Stuff to provide TV3 news: Here’s what you need to know
Wednesday, 17 April 2024
Stuff and Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) have done a deal for Stuff to provide a news bulletin to run on TV3, replacing Newshub, from July.
Here’s what you need to know.
What’s happened?
The deal was announced on Tuesday but signed late on Monday.
The bulletin provided by Stuff will be one hour on weekdays and half-an-hour at the weekends.
The deals solves a problem for WBD, because while it was not able to make Newshub work financially, the existence of a 6pm news bulletin still helps bring in an audience for evening programming, which boosts advertising revenue.
So Stuff is getting into the TV news business?
It says not. Linear television (as opposed to on-demand services) is experiencing a decline in audience numbers.
Stuff publisher Sinead Boucher said that was not the direction the business was heading and this should be thought of as an extension of the existing digital Stuff business, rather than a foray into TV.
She said the bulletin would be different to the existing Newshub news.
'That’s the really important thing, we’ve got the biggest newsroom in the country, we've now got 19 newsrooms, and we’re already a digital-first multi-media company so we’re leveraging off that to produce a new, innovative 6pm product for Warner Bros.'
How many jobs will be saved?
Not heaps. Newshub’s closure was to lead to the loss of about 300 jobs. Boucher has indicated it is likely that fewer than 40 will be saved. She said the bulletin would tap into the work already being done by Stuff’s journalists across the country. It would then hire some specialist roles to add skills where necessary.
It is not yet known how many high-profile Newshub faces, such as Paddy Gower, Mike McRoberts, Michael Morrah or Samantha Hayes, might find roles with Stuff.
How can Stuff make this work if Warner Bros Discovery can’t?
Stuff is providing a news bulletin for a fee from WBD. That means it is being given a budget that it will need to work within – and it will likely be a significantly slimmed down bulletin compared to what Newshub currently produces.
It may be that it only has one presenter, for example. There is no word yet on who that presenter might be.
Will Stuff have a TV studio?
At the moment, Stuff does not have the sort of studio required and will use TV3’s Flower St premises at first. The intention is to develop the capacity within its main premises in time.
How much is the deal worth?
That has not been disclosed, nor has the number of years the deal will run for. It has been speculated that it is in the low millions.
Were other businesses in the running?
It has been reported that WBD had talks with a number of other media businesses who were pitching a similar offer. NZME chief executive Michael Boggs reportedly told staff that such a deal would have had to have made commercial sense.
“Adding another element to our business right now would have only been a distraction - something that would need lots of extra resource, and some important projects we’re currently working on would’ve needed to go on the back burner,” he was reported as saying by the NZ Herald.
What about Sky?
The other media company with skin in the proverbial game is Sky TV. Newshub has been providing it with its early evening news bulletin.
“We have previously said that we remain interested in delivering strong local news, where it makes commercial sense, and are considering our options,” a spokesperson said.
“In the meantime, there is no immediate change to the bulletin for our Sky Open customers.”
Does this make commercial sense?
It has been reported that the financial benefit to Stuff may not be huge, given the set-up and running costs.
TVNZ’s chief executive Jodi O’Donnell has recently said it spends $40 million on news each year.
The Spinoff founder and media commentator Duncan Greive said the deal could work for Stuff if there was sufficient buy-in from the workforce.
“If they are able to get people to view news gathering as one aspect of their job and the distribution of it, whether that’s audio, video or text, being another, and create a culture of that being what the nature of the job is and being excited by the possibilities of that it can be a transformative thing for Stuff.”
He said it could help Stuff boost its video capabilities.
“There’s also a world where staff go ‘I’m just being asked to do more and more with less - I joined this organisation to do writing and now I’m being asked to be on the 6pm news’… it really does come down to Stuff’s people and how they are trained and sold the idea and to what extent they buy into it.”
He said it was a win for WBD. “They get the most valuable bit of what Newshub did, for pennies in the dollar. If, and it’s a bit of an if, Stuff can pull it off it can be an interesting, differentiated type of product. But even if Stuff can’t pull it off, all they are is where they were last Thursday.”
He said the people it was not a win for were Newshub staff because it would only work financially if Stuff was hiring a handful of them.