New Zealand’s recently announced cuts to TV news programming are an indication of what is coming to Australian broadcasters.
There are only two NZ free-to-air TV operators: the state-owned but commercially run TVNZ, and Warner Bros Discovery (WBD). Until now, both have had big news operations.
Two weeks ago, WBD announced it would entirely close its Newshub newsroom and shut down all associated TV and online properties. This involves sacking more than 200 people, comes on top of the closure of The Project NZ at the end of last year and removes the ability of Three (WBD’s main TV brand) to respond in real time to anything.
Then last week, TVNZ announced the closure of two long-running TV news shows, Sunday and Fair Go, and the sacking of 60 news staff. Sunday is a 60 Minutes-style high-end investigative show.
The closures are a result of declining free-to-air audiences, which naturally are correlated with revenue. Free-to-air audience decline is a decade-long trend, on top of which sits an independent advertising cycle. I think of both as waves, with the higher-frequency advertising wave superimposed on the low-frequency audience wave. Advertising peaks and troughs every few years. When the advertising wave is cresting, it somewhat masks the underlying audience trend, and when it bottoms out, things start snapping.
That’s what happened in New Zealand. They have lost a significant proportion of their news industry in one hit. I was the news director at Newshub from 2016-2020 and I have studied the New Zealand media industry closely. TV is now experiencing what newspapers have already gone through. The problem is that newspaper-heritage online operations, while in a different part of the cycle, are still losing revenue. I would not be surprised, for example, if NZ’s Stuff shuts down over the next five years. That would leave just one major non-government-owned news operation (NZME) in New Zealand.
The same factors are at play in Australia, and the results will be the same. I think within five years, Seven and Nines’ expensive TV news operations will be cut back severely to match declining audience and revenue. A natural move is to shut down state-based newsrooms and studios, replace them with bureaux, and produce national bulletins. The details are interesting to me, but not that important: the big picture is the same all over the world. In this, New Zealand is leading the way downhill.
Hal Crawford - Chair, CMT Advisory Board