TVNZ makes a big deal about its digital transition - it invests smartly in its TVNZ app, it manages a nationally important content library, and it bids for live (and streamable) events. But what always an unspoken bargain in that digital transition was a diminuition in the value of news and current affairs. Today, that bargain is finally on the table, courtesy of the incoming CE who’s proposing to “disestablish” Sunday and Fair Go.
This is only a week after NewsHub’s proposed demise. My thoughts, and solidarity, are with everyone at TVNZ and NewsHub.
The traditional argument for scaling back - or simply eliminating - television news and current affairs is the structural transformation in the advertising market. Online advertising is usually cheap and hyper targeted whereas broadcast and print advertising is expensive and generalised. Where broadcast and print companies could command the attention of millions, most of those millions now spend most of their time online as social media users and VOD and streaming consumers. Stuff.co.nz records tidy numbers, but it’s hardly Tik Tok or Youtube.
I suspect the unspoken assumption in TVNZ’s digital strategy was always that the company would become something closer to a local Netflix than a state broadcaster. In this strategy - where TVNZ is little more than an entertainment content library - there’s little room for a permanent (rather than seasonable or “snackable”) news and current affairs operation broadcasting - or rather streaming - every day. From this perspective, where news and current affairs is understood as the past rather than the future, it’s easier to justify scaling back news and current affairs and axing Sunday and Fair Go.
But that’s a shortsighted perspective. News and current affairs is what creates TVNZ’s “local” identity. If TVNZ’s strategists what to become Netflix then good luck to them. They’ll lose spectacularly against the US streamers. The only way the state broadcaster can become a viable streaming provider is if it differentiates itself with local content. The leading local content is news and current affairs - that is what sustains our democracy, creates a sense of shared experience and shared belonging, and contributes to the company’s own sense of itself and its purpose. Cutting news and current affairs is exactly what you do when you don’t know what you’re doing.
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Senior Brand Director @RTL AdAlliance
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