Today FM falls silent as owner MediaWorks loses its nerve in the battle with Newstalk ZB and tells staff it's over
Media crises and closures don't come more brutal than what occurred live on Today FM on Thursday morning as hosts Duncan Garner and Tova O'Brien told listeners the year-long talk radio experiment was over.
About 9.20am, as an all-staff meeting at the MediaWorks-owned channel was happening around him, Garner said the breakfast host O'Brien and members of the newsroom were walking into his studio and the news wasn't good.
"They've fucked us," O'Brien announced. "We're all going to lose our jobs."
Garner told O'Brien, and the listeners: "This is betrayal."
*Listen to audio of the broadcast below*
As the hosts discussed the broken promises from on-high to keep the station going, that it was a long-term project and that everyone needed patience over building audiences, Garner mused that the station would soon be off air. "I don't think anyone is going to let Tova and I keep gobbing off here."
O'Brien alleged the talk station had been white anted from within, by leaks to media and others, presumably by someone from the profitable but cost-affected music division of the business.
Garner adopted a 'the show must go on' professionalism and took a call from the station's sad, final talkback caller, a man who had rung and been helped out by Garner over the past year.
But that last gasp of business-as-usual dissolved as O'Brien intoned: "We've been instructed to play music."
Today's end was sudden and as badly handled as any badly handled media closure internationally, with the sacked hosts able to convey the station's end live on air and also give their views on how bad MediaWorks had been in their management and announcement.
It fell to Garner to utter the final words, a simple line from the gut: "This is the end of it for us ... thanks folks."
And then ... pop songs. A weird mix of Abba, Billy Joel and others, punctuated from the radio grave by the voice of Today FM, Paul Henry, talking up the talk station that was no more.
Today's end was sudden - and as badly handled as any badly handled media closure internationally, with the sacked hosts able to convey the station's end live on air and also give their views on how bad MediaWorks had been in their management and announcement.
But Today's fate was speculated on for months, and predicted almost from its launch last April.
Its audience was low. Lower than its troubled predecessor MagicTalk, well lower than the one before that, Radio Live. But MediaWorks executives preached patience, that listenership isn't built in a day. Or, as it turns out, a year.
Its revenue was said to be okay, sales of ads through the MediaWorks network had some income and the potential for growth for Today.
But it was the high start-up and ongoing salary costs that were the microphone cord around Today FM's neck. O'Brien, Garner, Leah Panapa and Mark Richardson in the afternoons, Lloyd Burr, Rachel Smalley and others were big names and reputedly rewarded appropriately. Their producers were also amply enticed from other jobs, one with what was said to be an "eye-wateringly" high salary.
All the while, Newstalk ZB and in particular Mike Hosking's Breakfast Show, rode supreme, undented by anything Today FM threw at them. Today innovated, tried spectacularly hard, to get the people's attention but even in the political and storm emergencies this year, the other guys just kept dominating.
It might be argued that aiming for 'news that moves us forward' and to move talkback to the centre, as Today informally intended, was never a winner; that centrists and people of reason and patience keep their own counsel, or have nothing much memorable to say.
With MediaWorks losing millions, and forced to announce the elimination of 90-plus jobs affecting sales and others across the music division, the resignation of the big-spending CEO Cam Wallace and then the resignation of the news and talk chief Dallas Gurney, it was felt something had to give.
MediaWorks has grown a posse of human resources and legal and administrative executives since the investigation into behaviour and conduct of some DJs and hosts, which Wallace was determined to put right.
So it must have had some clue how best to cancel the careers of some of the most outspoken voices in New Zealand media. There have been some salutary examples overseas - CNN cancelled its vastly costly CNN+ online play just weeks after it launched; here, Radio Sport was put out of its misery early in the pandemic.
Today was forced by circumstance into a staff briefing at peak audience time, with two of the biggest stars on air or just coming off air, for a 'proposal' to close the station and a consultation period lasting only until Thursday afternoon. According to the final murmurings on air in the Garner studio, it appeared the plan had been to stop Today's on-air shows from 12.15pm.
That was brought forward to about 9.20am as the studio became free range.
Heaven knows what the listeners thought. One minute a normal breakfast show with one of the best young journalists around, the next a live media tragedy, played out through the shock of people losing jobs, incomes and immediate futures.
This descendant of the broadcast legend Gordon Dryden's original Radio Manukau-turned-Radio Pacific-turned-RadioLive-turned-MagicTalk abruptly lost its voice.
At MediaWorks, it was the day the talk died.
* Newsroom and MediaWorks radio share one journalistic role covering politics at the parliamentary press gallery
