RNZ’s new audio boss on rebooting Morning Report - and what could be next

Saturday, 25 April 2026

Pip Keane has four pairs of AirPods. One is usually being worn, the second is in her bag, there’s a third in the car and another “down the side of the couch”.

As RNZ’s first chief audio officer, she has to have her ear to the ground - often quite literally.

The role was introduced in the wake of a scathing internal report by ex-news boss Richard Sutherland that suggested the state broadcaster had work to do retaining its audience, and needed to improve some of its on-air offering.

Keane is a former Campbell Live producer and has been at RNZ since 2015, including as executive producer of Checkpoint. Now, she’s something of a supercharged executive producer - keeping a close eye across the network’s entire catalogue of shows.

“You've got to be across what's playing out on the radio,” she says, speaking to The Post in one of her first interviews since taking on the high-powered role.

For much of her tenure, she has been focused on rejuvenating Morning Report. “It's the most crucial programme. That's our flagship programme. I think it's our window to RNZ. It sets the agenda across the station. It should set the agenda every morning across the station.”

Part of that involved bringing onboard John Campbell, with whom she has worked several times across her career. Campbell left TVNZ at the end of last year and started at Morning Report earlier this month, joining Ingrid Hipkiss behind the desk.

Keane says the recruitment process took three months and involved “speaking to 17 people”, a mix of both internal and external candidates.

Names once floated as being in the mix for that role included Tova O’Brien (now co-host of TVNZ’s Breakfast), Stuff journalist Lloyd Burr and RNZ Nights host Emile Donovan.

“It was a very robust process,” Keane says. “But you can just feel the energy there with the both of them in the same studio - Ingrid [Hipkiss is] very quick witted.

“I think she's come into her own. She's a very strong interviewer. They've got some nice energy. There’s some lovely banter … we're getting really, really, really good audience engagement.”

Speeding up the pace of the show - which banter clearly helps with - is part of Keane’s agenda. Morning Report is up against Mike Hosking’s breakfast show on Newstalk ZB which, though packed with ads, often has a quickfire pace.

While the Sutherland report predated Keane’s time in the role, and, she specifies, is not her “mandate”, it recommended shifting Morning Report to Auckland. The show is now fully hosted from the super city, and its lead producer is also based there. Having both hosts in the same room helps liven up the tone.

“I think John and Ingrid have proven over the past eight, nine days that they can really deliver. I feel like they're going to be a real force to be reckoned with.”

Keane won’t be drawn into discussing whether Morning Report should be outperforming Newstalk ZB, but does say she wants the show to be a 'destination programme” for listeners.

“But at the same time it's three hours of really high pressure, demanding radio. We need presenters that really need to be on the ball all of the time,” she said.

“So I think our goal is to read our audience, engage with our audience, be able to reach new audiences, be a really strong lifeline utility, and give people as much information as we can throughout the morning, as well as making them have a laugh from time to time.”

It’s too soon to know if the audience will follow Campbell. An RNZ press release from when Campbell joined Morning Report claimed he added 50,000 listeners to the Checkpoint audience during his time hosting the afternoon show. However, Keane said the Morning Report Essentials podcast has had a 20% bump in listeners already and all eyes are on the next audience survey numbers in a month or so.

But Morning Report is just one part of the wider puzzle: Keane makes clear that all shows are on notice.

“I think we need to be looking at all of them. There's no one specific programme I'm looking at. I'm looking at all of them, and we're constantly making tweaks. And if we get something wrong, we'll fix it,” she said.

One previous change that was quickly rectified was removing an early morning weather bulletin, which was added back in a couple of days later.

“The audience hated [the change]. They actually wanted to know what the weather was at 6.30 in the morning,” said Keane.

“Even … with Morning Report … there was an audio bed that ran under the headlines, and for the first day, it just didn't work, so we pulled it back.”

The late night news bulletin is also a focus, especially with RNZ’s role as a civil defence broadcaster.

“I am slightly obsessed with our 10pm news bulletin, which I really think is really great. There's not a lot available now that there's no evening TV news and that 10pm bulletin has increasingly become part of our lifeline utility,” she said.

But the Auckland focus doesn’t mean the show should only appeal to listeners in our biggest city. A letter to the editor in last week’s Weekend Post asked if people felt “Radio New Zealand ha[d] quite quickly transformed into Radio Auckland”.

Keane disputes that.

“I'm a huge flag flyer of regional reporting and voices across the country. And I also think that the story should dictate the content, we don't do an Auckland story just because it's Auckland. We've got to make Auckland stories interesting to our audience across the country.”

One change likely to be less divisive is the newly confirmed return of Kim Hill - not to the radio waves but as host of a forthcoming video podcast.

“Quite excited about that [and] looking after our loyal audience, but alongside that, working on how we can deliver our content and reach new audiences through different avenues.”

With ratings on the way, an election in just under 200 days time, and media trust consistently in the spotlight, there is a lot going on for the country’s state broadcaster.

“Our standards are high,” Keane said. “And if we make a mistake, we correct it quickly.”