What’s the future for media?

Friday, 18 April 2025

A stunned gasp shuddered through the Queenstown Writers Festival crowd as Peter Newport delivered the glum news. The local news website he’d spent six years building was going into hibernation.

That was last November. Newport had plenty of readers, they just didn’t want to pay for news. But that collective gasp finally solidified into real support.

“That produced a massive response from our readers, who now are funding us, quite successfully, because they knew we were really in trouble.”

So now Crux is back, investigating the “shit” (failing sewage infrastructure) that matters to ratepayers.

It’s one of several media outlets reeled back from the precipice of closure by readers who suddenly realised what they stood to lose.

But they’re rare bright spots in a bleak landscape, including the recent revelation that the newest shareholder of New Zealand Herald owner NZME ‒ Canadian-born billionaire Jim Grenon ‒ wants to part-oust its board and influence its direction.

Former News Publishers Association public affairs director Andrew Holden ranks the health of New Zealand media at three out of 10, “with a downward arrow”.

And Stuff owner Sinead Boucher told a parliamentary select committee “journalism is in a fight for its life”.

As Newport puts it, “there’s blood all over the walls, and just surviving is something to be proud of”.

But Auckland University of Technology communications lecturer Greg Treadwell stops people when they talk about a crisis in journalism.

“It’s not a crisis of journalism. We know why we want and need journalism - perhaps the public needs to wake up to it more. But the crisis is really in the business model.”

A Last Post for the last Post?

Pundits have consigned printed newspapers to death row for years. The decision back in the noughties to put stories online for free, the rise of social media scrolling for news, the gobbling of advertising by Google, Facebook and TikTok, and the escalating costs of newsprint all seem to lower the coffin lid just a little further.

A Last Post for the last Post rolling off the Petone presses would be a sad end to 160 years of Wellington newspaper history. There’s no suggestion that’s on the near horizon. But even if it was, it wouldn’t be catastrophic, so long as that journalism has somewhere else to go, says Treadwell.

He reckons specialist print products and weekend reads might last another 10-20 years, but printed daily newspapers will be dead within five.

“For a long time that really felt like a disaster. But the world’s online, it’s not a surprise any more, and we have to work out how to make online news pay.

“I love newspapers. Everything about a newspaper is deep in my soul. But in the end, what matters is quality, democratic information.”

The trouble is, quality journalism costs money to produce - and someone has to pay for that.

Worldwide, media companies are trying to undo the expectation they created - that news should be free - by introducing digital subscriptions. The NZ Herald introduced a partial paywall in 2019, while Stuff newspapers The Post, The Press and The Waikato Times waited until 2023.

While digital subscriptions are climbing steadily - and some specialist publishers like the National Business Review have successfully switched from printed papers to online-only - it’s not enough to save print media generally.

A slide in an NZME investor presentation shows why. With Herald digital subscriptions now far outnumbering newspaper subscribers, the company’s digital revenue has more than doubled since 2019, to $103m. But it still makes up only one-third of total revenue - the other two-thirds still comes from print and broadcasting.

While digital advertising is worth billions, much is gobbled up by social media platforms and Google, which host news content, but pay nothing towards producing it.

As Holden puts it, the media needs “its own Spotify moment”.

“Original content has value. But at the moment, the value isn't going to the people who created it, it's going to the people - like search and social - who feed off it, or amplify it.”

Around the world, media companies are trying to increase their slice of the digital advertising pie, through voluntary or legislated deals with the tech giants.

In New Zealand, the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill was supposed to force the multinationals to pay local media to use their journalism. But that’s been stalled since November, and Media Minister Paul Goldsmith would not say whether the Government was still committed to the bill.

“We’re still working through the detail.”

When Rufus Chuter, of Together media agency, started in advertising 25 years ago, YouTube and Facebook didn’t exist and Netflix was a DVD mailout service.

The only constant is change, and media companies need to continually adapt, Chuter says.

Kiwi businesses still want to advertise with local media, but they need to better demonstrate their ads’ effectiveness to compete with the detailed performance data of international platforms, he says.

Despite the pain of cost cutting and adapting, Chuter is optimistic local journalism will survive, and says the media needs to be careful not to create a perceived “doom spiral”.

Do Gen Zers even read news?

For journalism to have any future, it needs a new generation to care about it.

Holden - who edited The Press and The Age in Melbourne - says people typically subscribed to newspapers after buying a home and having kids.

“You're not seeing that generation of new print subscribers coming through as people turn 30 or 40, and that really predicts the ultimate demise.”

Kaya Selby still sometimes picks up a newspaper. But the 22-year-old is a Gen Z oddity. As a journalism graduate, he’s a news junkie.

His friends might scroll news headlines on social media. But for something to hold their attention, they want to also be entertained. That might mean a podcast or 20-minute video essay.

“The rise of the YouTube journalist, like Coffeezilla or Johnny Harris, who can make a really engaging, entertaining video and you'll walk away from it having figured something out. It's within that spirit of traditional investigative journalism.”

He reckons his generation is unlikely to pay for news, but he still wants to be a news-maker.

However, despite winning an Australasian investigative journalism award, the 2024 grad still hasn’t found a permanent job. The decimation of the traditional journalism starting ground of community newspapers, and the dozens of newsroom redundancies, means young journos have to compete with seasoned seniors for the few available roles.

He’s about to start casual work at RNZ Pacific, but if he can’t get permanent work “it may be just give up and go into PR or comms”.

“I'd like to enter this profession, because I'm really passionate about it … To reach people and tell either their story, or a much larger story that people can see themselves within, that’s a really gratifying thing.”

The stayers

When Dan Hutchinson delayed the re-launch of Taupō’s community newspaper for a week, he started getting panicked calls.

“People were getting quite frantic: are you actually starting up again? It looked like it was closing, and then it didn't close, and I think people have appreciated that.”

Hutchinson was editor of the town’s last remaining paper, the Taupō & Tūrangi Herald, when NZME last year announced it was closing 14 community papers nationwide.

That purge followed a similar move by Stuff to cut community papers, including Taupō Times, last June.

Suddenly, a district of 42,000 faced having no local newspaper. But Hutchinson wasn’t having it. He bought the NZME title, rebranded as Taupō & Tūrangi News, and re-started the presses in January.

“I was fully expecting to lose a ton of money in the first month or two months, and that hasn’t been the case at all. It's proving to be a huge amount of work. But on the whole, it's been more positive than probably what we thought it was going to be. Still, early days.”

The miracle of the Taupō News is that in a media world changing with every spluttering breath, the model of delivering a free community newspaper to every mailbox is virtually the same as when Hutchinson began at the Kaikōura Star, in 1998.

“With the daily, paid-for subscriber newspapers, you're relying entirely on subscription, and people have really got to see the value in it. Whereas with a community, the model hasn't really changed since I started.”

Struggle street

Tapu Misa sounds exhausted. In the decade she’s been editing the E-Tangata online weekly magazine, funding worries have been constant.

“We’ve never felt secure about our future. We’ve never looked much further than the year in front of us. So this is not new territory for us.”

She and Gary Wilson started the magazine in 2014, as a home for Māori and Pacific voices. It was set up as a not-for-profit, with a $90,000 donation from the Tindall Foundation.

That was supposed to be seed funding, but philanthropy proved a dead end, so Tindall grants kept them going until they joined crowd-funding platform PressPatron in 2017.

“In many ways, E-T has been shaped by the lack of money and people,” Misa says. “But that also came with a lot of sacrifice in terms of energy and income, which isn’t sustainable in the long run. When you don’t have staff, you have to do everything. People get burned out and poorer. It’s not fair to ask that in the current environment.”

From 2022 to earlier this year, the mag got government funding for four jobs, through the controversial Public Interest Journalism Fund, which employed dozens of journalists through the hard years of Covid-squished advertising.

But with that funding drying up, E-Tangata is back on the precipice. Although reader contributions have doubled since 2018, they need to double again, Misa says.

“We can certainly get skinnier — we’ve done it before — but we’re already pretty lean. There’s a minimum level of operation needed to keep E-T going, and we’ll be falling a long way short of that at the current rates.”

While the PIJF model wasn’t perfect, Misa can’t understand why there’s no government funding system for print media similar to NZ on Air funding for broadcast media.

“Written journalism has been starved. That’s an obvious disparity in the system that needs addressing.”

Alternative funding models?

The fraught question of media funding has never been more topical, with the revelation that NZME’s newest shareholder, Grenon, is trying to overthrow its board and steer a new direction.

And last year’s closure of Newshub showed the risk of having offshore owners interested only in economics, not whether they’re giving Kiwis critical information.

The benign dictator model can also sour. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owned The Washington Post for a decade with no editorial interference, but recently banned the paper from publishing any opinion articles that disagree with his ideology.

Stuff has also been the subject of ownership uncertainty. NZME revealed in March that it had approached the company about buying its newspapers, including The Post, but Stuff pulled the pin on talks after Grenon’s power move.

There’s also been speculation that online auction site TradeMe could buy into Stuff Digital, which runs the Stuff website.

Former Warner Bros Discovery head of networks Glen Kyne thinks the media needs to stop depending on volatile ad revenue, in a world of relentless competition from global tech platforms. Especially with Trump’s tariff uncertainties. He’s not sure many Kiwi media companies could survive another advertising collapse.

As well as increasing reader subscriptions and contributions, different ownership models make sense, Kyne says. TradeMe buying into Stuff Digital, for example, would provide a sustainable pipeline for journalism, while driving eyeballs to the auction site.

“Ironically - the classifieds would be back in a digital way, funding news …The business models and operating models all look different going forward, given the stress on media companies.”

The other option is some publicly-funded, or publicly legislated, leg up.

Holden argues the current uncertainty reinforces the importance of having a strong publicly-funded newsroom. (He’s gone to work for RNZ.)

And while private media companies don’t want to be - or appear - beholden to the people they’re supposed to hold to account, there are indirect ways for governments to support journalism, he says.

Canada provides tax credits for every journalist employed. Ontario requires local government to spend at least 25% of its advertising budget with local media.

Another funding option - which Newport supports - is a digital advertising levy. That would see the tech giants - Google, Meta etc - paying a levy on all digital advertising revenue, which would then be distributed to local media companies.

Goldsmith won’t say if that’s under consideration.

Newport also thinks a ratepayer levy could help fund community journalism.

Treadwell says journalism is essentially a public service - like education or health - and should be “significantly publicly funded”.

'It is too important not to have a public approach to quality information.“

New technology - saviour or slayer?

You can’t have a conversation about the future without Artificial Intelligence coming up.

On one hand, AI is another mega-threat to media businesses, because unlike traditional Google search - which sends readers to the information’s source - AI search summaries hoover up and regurgitate news with no benefit to its creator.

But AI also bring opportunities. Stuff’s mastheads are already using a customised AI tool to report on local council documents.

Holden doesn’t think AI will ever replace journalists, because it can’t gather human stories in a disaster, such as Cyclone Gabrielle.

“What do journalists do? They bear witness to events …An AI engine is never going to walk the streets of Gisborne collecting information and talking to people about what's happened to them.”

But Kyne thinks we will see some kind of user-generated news model, that blends AI, crowd-sourced content and stories by trained journalists. With YouTube now the most-watched video platform in the US, he also expects to see more “creators”, like wildly successful YouTuber Mr Beast, working across different channels.

A Kiwi example would be Paddy Gower’s This Is the F#$%ing News, which blends social media, live events and is published on Stuff, Kyne says.

“I think increasingly, people will form these affiliations around trusted brands or individuals, that are not necessarily the institutions that we hold dear today.”

But he still sees a role for the news organisations that have formed the bedrock of New Zealand journalism for more than a century.

“I bloody hope so …They will still hold a very strong place by representing independent news and fact-based reporting in New Zealand.”

A new frontier - the substackers

Disillusioned with the direction his employer was heading in, Dylan Cleaver didn’t want to be that grumpy guy in the corner that no-one wants to talk to.

So in 2021, the veteran NZ Herald sports journo went solo, setting up The Bounce on newsletter subscription platform Substack. That works by having both paid and unpaid subscribers. Of Cleaver’s 2-3 newsletters a week, one is free.

Substack paid him for a year to help him build an audience. Three years on, the 54-year-old has over 6000 subscribers, of which more than 12% are paid.

He could survive on that income alone, but also ghost-writes autobiographies, and does a podcast with the Alternative Commentary Collective.

Cleaver has “absolutely no regrets” about going it alone.

“I've loved it. I've loved the freedom. I've loved the opportunity that I can do other things as well … and at this point, I still have financial security, and so long may that continue.”

Logan Savory also joined the Substack revolution, leaving The Southland Times in January 2023, to start The Southland Tribune. A one-man band, he covers everything from sport to council.

Working from home, he figured a low-overheads model might work for local journalism.

He won’t lie - it’s been tough. Unlike Cleaver’s national audience pool, he’s only drawing from a market of 100,000 people. And it’s hard to get people to pay for news.

“I’m still not 100% sure if it will work long term. So far so good.”

Still, he has 4000 subscribers and he’s paying his bills. Given the workload, there are easier ways to make a living. And to make it sustainable, he’d need more subscribers, and advertising.

But he also has no regrets, and is spurred by great community support.

“When I had a crack at this, it was pretty ambitious, whether it would fly or not. A lot of people were like, that's a bit crazy. But it's been really, really enjoyable.'

Newport is also using Substack to get readers to pay. That’s both exciting and frightening, he says.

“I have to sing for my supper. If I write great stories, I will get money. If I stop writing great stories, and if I stop reading this community correctly, and if I stop doing my investigative work, I've got no doubt the money would dry up.

“It means that there's a new future, where journalists are going to have to become sort of like business people. We've got to learn how to market ourselves, but we can't chase clicks. We can't chase audience approval.

“We have to be true to the spirit of journalism and trust our community to value that.”