuff is a digital-first, video-led news operation now.
“All of our staff are expected to already file video and audio. We have a lot of great expertise in our business who have come from the broadcasters.
“And we’ll be adding more specialist capability and people over time to make sure we’re delivering something really excellent.”
Amid falling advertising revenue over the past year, Stuff has significantly restructured its newsrooms, begun paywalling stories, and disestablished its long-form investigative documentary unit Stuff Circuit.
Reacting to the news earlier, Newshub’s Wellington bureau chief Caitlin Cherry noted there were “some enormous advantages in having the country’s biggest newsroom” for Stuff.
“Stuff has journalists in areas like Taranaki, Hawke’s Bay, Nelson, Southland and Waikato. It has an excellent political team and the number-one news website in New Zealand. There are, however, some big challenges ahead,” she said in a tweet.
“Broadcast news requires specific technical and presentation skills. I’m hopeful Stuff will retain some of the incredible expertise at Newshub — editors, camera operators, news producers etc. But many will still lose their jobs.”
Today’s announcement comes amid cost-cutting in the industry as television advertising shrinks — there are widespread changes at TVNZ including the ending of Sunday and the standalone broadcast of Fair Go.
In reacting to today’s announcement, a spokesperson for TVNZ told 1News the broadcaster was “pleased” to see competition in the news industry.
“We are pleased to see this outcome. It’s good news for the industry, and we’re very supportive of a competitive media landscape,” they said in a statement.
“It’s too early to comment on any specific changes we’d make, but of course, we will respond to the market as we always do.”