11min chapter

The Fold cover image

The non-endorsements, the fate of 1News.co.nz and tremors from small publishers

The Fold

CHAPTER

Navigating Digital Transformation in News

This chapter explores the transition of TVNZ into a digital-first streaming platform, focusing on the challenges and strategies surrounding its One News brand. It discusses the complexities of audience engagement, monetization, and the adaptation of traditional news formats to modern media consumption patterns.

00:00
Speaker 1
I
Speaker 2
mean, I thought the call at the time was very strategically sound. So the one where we're talking about the true digital future of TVNZ, which is as a streaming platform, essentially. And I thought, you know, the comments that you and Glenn made around it at the time in terms of its position against, you know, the other big news players' websites, you know, it seems odd that they have this, you know, number one news kind of channel and program and then a website that really struggles to crack into the, you know, the top three most of the time. On the other hand, there was, I was a bit like, I was trying to figure out the sort of the discoverability stuff around streaming platforms, you know, like Netflix doesn't really need search engine optimisation. I mean, it's got it. But people just, it's a portal and you just go there. And I suppose I was, I wasn't sure about like the trail of breadcrumbs that needed to be laid to get people to switch from, you know, sort of quite entrenched search behaviour around finding out what's going on to going, oh, I know what I'll do. I'll go to the TVNZ Plus app because they'll be having the breaking news. Yeah. So I sort of, I guess, just I suppose in the current context of how people discover news and information, I felt like it's an idea that I think is correct for the future, but perhaps a little radical for right now in terms of pulling the website entirely off the table. But, you know, reading what they've sort of said, it does sound a little bit like it's a holding pattern until they have transferred audiences or trained that kind of behaviour.
Speaker 1
That might be defensible. It's interesting, right? Like the thing I think about is, you know, well, there's two things. One is, you know, could you achieve the same sort of, like is the function of one news.co to be a profit center and a behavior unto itself for TVNZ? Or is it supposed to be a promotional service for the profitable behavior which is watching one news either on linear or on tvnz plus i think right now given what it costs versus what it brings in and how likely you are to be able to close that gap you can only say that it's the latter yeah um and on that basis you know what evidence they have that makes them believe that either a One News 6pm or TVNZ Plus viewer is more likely to be brand loyal to One News as a text-based throughout-the news source? Don't know. Because in my experience, most people are fairly omnivorous with their digital news viewing. And then secondly, if you don't believe that, is there another way to achieve the same ends? And that's where, and this is ironic given that One News kind of shut down a lot of this stuff a bit over a year ago. Could you sort of shut One News as a website, take 20% of the cost of that and just go really hard on video-based social as a kind of a way of getting that sort of sense of this is what One News does and using it as effectively as those advertising forums. Now, I still remain kind of sceptical, and I know that you do too, about if you give people a really great news experience on social, aren't you just training them to be on social even more and never to go to your own platform, i.e. never to a place where you can make money to recoup the really high cost of making news. I kind of think you are.
Speaker 2
I mean, I agree, and it's a really hideous, unavoidable tension in that where are the audiences and where is the audiences of the next generation? But I think, you know, in some ways, the idea of getting people into TVNZ Plus without the intermediary step of the site feels almost like, I don't know, it feels like everything that media has been trying to do, which is shift people off social onto their own platforms because that's how we are able to survive because that's what we can monetize. It now feels like kind of a frog leap over the top of that and essentially trying to encourage a different kind of behavior, a behavior that feels really familiar because I don't watch linear TV. I watch TV on the apps on my screen. But yeah, I think it's quite a hard slog trying to figure out how to you know I am assuming TVNZ plus is a vastly more monetizable proposition in terms of you know the selling of video inventory than display on site or whatever but yeah I mean it's funny really because TVNZ started as a TV they have always done essentially video and visual storytelling best and then at some point i assume in the 2000s or whenever with with google arriving on the scene they had to transform their business to accommodate that and become a text-based you know so to write the news instead of just speaking it and now it's sort of headed back towards actually we're just all about video.
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. Part of me thinks that is the problem actually that it's mostly like a dude in a suit telling you the news and then they'll throw to someone which is like a lady in a fancy dress or another dude in a suit, like that maybe some of the sort of formality that feels really natural on a linear TV set feels alien in these other contexts. Yeah, totally. Some kind of, not that you just want someone in converse with their feet up on the desk, just kind of like, dude, that's a big story. I don't know how you do this. You won't believe this. Yeah, and you maybe choose your sort of different vibes-based newsreader. But there's something maybe that the TVNZ Plus thing is actually an opportunity for them to just play a little bit in terms of the style that the information is transmitted because you do see, you know, a massive amount of news discussion on social platforms. It's really, really popular. It just never looks anything like the dude in a suit with an autocue.
Speaker 2
No, I mean, you can't just take the broadcast and chuck it on YouTube or cut it up into bits and put it on Instagram. They're going to have to have, you know, just as you have to think differently about content in a social media environment. Oh, I just called the news content. I mean, it is, right?
Speaker 1
I'm on the record as saying content is fine. Okay. We don't have another word that actually uses it. Let's just stop apologising. Okay, that's fine, right? Content,
Speaker 2
you've heard it here five times now, but it's fine. They're not going to be able to do that with the streaming platform either. It's going to have to be a different product in a lot of ways, and I think especially in the context of news. And so, I mean, it'll be interesting to see how they do that and then how, I suppose, One News, the site, acts as a transitional device for that.
Speaker 1
Yeah, or maybe it can push harder in that respect, potentially, because at least it's trying to now move you to TVNZ +, whereas previously it felt like it was ultimately wanting to make you watch the 6pm news. Let's hit on some of these sort of smaller publications. So Crux, which was a new site founded in the last few years by Peter Newport, former writer for the spinoff, but long-time RNZ journalist to cover Queenstown and the Southern Lakes region. It sort of like, it was very focused on kind of classic journalism, looking at the city council. Yeah,
Speaker 2
it was local issues.
Speaker 1
Yeah, but with a bit more kind of a sort of pointier and sometimes investigative vibe, it's basically just announced that it is shutting down. There was a for now at the end of the post announcing it, and I encourage you to read the post because it's quite an interesting, you know, regional news isn't something we talk a lot about, but it's a kind of a classic news desert, a classic dilemma of digital journalism, which is even more challenged than the original form. So that's basically gone to pause at best right now. New Zealand Geographic, fantastic local magazine. Most years it wins the award for magazine of the year. Most years it justifies that. Full disclosure, they were our sort of flatmates in our first office for quite some time. They basically said two things which were both quite shocking. One is that they have nearly 9, I think it's 8,000 subs across various formats. I was like, that's a lot. Well done. And they're like, we need 10,000 to survive. And I admire James Francom, the publisher, for making that public. And he said that they're going to have a greater degree of transparency in future. New Zealand Geographic has really held the line on quality. It's paid. It's freelance as well. It's paid photographers as well. It's just a beautifully made product. And it almost feels like James is saying, I don't want to stop doing that or slowly diminish it. I'd almost rather die than compromise on those values. So he's written a piece about that. And then finally Caffeine, who I think I had on the podcast about a year ago. It's a new publication focused on sort of tech and startups, which has come from James Herman, who's also recently been on the podcast, who's involved in sort of brand strategy and venture capital and so on as well. But I thought it was a beautifully designed and conceived product, but they basically have said we're going to sort of – they went on to Substack about six months ago and they're now going to a largely paywall product. And, yeah, it's just – it's quite a – but taken together, the three of them arriving within a few days of one another as announcements, feel like there are quite a loud alarm signaling about the state of the kind of, I guess it's not necessarily niche media, but it's not the kind of the big shops that they're sort of starting to feel it really, really hard.

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