Newshub second high profile media outlet to close in a year

Wednesday, 28 February 2024

Newshub is shutting down under a proposal by owner Warner Bros. Discovery

It’s been a torrid few years for New Zealand media outlets with a mixture of closures, multinational buyouts and Aussie offloads.

Newshub’s announcement on Wednesday comes less than a year after the shock closure of ambitious young radio channel Today FM.

Owned by Newshub’s former owners MediaWorks New Zealand, Today FM was stacked with high-profile broadcasting personalities who suddenly found themselves in the wind after its March 30 announcement last year.

MediaWorks sold Newshub to US multimedia company Discovery Inc, now called Warner Bros. Discovery, in late 2020.

The parent company had been facing big losses, with another disappointing earnings report last week prompting a 10% drop in its share price.

Today FM team left the MediaWorks building in Freeman’s Bay after their show was suddenly cancelled last year.

Newshub was no doubt a victim of a mix of tough domestic and international economic trading conditions.

These latest travails on the New Zealand media landscape were just the most recent examples in at least two decades of upheaval prompted by the rise of digital media and a decline in print and television advertising revenue.

When the Government thrust the country into Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020, it prompted a massive advertising retrenchment putting huge pressure on the privately owned media companies.

One of the first to be affected was the German-owned Bauer Media NZ which published well-loved New Zealand print titles including The Listener, New Zealand Woman's Weekly, Woman's Day, North & South, Metro, Fashion Quarterly and Next.

It announced closure in early April 2020. In June that year Australian investment company Mercury Capital bought Bauer’s New Zealand assets, and a month later announced that it would resume publishing The Listener and other former Bauer publications.

Stuff, which was owned by Australian media company Nine Network, narrowly avoided a similar fate in the months after the first lockdown.

With rumours spreading that Nine might be planning to close its New Zealand satellite business, and an attempted takeover by rival NZME, chief executive Sinead Boucher moved quickly and bought Stuff for a dollar.

This was the first time its New Zealand operations had been locally owned for decades. Stuff’s previous owner Fairfax Media merged with Aussie media giant Nine in 2018.

One of New Zealand’s largest media conglomerates NZME, which publishes the New Zealand Herald, a range of regional newspapers and operates a suite of radio stations, announced earlier this month that its profits had reduced by a third to $23 million.

Various media bosses, including Stuff’s Sinead Boucher, appeared before the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill Select Committee to submit that the tech giants like Google and Meta should pay for using content from media organisations.

In the wake of Covid-19, the Government announced a $55 million contestable fund to pay for ‘public interest’ journalism.

Administered by NZ On Air, this paid for a range of journalism projects, reporting roles and development initiatives, and was wound up in mid-2023.

Media company executives recently put forward their cases to Government to have international digital media giants pay for New Zealand-generated news content that appeared on their platforms.

Massey University journalism lecturer Professor James Hollings said Newshub’s closure was “clearly a sign it’s very hard to run commercial television news” and the Government had to take some responsibility.

“They need to do something something to support New Zealand news media. In other words, progress the Digital Broadcasting Bill where they’ve been dragging their heels.“