Media faces reporting on its own gradual demise

Sunday, 3 December 2023

Soft advertising, deteriorating finances, job losses, a spectacular own goal and unkind words from Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters — it’s been tough year for the media.

And the Government has not yet shown any inclination to ride to the rescue.

There is no official count of journalists in New Zealand, and nor could there be given there is also no such thing as an official journalist.

But 1635 people recorded their profession as journalism in the 2018 Census, of whom 1197 identified as print journalists and 219 each as radio journalists and television journalists, according to the Tertiary Education Commission.

That total was down 52% on the tally in the 2000 Census, and Massey University associate professor of journalism James Hollings believes that figure will have fallen by further few hundred since 2018.

For comparison there are about 16,400 lawyers and an estimated 3500 sex workers, to pick another couple of professions that sometimes fret about their public image.

To rattle through the recent litany of woes, MediaWorks, which own about half the country’s commercial radio stations, closed its flagship current affairs station Today FM in April, with auditor PwC since voicing doubt over the firm’s viability beyond 2025.

Newshub owner Warner Bros Discovery NZ has been more happily bankrolled by its US parent so far, but still posted a $35m loss and announced its 7pm current affairs show The Project would be axed as it transitions to a “digitally-led operating model”.

TVNZ is also planning to cut local productions after sinking from a bumper profit of $59m in the year to June 2021 – thanks to a Covid-enforced drop in its spending on programmes – to a wafer-thin $1.7m profit this year.

New Zealand Herald owner NZME is also transitioning from print to “digital” and says the number of journalists it employs is little changed over the past five years, at about 300.

Nevertheless, its interim profit slumped 76% this year to also approximate the price of an up-market villa in Freeman’s Bay.

RNZ has been shielded from cuts thanks to its public funding.

But Victoria University academic Peter Thompson, chairperson of lobby group Better Public Media, says “we don't know what National's policy vision for public media is, other than opposing whatever it was that Labour had put in place”.

Should the Budget-challenged Government be looking for an excuse to make cuts, an NZ-On-Air funded study pointed to a significant drop in the audience for RNZ’s flagship RNZ National station, with 8% people now tuning-in each day versus 12% two years ago.

Then there’s the aforementioned own goal of a former RNZ staffer having editing 36 Reuters and the BBC stories to suit his tastes, often injecting a pro-Russian viewpoint.

As a private, locally-owned business, Stuff’s finances are opaque, but owner Sinead Boucher says it is not really in any different position to any of the other media companies.

The fortunes of the media are closely tied to the wider economy and it's been “a really challenging advertising market in the last year or so”, she says.

“We're operating in a world where it's not just that we might be being out-competed for advertising dollars by the tech platforms. They control the whole infrastructure; they control access to the internet and they control the advertising technology.”

Boucher, who also currently chairs the News Publishers’ Association, worries about a new threat to the media’s ability to make money from its content.

That is Google using AI, trained in large part on news articles, to generate detailed one-stop-shop responses to search queries and displacing media content.

Bribe or no bribe, Hollings says there is clearly not going to be a return of anything resembling the former government’s $55m Public Interest Journalism Fund (PIJF) that provided an aspirin to the industry in the wake of the Covid pandemic.

And, at this point, that may be a relief to most.

Hollings believes some media organisations would now regret taking money from the PIJF because it was in some ways “more trouble than it was worth”.

Although Stuff applied for and received several million dollars from the fund, Boucher says “nobody wanted bailouts or government handouts, doled out project by project or story by story”, but rather the right regulatory settings.

She hopes the National Party will reverse its caucus’ position on the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, proposed in the dying days of the Labour government.

The legislation would effectively have required Google and Meta to pay media firms for content accessed through their platforms on terms that could ultimately be set through state-managed binding arbitration.

The legislation could underpin and potentially enhance a “voluntary” deal that Google alone offered some media firms after being strong-armed by the threat of the aforementioned regulation, but which Boucher said offered “no security”.

Broadcasting Minister Melissa Lee did not show any sign of agreeing in the run-up to the election that the voluntary licensing agreements offered by Google were reliant on a prop that the new Government now looks set to kick away.

If the National Party doesn’t flip of its own accord, there’s some hope salvation for the media could come from an unlikely source.

Hollings says that despite Peters’ “dog whistling” on the Public Interest Journalism Fund, NZ First’s policies are by no means anti-media and contain “some quite good elements”.

NZ First’s manifesto states a free and flourishing media is essential for democracy and supports requiring “major global tech platforms like Google and Meta to support NZ journalism by paying a fair price for NZ published content”.

On top of that, it also proposed examining tax deductions for “domestic news subscriptions, press patron subscriptions, and large corporate sponsorships of news outlets”, and “future proof funding to enable iwi radio to develop its full potential”.

More confrontationally for the media, NZ First’s manifesto also proposed a Royal Commission of Inquiry into media independence, alleging “media bias”.

Massey University’s research suggests that if the media does have a political bent, the source could be the actual journalists rather than a more complex conspiracy.

A poll of 350 journalists it conducted last year found 84% identified as being “middle leftish” to “extreme left” on the political spectrum, while about only 11% identified as “middle rightish” to “extreme right” (its poll didn’t give “straight, middle” as an option).

Hollings suggests those results may go with the territory, given there is a vocational and altruistic element to the professional, the pay is often “terrible”, and journalists tend to rate highly on assessments of moral reasoning.

Journalists’ political views shouldn’t necessarily matter, depending what sort of approach they have to the job, he says.

Research around the world suggests journalists see themselves as falling neatly into one of four roles; activist, neutral observer, “watchdog” or simply a hired hand for a commercial enterprise whose job it is to inform and entertain.

But Eric Crampton, chief economist of the economically-purist New Zealand Initiative think-tank, suggests there may be no such thing as a true neutral observer.

“Facts are theory-ladened. It's hard to report straight facts without them having to go through your own mental model of how the world works,” he says.

“Journalism will often be trying to build links between facts to make a story and that will depend on your whole view of how the world functions.”

Crampton laughs at the suggestion higher pay might help balance the books by attracting more journalists with a weaker sense of social justice into the profession, although Hollings says overseas there in fact is evidence of some “ethical softening”.

“I like to think that I have a strong sense of social justice, I just think it runs in different directions from other people,” Crampton says.

He sees no justification for either the Fair Digital Marketing Bill or any additional compensation for tech companies scraping media stories to generate AI content.

“That’s kind of what everybody does, right? I pay for the subscription, read the stories in the paper and that updates my views on how the world works, and then I write columns and tweets and provide commentary based on that updated view of the world.

“I don't make ongoing royalty payments to the initial authors of these pieces. I don't see what the problem would be for an ‘AI’ to be doing that; it's just that AI is way better at it.”

Nor does he accept – setting aside the rights or wrongs – that direct funding from Google and Meta might simply be a practical and convenient alternative to the messy solution of commercial media organisations taking cash direct from the state.

“The Government sets the terms of all of it and then I don't think it comes out of it with clean hands.”

What if that is also the Government’s take, and the media is left to fend itself without protection from ‘big tech’, amid accusations and counter-accusation of bias?

Boucher paints a bleak picture.

“If you look at places where newsrooms have disappeared, there's plenty of data and research now to show that corruption has increased, civic engagement has dropped and social cohesion has worsened.

“And on the other side, in the United States you see hundreds of what are called ‘pink slime’ news sites that don't have a single journalist and are fully AI-generated, often run by politically-backed institutions that are skewed.”

Hollings believes people should be really concerned about media businesses falling over. “It’s a case of ‘we’ll regret it when it’s gone’.”

For the remaining, aspiring “neutral observers” in journalism, it would need to be a case of going down not fighting, but writing.