New Zealand is not a country short of news. Our geography, multiparty electoral system, and adventurous seals all make for plenty of good yarns most days of the year. But we are increasingly short of the journalists to tell them.
The latest shocking blow comes in the news that Warner Bros Discovery plans to shut down Newshub, a rebranded version of what most of us grew up knowing as “3 News” – leaving our country with just one English-language TV news team, and none that aren’t owned by the state. This will mean the end of the flagship 6pm bulletin and redundancies for more than 200 staff, many of whom will probably leave the journalism profession for good.
And who could blame them? Journalism globally and in New Zealand has suffered in recent decades, with hundreds of reporters filing their last stories and not being replaced. There were 1,635 people who listed their profession as “journalist” in the 2018 census – down about 51% from the count in the year 2000. That number undoubtedly includes a wide range of people who are not paid full-time reporters.
Newshub’s demise is another flashpoint in this slow crisis. The 6pm bulletin has always existed as a kind of rebellious sibling to the more buttoned-down stylings of 1 News, the flagship news program of state-owned but commercially run broadcaster TVNZ. Whereas 1 News generally had a higher audience, Newshub had far more personality, and seemed far more eager to break agenda-setting stories.
In my years working in the parliamentary press gallery, it was Newshub that I anxiously watched at 6pm, worried that my friends down the corridor would ruthlessly scoop me. Political editor Tova O’Brien rightly made international headlines for her Jami-Lee Ross interview in 2020 and this team seemed to receive more leaks than Wellington’s ageing pipes network, with the recurring phrase “Newshub understands” often setting off a process that would eventually see someone resign.
New Zealand’s public life and democracy will be poorer without it. Competition is the main driver behind great journalism, the reason you stay working late into the night to nail a story or take a step back to see out what everyone else is missing. While there are hundreds of fantastic reporters left working at the other pillars of New Zealand journalism, Newshub brought an edge and reminded us we needed to bring our own A-game.
A shift in audiences away from television has contributed to this demise. Television news is expensive and difficult to make well, as many print outlets have found in their own forays into video journalism. Online ads might just not be able to fund good, TV-style journalism in a country of our size.
But it is still TV which defines the political conversation, and can so often take what would be a ripper newspaper story and make it a proper national scandal. Online news will fully replace this function at some point – but it is nowhere near managing that yet.
It would be easy to just blame the foreign multinational who made this decision, the new government that is very wary of doing anything to help a sector struggling to compete with social media, or indeed the half-corporate half-public nature of TVNZ, which many see as monopolising advertising revenue. Perhaps a Kiwi owner would stick it out with a loss-making product for a little bit longer. But there’s a reason the capital for Three came from offshore – there just isn’t a lot of money roaming around.
Of course, innovation isn’t totally lacking in New Zealand news. Paywalls have sprung up all over the place, both for legacy print media and boutique newsletters. But it remains unclear if these models can deliver the scale of staffing we enjoyed in decades past, when the rivers of gold from advertising let the media at least attempt to cover the whole country and cover it well, not just the main three centres. I always assumed that something would just “come along” and fix all of this, as audiences demanded at least some sort of reporter cover their local council and courts, but the increasing number of “news deserts” across the western world suggest that demand isn’t as strong as journalists might like.
One shouldn’t mythologise the golden age too much. While there were far more reporters they still got plenty wrong and missed plenty of important stories. But there is something worth saving in a thriving news culture, one funded by readers not billionaires, where people break stories not to aid or harm a political party but to embarrass other journalists who missed it. Newshub embarrassed me more times than I can count. I wish they had the opportunity to do so again.
Henry Cooke is a freelance journalist covering New Zealand politics
