‘Ruthless’ Todd Scott explains his NBR subscription crusade: ‘I'm big on accountability’
Sunday, 12 April 2026
Calling in from Fiji, where he has been living since the pandemic, the news boss and ‘LinkedIn provocateur’ explains to Stewart Sowman-Lund why he is taking on big businesses and government agencies.
Todd Scott calls out of the blue.
In the background, waves are crashing. A dog barks. The line keeps cutting in and out, his voice fluctuating from very loud to barely audible.
“I’m on a private island,” the self-described “LinkedIn provocateur' and co-owner of the National Business Review (NBR) says.
“I don't own the island, but I own one of the properties on it, and I'm with my dog. She's just going for a wander. It's a beautiful sunny day. I'm just wearing shorts, and I'm looking out to a very calm ocean.”
When the call arrives, the Sunday Star-Times had been attempting, unsuccessfully, to speak with Scott for several days about the NBR’s crusade against subscription theft, which has made headlines sporadically over the past 12 months. Initially, Scott said he did not want to be interviewed. Texts went back and forth, (including one at 4.45am), with Scott directing us to the NBR’s co-editor Hamish McNicol along with a recent podcast interview that he said would be “insightful”.
The NBR has targeted both big business and government agencies - some of whom you may expect to be amongst the NBR’s core audience - after it discovered instances of password sharing as a way to bypass their monthly subscription fee.
The most public dispute has been with the Inland Revenue, which admitted to sharing cut and pasted versions of NBR articles to 600 staff members.
A settlement offer was rejected and a court battle is likely the next step.
But while the IRD dispute, and battles with several private businesses, have been publicised, the NBR has quietly continued its campaign in the background. It has now settled with 15 businesses, the Star-Times can report, and is gearing up to negotiate - or litigate - with a handful of government agencies.
McNicol said Scott wouldn’t be able to resist the opportunity to speak out, but it was only after asking for confirmation that Scott was still residing in Fiji, where he has been for several years, that the self-proclaimed “ruthless” publisher finally called up.
Scott, a former advertising salesman who completed a purchase of the NBR in 2020 (but begun in 2012) from long-time publisher Barry Colman via a vendor finance deal that he partly funded by selling his St Heliers home, says he’s very much still in Fiji.
He spends everyday “like this” - wandering casually through the waves, balancing the workload of a high profile New Zealand publisher with the lifestyle of a retired expat.
The scale of the problem
Alarm bells first started ringing after Inland Revenue dropped the number of NBR subscriptions it paid for from 220 down to just one.
This was in 2024, just a few months after the coalition government came to power and put the public service on notice.
Scott says he “suspected” something was going on, believing the company’s subscriber base should have been rising quicker than it had been. The NBR’s paywall has been in place since 2009, well before other local media outlets also chose to introduce paid subscriptions.
“What I found was there were a number of corporates, and disgracefully, a number of government departments who were literally stealing our content,” he says.
“I didn't think it was fair to build in leakage to an individual annual [or] monthly subscription to NBR.”
While it was expected that the Government’s cost-saving drive could be partly to blame, the scale of the cuts was unexpected.
“We did see other government departments cutting back on their group subscriptions, not to that same extent, but … the FMA, for example, went from about 100 to 50 and other examples like that,” McNicol adds.
It wasn’t just government agencies in the spotlight. Corporate clients, some of whom worked closely with the NBR, also had a relatively small number of paid subscriptions for the size of their operations. As they are not subject to the Official Information Act, details of any potential membership sharing could not be obtained directly.
In one instance, says McNicol, a company was “pretty upfront” when asked whether they were sharing a limited number of subscriptions around their staff.
“Obviously Todd wasn't happy with it,” he says.
“That was in breach of our terms and conditions and copyright as well. And it has been for several years. So I guess that sort of triggered a moment for Todd. Between that and the government departments, he just sort of wondered how extensive this is.”
Settlements rise to 15
Over the following months, Scott went digging. The company developed new systems to try and monitor any breaches, and discrepancies with different subscriptions started to become clear.
“You might have the same story read 20 times in five minutes across a bunch of different IP addresses or devices or whatever, which is a pretty good indicator that stuff is going on,” says McNicol.
In October last year, the NBR wrote to three corporates with its concerns, which resulted in admissions that they were indeed sharing subscriptions. Settlements followed. Previous reporting has described these businesses as a pair of leading fund managers and a national law firm.
“We also had a couple of instances of internal whistleblowers getting in touch with us with evidence of emails being sent with NBR articles just copied and pasted and sent to staff,” McNicol says.
The NBR has now settled with 15 corporates.
In some cases, they paid damages - “quite a significant total sum of money”, Scott says. Or they covered legal fees. “But most importantly, they all took out additional subscriptions as they should have in the first place.”
Some of those companies can’t yet be publicised, but those that can be reported include SkyCity and financial services provider Macquarie.
In January, it was reported that IRD’s offer of a $12,500 settlement had been rejected. Talks are now ongoing with the agency, along with the FMA, the DIA, MBIE and the Serious Fraud Office.
The latter of those seems ironic, the Star-Times asks McNicol. “Yeah, it does, yep.”
(The SFO and the FMA are now banned from accessing the NBR website.)
McNicol says that if negotiations fail, Scott is “primed and ready” to launch legal action.
Adds Scott: “If you were playing poker, which I don't, I imagine that's the hand you'd want.”
In the past fortnight, MBIE confirmed to the NBR it could retrieve data dating back to 2021 - though this information won’t be released to the company for a few months.
Scott says that, by contrast, the IRD had only provided information from 2024 onwards.
Via text, he expresses suspicion about this. “Given that New Zealand businesses are legally required to retain records for seven years, it’s hard to understand why a government agency tasked with enforcement would operate to a lower standard.”
Information relating to NBR subscriptions was requested from a dozen agencies under the Official Information Act in January, says McNicol.
“Collectively, the departments have admitted at least 230 articles were inappropriately shared with thousands of staff,” he says.
MBIE has admitted sharing at least 149 articles; IRD at least 43 articles; DIA at least 23 articles; and the SFO at least 15. The FMA denies any breaches but NBR alleges that certain staff accounts have been inappropriately shared with non-subscribers.
Setting a precedent
The NBR isn’t the only media outlet to operate a subscription model, though it has been the most public about its attempts to snuff out password sharing. Stuff’s masthead websites, which includes The Post and the Sunday Star-Times, are fully behind a paywall.
Stuff Group owner and publisher Sinead Boucher says subscription sharing is “always a concern” as quality news is expensive to produce and pirating it is illegal.
“It is also critical for society that we have journalism independent of government so that we can hold them to account and tell our own stories, but all of that requires subscribers and supporters to pay for it,” she says in a statement.
'Our subscription news brands are enjoying tremendous growth in the number of subscribers paying for their news and The Post in particular has become essential reading for public servants and business people.
“If we do become aware of people attempting to steal content or use a subscription outside the terms of their licence, our first step is to educate and give them the opportunity to upgrade to reflect group usage. They are usually happy to do this.'
The Herald has also operated a premium subscription service since 2019, and much of its exclusive content now sits behind a paywall.
Matt Wilson, NZME’s chief publishing officer, says: 'Our subscribers play a critical role in supporting the quality journalism we produce across our newsrooms nationwide. Our subscription terms are very clear and we do monitor subscription usage, taking a pragmatic, common-sense approach when issues of misuse arise.”
McNicol believes the NBR has set a precedent for these companies.
“One of the very early companies that we took on compared password sharing for the NBR to password sharing for Netflix. And we were sort of like, well, that's the biggest media company in the world and even they have taken steps in the last couple of years to limit that activity,” he says.
“I think people are slowly realising that actually, this is the model now. This is how you pay for news to continue to exist, you need to pay for it. It needed someone to actually go out there and do it. And Todd and [wife and co-owner] Jackie are … brave enough to go out and do that.”
Does this campaign risk damaging important relationships, given many of the agencies and companies in the crosshairs are likely NBR’s target audience?
“It's certainly something we've thought about and discussed internally,” McNicol acknowledges. “I will say, honestly, we've had overwhelming support for what we've done so far, particularly against the government departments, particularly against Inland Revenue, as you might expect.”
Scott says the decision to go public with his disputes is down to a moral stance. His lawyer had previously advised him not to name and shame any of the businesses involved.
“Over the Christmas break, I made a decision that I wasn't going to take the advice of my lawyer, and that I was going to start naming and shaming, and I actually really didn't care about the fact that ultimately they may decide not to settle if I named and shamed them,” he says.
“It just got to the point where [it] felt like … if you get caught, you just pay damages and legal fees [but we] won't name you.”
On LinkedIn, Scott’s social media of choice, that lesson extends beyond his own personal business. Most recently, he shared in full the allegations levelled against Labour leader Chris Hipkins by his ex-wife - allegations, though not of a criminal nature, that were never fully shared by most mainstream media outlets.
Scott puts that down to a difficult upbringing. During a recent appearance on the Beyond Broadcast podcast, he describes how childhood trauma prompted a reliance later in life on alcohol and cannabis. He spent two months in rehab in Thailand last year.
“I'm big on accountability,” Scott says. “I love my team. I love journalism. I'm not a journalist, [but] I'm very passionate about the job that my team do, and I'm ruthless. I am unashamedly the most litigious publisher in New Zealand.”