RNZ’s online surge could start to worry private media

Public broadcaster RNZ might be struggling to stem its falls in radio listenership, but the audience for its website rnz.co.nz is soaring.
In the latest Nielsen online audience figures for August, RNZ hit 1.56 million unique readers for the month, up from under a million a year ago and less than 500,000 pre-Covid.
Its latest increase, from 1.4m in July, and some of the other growth this year will have resulted from the closing of newshub.co.nz which had more than a million readers a month, and was third behind Stuff and nzherald.co.nz. Next after RNZ is now 1News, which still attracts under a million.
No other site has ever been growing this fast towards the big two, which in August had 2.2m and 2.1m respectively. Both Stuff and the Herald appear to be benefiting incrementally from Newshub’s demise, but are still fighting it out around or just above the two million mark as they have for the past couple of years.
RNZ has broadened its online offering, changing the types of stories it promotes at the top of its previously hard-news website to also include lifestyle, celebrity and social media-based articles.
The publicly-owned broadcaster had a substantial lift in its budget in the last year of the Labour Government, with an extra $25.7m representing a 50 percent increase for four years.
Its radio networks, RNZ National and RNZ Concert, have seen audiences falling, and the broadcaster has said it will prioritise moves to lift the performances of RNZ National in particular, which had 495,000 weekly listeners in the latest GfK survey – down from 633,700 as recently as two years ago. During the pandemic RNZ National was number one station in the country, heading off all commercial music stations and NewstalkZB. Now it ranks 6th.
But with its online success, which after July’s 1.4m audience figure RNZ said was up 60 percent, and strong on-demand podcast audiences, RNZ says its overall audience and the number of people it reaches across New Zealand are at record levels.
Its online success, however, is sure to be attracting the attention of private media like Stuff and the Herald’s owner NZME, with publicly-funded and non-commercial RNZ soaking up valued eyeballs they could monetise if on their channels.
If the rnz.co.nz growth continues, expect to hear complaints bobbing up from the big commercial players about why the publicly-funded firm is encroaching on lifestyle, celebrity and sport so successfully.
In the UK and Australia, commercial media have long lamented the BBC and ABC’s online presence and success.
Newsroom co-editor Mark Jennings wrote this week on the future of TV3, for our Newsroom Pro daily newsletter 8 Things. Here’s his thoughts on the struggling channel:
The American owners of TV3 need to be good guys and sell the network to Stuff’s owner, Sinead Boucher, for a dollar.   
The precedent is there. The Australian company Nine Entertainment sold Stuff, which included a bundle of newspapers as well as the digital platform, to Boucher in 2020 for that nominal amount.
The Aussies felt a local owner could do a better job than them and basically handed Stuff over to its chief executive, Boucher.
The same is true of TV3, and Warner Bros Discovery should give it away before it is too late, and they end up shutting the doors and waving goodbye to the remaining staff.  
Things already seem grim. This past Sunday night, in the prime time 7.30pm slot, TV3 was showing an Australian show about tow trucks.
Within three years the company could be producing few, if any, local programmes and viewers would be left with only American and Australian reality TV shows.
The ratings will slip away and so too will the already dwindling advertising revenue.
TV3’s owners are also likely to be distracted by the rapid decline in their US legacy television business. Its share price was pummelled recently when it announced a US$9b write-down of its TV channels.
Then there are the challenges of its own merger. Warners and Discovery got together in 2022 but the company’s CEO, David Zaslav, recently told analysts it was like “painting a mural on the side of a building, and all kinds of stuff is falling off. It looks messy, and it is messy. It’s really hard and it’s really challenging.”
Zaslav is also suing the NBA in an attempt to get back the crucial sports rights WBD has just lost.
With all this going on, a tiny television business in far-flung New Zealand won’t get much attention. Closing it down may take a minute or two of discussion at WBD’s board table.
So why should Boucher risk taking over a network that, even with all the major cuts its made, is probably just breaking even?
Well, Boucher took a significant risk earlier in the year when WBD awarded her a contract to produce the 6pm bulletin. This saved WBD at least $20m but the effort required to put out a reasonable quality news programme on a very skinny budget looks like it is starting to weigh on Stuff.  
Saturday night’s Three News bulletin had just one proper video news story by a local reporter – the search for a person lost in the Manukau harbour. The rest of the programme was filled with international stories from Britain’s ITV and a big chunk of sport’s news. The only other local video story was a magazine-style piece at the end of the show about a hospital garden.
The ratings are on a downward path and competing with 1News, which completely overpowered Three News at the recent Olympics, is going to be very hard unless something changes.
Three News needs more than one scheduled programme. If a big story breaks overnight viewers have one option – TVNZ breakfast. It is then likely that the household TV will stay on that channel for the 6pm news and perhaps even the 7pm programme.  
If Boucher took over TV3 she could truly use the strength of Stuff. Her stable now has some serious TV firepower including Paddy Gower, Lloyd Burr, Tova O’Brien, Sam Hayes, Laura Tupou and others. With the backing of other Stuff journalists these experienced operators could really dent TVNZ at breakfast and 7pm. More so given that TVNZ is losing money and looking to cut $30m in costs. 
Boucher would then have real skin in the game and could use Stuff’s huge reach to out market TVNZ. She would have economy of scale with her sales teams and be able to offer advertisers truly integrated campaigns. The advertising industry would support Boucher as it will not want competition in the free-to-air market to disappear.
NZ on Air is also likely to look a lot more favourably on funding programmes screening on a New Zealand-owned channel than it would on an American-owned one. 
A low-key visit to New Zealand by one of China’s top Communist Party propaganda figures, Mo Gaoyi, included an unreported visit to the country’s biggest newspaper the NZ Herald.
Gaoyi, the deputy head of the CCP’s Publicity Department and minister of the State Council Information Office, made the Herald meeting one of four known stops during his brief visit en route to Australia.
He attended one event with Sir John Key, promoting youth and cultural exchanges, visited the Dun Huang silk road exhibition, marked the Chinese Film Festival and called at the Herald’s offices.
Herald owner NZME until December 2019 had a three-year joint venture with Chinese interests in a publication called the Chinese NZ Herald, but faced controversy in September 2019.
Newsroom reported at the time that experts had identified the Chinese New Zealand Herald website as a propaganda outlet for the government of China.
However, the news outlet’s co-owner, NZME, said the Chinese NZ Herald was not beholden to China’s media guidelines and censorship requirements.
An investigation by Newsroom, with the help of China propaganda experts, found the news organisation’s operational structure, and its Chinese state internet and security permits, amounted to the news site coming under the supervision and control of various Chinese Communist Party (CCP) authorities.
Three months later the joint venture was terminated.
MediaRoom asked NZME if any new ventures or agreements had been discussed when its executives met Mo last week. A spokeperson would only say: “We regularly have international visitors come into NZME.  It was a brief meet and greet.”