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Hanging lights in a tree on Courtenay Place. Photo: Joel MacManus
Hanging lights in a tree on Courtenay Place. Photo: Joel MacManus

OPINIONBusinessJuly 8, 2024

Windbag: Holy shit, there are hanging lights in that tree!

Hanging lights in a tree on Courtenay Place. Photo: Joel MacManus
Hanging lights in a tree on Courtenay Place. Photo: Joel MacManus

Courtenay Place is dead. Long live Courtenay Precinct.

Windbag is The Spinoff’s Wellington issues column, written by Wellington editor Joel MacManus. It’s made possible thanks to the support of The Spinoff Members.

It was dreary and dark, the traffic on Cambridge Terrace was impatient. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw it – at the edge of Courtenay Place, a glisten, a sparkle. I swear, I almost crashed the car. “Holy shit, there are hanging lights in that tree!” I yelled to nobody in particular.

I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I went back the next day to confirm they were real, that I wasn’t dreaming. They shone through the branches like garden fairies having orgasms. It’s embarrassing that some mediocre lights above a public toilet are so exciting, but this is the first visual facelift Courtenay Place has had since… the Tripod statue in 2005?

Courtenay Place matters to Wellington. When decision-makers talk about how to fix this city and get its mojo back, they’re happy to bang on about public transport and water infrastructure – the big, meaty issues. Compared to that, having a fun place to go out on a Friday doesn’t seem so important. But it is. At their core, cities are about connections between people. Young people don’t just flock to cities for jobs but because they promise better social environments. More stuff to do, friends to make, and people to have sex with. The entertainment and hospitality industries are far more important to the city than just their economic spend – they’re what attracts people, what gives the city life.

Courtenay Place in 2011 (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Like most industries, hospitality struggled through the double-whammy of Covid and the recession. Courtenay Place seems to have struggled more than most. The street looks tired, and it lacks a drawcard to bring people there before midnight – it doesn’t have the natural beauty of the waterfront, the office crowd of Lambton Quay, or Cuba Street’s fountain made of buckets. Still, with all its problems, Courtenay Place is the best congregation of late-night fun anywhere in the country outside of Karangahape Road (and, with some improvements, still has the potential to challenge for the top spot).

The hanging lights are a small sign of the new Courtenay Precinct. The plan is the brainchild of a group of bar and restaurant owners, with some support from corporate sponsors and council grants. They hope to extend the area’s appeal to be not just a place for the after-midnight crowd, but for afternoons and evenings too.

The name “Courtenay Precinct” refers to Courtenay Place and the surrounding side streets, such as Blair, Allen and Tory. Justin McKenzie, who owns two bars in the precinct (CGR Merchant & Co and Hawthorn Lounge), said a rebrand was needed because of the street’s deteriorating reputation and an unfortunate run of bad news stories.

Justin McKenzie, owner of Hawthorn Lounge (Photo: Joel MacManus)

 

 

The precinct’s first event, Eat Street, ran over the past two weeks, featuring buskers, performers and street parades. Each bar and eatery promoted a special small plate. It was a small festival; advertising wasn’t particularly prominent. The weather was terrible, and the council didn’t support any road closures, so the street parades ended up being processions down the footpaths. Still, as it coincided with Matariki celebrations, McKenzie says his bars had the equivalent of a “normal weekend” by pre-Covid, pre-recession standards. Sunaina Gill, who runs Jugnu’s Little India on Blair Street, said she had a busier-than-usual weekend, though customers didn’t seem particularly aware of the Eat Street offerings.

That the event was small is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s perfect. WellingtonNZ and the council events team put a lot of focus on big, showy events that bring people in from out of town. But that’s quite a provincial way of thinking – the same logic behind Wings over Wairarapa or Featherston Booktown. Arguably, small but regular activities around the Courtenay Precinct could be much cheaper and make a much bigger difference. A proper city should feel vibrant every weekend, not just during a big event.

There is palpable excitement among some of the business owners involved in Courtenay Precinct. Everyone has been in survival mode for the last few years; this is the first time in a long time that there are real discussions about building a collective future for the street. As I spoke with Gill, she bubbled with ideas, excitedly talking about cross-promoting with other businesses, getting buskers outside her restaurant, and creating better connections to the waterfront.

Sunaina Gill at Jugnu’s Little India on Blair Street (Photo: Joel MacManus)

The precinct is planning more events, including Road to Beervana, an all-inclusive beer week ahead of the national festival. McKenzie is working on plans to set up an outdoor fan zone for the two upcoming All Blacks tests and hopes to get approval to close Courtenay Place between Tory Street and Cambridge Terrace for a New Year’s Eve street party.

This is all long, long overdue. Decision-making around Courtenay Place has been in a period of stasis for years. Nothing has changed. The Golden Mile upgrade was meant to be the circuit breaker – and it will make an enormous difference to the streetscape if/when it actually happens. But Wellington City Council seems to have forgotten an important lesson it learned from the Island Bay cycleway. Doing one big, expensive, permanent street change creates conflict, inaction and budget blowouts. Wellington’s cycleway rollout has been successful because the council embraced temporary solutions that are quicker and cheaper to install and easy to adapt based on feedback.

In the eight years Wellington has spent arguing about the Golden Mile, why has the council never trialled a traffic-free weekend on Courtenay Place? It’s not hard, just chuck down some cones and planter boxes. There are some dirt-cheap upgrades that would go a long way towards making Courtenay Precinct feel a lot more inviting. Why can’t we just string a few festoon flags across Blair and Allen Street? Why can’t we make it a little easier to run a parade down the street? Why did it take so long to put some goddamn hanging lights in that tree?

‘Hutt Valley, Kāpiti, down to the south coast. Our Wellington coverage is powered by members.’
Joel MacManus
— Wellington editor
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MediaJuly 4, 2024

Death of a newsroom: If only Newshub’s closure was mismanagement

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The former chief news officer at Newshub reflects on, and explains, the end of a news era.

A version of this article was first published on Hal Crawford’s Substack, Crawford Media. Subscribe here.

This Friday will be the last day of broadcasting and publishing for my old newsroom, Newshub. It’s being shut down because TV is losing audience and therefore revenue, and closing the newsroom saves millions of dollars in costs. The newsroom has been operational (as 3 News) for 35 years. When I left in 2020, Newshub employed 280 news staff.

Fear and the first day

I don’t have a photo of my first day, so this is my last – in the same place (Newshub Auckland). I am on the right. Foreground are Sarah Bristow, Jack Matthews and Michael Anderson (L-R)

The first day I walked into the newsroom on Flower Street in Auckland in 2016, I was greeted by a group of people who had every reason to think I was the enemy. I’d been employed by a CEO, Mark Weldon, who many loathed on account of his approach to content and people. Before I even arrived, Mark had been forced out of the business by an across-the-board revolt. But there I was, a digital guy and an Australian, appointed chief news officer of an unequivocally TV and Kiwi newsroom.

3 News had become Newshub a few months before. It had been an enormous rebranding effort with clean graphic design and beautiful studio sets. To go with the new look they had an as-yet unborn content strategy that broke up traditional newsroom structure, replacing medium-focussed units (for example, TV reporters or radio reporters) with content-focussed units (for example, daily newsgathering) that would service multiple mediums.

I stood in front of the newsroom and told everyone we would be tearing that plan up. It was ideologically driven, rather than practical. The main problem was that the biggest single group, newsgathering, would be off the hook, too far removed from clear metrics like TV ratings and digital engagement. Evaluating the performance of the head of newsgathering, the chief resource allocator, was going to be difficult. I wanted none of that.

What I found

The Newshub branding, by Ant Farac, was beautiful, clean, and part of the reason I believed we could make a difference in NZ media.

Newsroom mythology painted Newshub as the scrappy fighter, the underdog with an ability to improvise. To a large extent I think this was accurate. There certainly was something of the youngest child about the place – cheeky, entertaining and irresponsible – and the relationship with older sibling 1 News (TVNZ) was central to newsroom identity. We were intensely competitive with TVNZ, although that competitiveness was mostly one-sided as far as I could see. That asymmetry is a classic part of the youngest kid dynamic.

Another aspect of the Newshub mythology was that we were underfunded. I struggled with that one. Underfunded compared to what? I came from digital where no choppers could be hired ever, and buying $50k news cameras would have been madness. We were spending more than $30m a year to produce our bulletins, website,and shows. Certainly, our ambition outstripped our budget – but isn’t that always the case? By the standards of TV, we did things cheaply, but the standards of TV demand high minimum spend.

When you ask TV news camera operators why they can’t make do with a DSLR, strap in for a long answer. In the end you will believe them. This is a Panasonic PX5100 and set up ready to shoot used to cost around NZ$50k.

It was those costs that would sink the place in the end. So it’s worth dwelling on exactly why TV news is so expensive. There are many different areas where high costs come in – for example, studios, camera equipment, talent costs, international content licensing, transmission – but if you take a step back there are two key factors behind the big dollars:

  • Real-time daily output
  • Original video/audio output

These two factors combine to create that high minimum spend. They seem so obvious to anyone in TV they wouldn’t understand why I am talking about them. But these are requirements not shared by other forms of news. Newshub made TV bulletins 365 days a year, live in the studio. That gives your TV channel a sense of presence – the lights are on – but it comes at great cost in staffing and equipment.

The audience and the industry expect in-house video content to be polished. Video/audio is cheap to do amateurishly and expensive to do professionally. This dichotomy has not changed despite Youtube and the sea of amateur footage available. If anything, the expectations for in-house video have increased, perhaps as a means of differentiation.

An aside on newsroom costs: many people believe newsreaders and well-known on-screen talent are paid salaries in the millions. This is fantasy. While there may be hangovers from the bloated past, on-screen talent costs are a minor part of the overall budget.

What’s being lost

The people losing their jobs at Newshub this week aren’t dying. They are going to move on and do their thing. This is part of the arc of their lives. I found them to be wonderful people. I was first given a fair hearing and then accepted, and as a group we achieved big digital growth and stability in TV ratings. As one of my final projects, I gathered data that showed, against received wisdom, that the newsroom was profitable.

That situation had changed by 2024, and it had nothing to do with me or my successor Sarah Bristow.  After the bump of Covid, audiences continued to drift away from TV. Combined with a cyclical advertising downturn, Warner Bros Discovery NZ was losing money. Costs had to be cut, and news was the single biggest pot. Because TV news has a high minimum viable cost, WBD decided to cut the lot and accept a much smaller TV business.

A newsroom is a particular cultural institution. It creates an environment where telling local short-term truths is rewarded with recognition and status. I say “local” and “short-term” here to differentiate news from science and the arts, which pursue truth in different ways.

The problem with local truths, and why they require an institution to tell, is that they are often unpleasant. Many stories of misdeeds begin as rumours which have to be substantiated. Reporting them requires either a sociopath or someone with an incentive to drudge through it. A newsroom provides that incentive, along with legal backup.

Subjects of unpleasant stories often ask “Why are you doing this?”. Without a newsroom, it may well be impossible to answer.