Death of a newsroom
If only Newshub's closure was mismanagement
This Friday will be the last day of broadcasting and publishing for my old NZ newsroom, Newshub. It’s being shut down because TV is losing audience and therefore revenue, and closing the newsroom saves millions of dollars in costs.
Newshub is one of only two TV-based newsrooms in New Zealand.* While there is no exact Australian or US equivalent, the closure of Seven News would have a similar impact in Australia. The newsroom has been operational (as 3 News) for 35 years. When I left in 2020, Newshub employed 280 news staff.
The shutdown is a big deal. Newsrooms are an important part of the institutional machinery of democracy. New Zealand won’t fall over with the closure of Newshub, but its democracy will be weakened.
Fear and the first day
The first day I walked into the newsroom on Flower Street in Auckland in 2016, I was greeted by a group of people who had every reason to think I was the enemy. I’d been employed by a CEO - Mark Weldon - who many loathed on account of his approach to content and people. Before I even arrived, Mark had been forced out of the business by an across-the-board revolt. But there I was, a digital guy and an Australian, appointed Chief News Officer of an unequivocally TV and Kiwi newsroom.
3 News had become Newshub a few months before. It had been an enormous rebranding effort with clean graphic design and beautiful studio sets. To go with the new look they had an as-yet unborn content strategy that broke up traditional newsroom structure, replacing medium-focussed units (for example, TV reporters or radio reporters) with content-focussed units (for example, daily newsgathering) that would service multiple mediums.
I stood in front of the newsroom and told everyone we would be tearing that plan up. It was ideologically driven, rather than practical. The main problem was that the biggest single group, newsgathering, would be off the hook, too far removed from clear metrics like TV ratings and digital engagement. Evaluating the performance of the Head of Newsgathering, the chief resource allocator, was going to difficult. I wanted none of that.
The practical approach helped convince the newsroom I was ok. I spent three months asking questions and learning, and at the end of that time I knew a lot more about both TV and the people who made up Newshub.
What I found
Newsroom mythology painted Newshub as the scrappy fighter, the underdog with an ability to improvise. To a large extent I think this was accurate. There certainly was something of the youngest child about the place - cheeky, entertaining and irresponsible - and the relationship with older sibling 1 News (TVNZ) was central to newsroom identity. We were intensely competitive with TVNZ, although that competitiveness was mostly one-sided as far as I could see. The asymmetry is also part of the youngest kid dynamic.
Another aspect of the Newshub mythology was that we were underfunded. I struggled with that one. Underfunded compared to what? I came from digital where no choppers could be hired ever, and buying $50k news cameras would have been madness. We were spending more than NZ$30m a year to produce our bulletins, website, and shows. Certainly, our ambition outstripped our budget - but isn’t that always the case? By the standards of TV, we did things cheaply, but the standards of TV demand high minimum spend.
It was those costs that would sink the place in the end. So it’s worth dwelling on exactly why TV news is so expensive. There are many different areas where high costs come in - for example, studios, camera equipment, talent costs, international content licensing, transmission - but if you take a step back there are two key factors behind the big dollars:
Real time daily output
Original video/audio output
These two factors combine to create that high minimum spend. They seem so obvious to anyone in TV they wouldn’t understand why I am talking about them. But these are requirements not shared by other forms of news. Newshub made TV bulletins 365 days a year live in the studio. That gives your TV channel a sense of presence - the lights are on - but it comes at great cost in staffing and equipment.
The audience and the industry expect in-house video content to be polished. Video/audio is cheap to do amateurishly and expensive to do professionally. This dichotomy has not changed despite Youtube and the sea of amateur footage available. If anything, the expectations for in-house video have increased, perhaps as a means of differentiation.
An aside on newsroom costs: many people believe newsreaders and well-known on-screen talent are paid salaries in the millions. This is fantasy. While there may be hangovers from the bloated past, on-screen talent costs are a minor part of the overall budget.
What’s being lost
The people losing their jobs at Newshub this week aren’t dying. They are going to move on and do their thing. This is part of the arc of their lives. I found them to be wonderful people. I was first given a fair hearing and then accepted, and as a group we achieved big digital growth and stability in TV ratings. As one of my final projects, I gathered data that showed, against received wisdom, that the newsroom was profitable.
That situation had changed by 2024, and it had nothing to do with me or my successor Sarah Bristow. After the bump of Covid, audiences continued to drift away from TV. Combined with a cyclical advertising downturn, Warner Bros Discovery NZ was losing money. Costs had to be cut, and news was the single biggest pot. Because TV news has a high minimum viable cost, WBD decided to cut the lot and accept a much smaller TV business.
This is the same trajectory that bigger businesses like Seven and Nine in Australia will follow. It will happen. There’s no revenue equivalence in digital to enable TV newsroom costs. So while a diversified media company like Nine will survive, it won’t support news on the same scale. Newsrooms will be cut down and aggregated, and the bulletins will dry up like soaks in a drought.
A newsroom is a particular cultural institution. It creates an environment where telling local short-term truths is rewarded with recognition and status. I say “local” and “short-term” here to differentiate news from science and the arts, which pursue truth in different ways.
The problem with local truths, and why they require an institution to tell, is that they are often unpleasant. Many stories of misdeeds begin as rumours which have to be substantiated. Reporting them requires either a sociopath or someone with an incentive to be unpleasant. A newsroom provides that incentive, along with legal backup.
Subjects of unpleasant stories often ask “Why are you doing this?” Without a newsroom, it well may be impossible to answer.
The littered past
So many of the places I have worked don’t exist anymore. Radio Netherlands was dissolved in 2012. Ninemsn was taken over by Nine, withered, and now exists in a spectral form as nine.com.au. Mediaworks sold Newshub to WBD in 2020 and they are shutting it down this week. Only the West Australian newspaper, where I did my cadetship in 1995, is still operational.
What a miserable industry!
For my own purposes, I shouldn’t be saying that - I’d get more work being optimistic. But I can’t do that right now - like most news people, I am an idealist. The youngest of my siblings. My heart is with the presenters, reporters, producers, editors, directors, camera operators, graphic artists, make-up artists, administrators and managers leaving Newshub for the last time this Friday.
*Whakaata Māori has nightly TV news in te reo Māori (the Māori language)