RNZ pushes back against concerns it's moving in on commercial territory

Thursday, 23 September 2021

RNZ's chief executive responds to concerns it's moving into commercial markets.

RNZ has pushed back against concerns from commercial radio station owners that it is targeting their audiences at the expense of its public media mandate.

Chief executive Paul Thompson also suggested to MPs that RNZ’s charter could be updated to include a duty to offer material to other media and to reference te Tiriti.

Parliament’s Economic Development, Science and Innovation select committee is currently carrying out a regular review of RNZ’s charter.

NZME Radio, owner of about half the country’s commercial radio stations, submitted to the committee in August that “commercial entities” were increasingly being “pressured by what may be perceived as a strategy of audience growth by RNZ, rather than strategy focused on serving the public interest”.

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“NZME does not want what can be perceived as recent attempts by RNZ to grow audience to come at the cost of distorting audiences,” it said in its submission.

“NZME’s concern is that this could create increased competition with commercial radio, and therefore could potentially undermine RNZ’s purpose as a public broadcaster.”

RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson says it is the purest public media.

The Radio Broadcasters Association, which represents the interests of commercial radio stations, voiced similar concerns, saying it was important that public media provided services that commercial services could not.

“We have seen growing focus and pressures, both internally and externally, to ‘grow’ new and total audiences without regard to the commercial market,” it said.

It suggested that RNZ’s interest in youth radio was a case in point.

Appearing in front of the select committee on Thursday, Thompson said in response that its existing charter required it to provide services to all New Zealanders in all age groups.

Commercial media had “obviously come back strongly on any sense that any public media should have a strong growth agenda and I think that that's a good debate to hear,” Thompson said.

RNZ says it is not seeking to crowd out commercial media.

But what RNZ did was “quite unique because we are the ‘purest’ public broadcaster on the block,” he said.

“It's a question of choice and it's not that we want to crowd anyone else out.”

RNZ had gone from reaching about 15 per cent of New Zealanders “through two radio stations” to more than 60 per cent of New Zealanders each week as a result of previous changes to its mandate which had seen it expand into areas such as online news and podcasting, he said.

“But it's fair to say that our most loyal audiences are still those really-loyal radio listeners and they all really important to us,” he added.

The lack of mention of te Tiriti (the Treaty of Waitangi), seemed like “a bit of gap” in its existing charter, which was updated, five years ago, Thompson said.

There was “quite an exciting opportunity” to make sure that Aoteroa’s foundation document was “anchored at the heart of our mandate”, he said.

Questioned on what impact a reference to te Tiriti would have on its audiences, Mather said an example might be that if there was a particular story that had a Māori focus, “rather than a primarily Eurocentric team debating the editorial merits of it, they would – under the principle of participation – invite Māori journalists to contribute”.

Thompson said the charter should “speak to the uniqueness of our nation”.

“Otherwise you just end up with us being a replica of something that's overseas.”

Thompson said its charter could also be redrafted to be more explicit about its obligation to provide a commercial-free public media service to people who didn’t current “strongly engage with us”.

The charter was silent on New Zealand’s responsibility to “support plurality and a strong overall media ecosystem”, he said.

Over the past five years, RNZ had pursued a strategy of “radical sharing” by offering its content to other media organisations in a bid to increase the audience for its own material.

That policy could be included in RNZ’s charter, Thompson said.

Stuff and the NZME-owned New Zealand Herald are among the media outlets that republish some RNZ material to complement their own reporting.

The Government is expected to decide next month whether to pool RNZ and TVNZ into a new public media entity.

RNZ chairman Jim Mather said RNZ was “committed to supporting the principles of that” but its charter “still provides the way forward for our organisation”.