spinofflive
Sony
Sony

BusinessMarch 9, 2020

TVNZ and RNZ might soon become siblings. Ireland has some advice

Sony
Sony

The proposed merger of RNZ and TVNZ has one clear international precedent – Irish national broadcaster RTÉ. Michael Andrew asks what New Zealand can learn from the Irish model.

There’s a touch of comedy in the idea of a merger between RNZ and TNVZ, almost as if the two organisations were unfamiliar step siblings forced to share the same bedroom.

On one bunk will lie RNZ, our national radio broadcaster; a state funded organisation that markets itself – sometimes controversially – on its ad-free public service content. And on the other bunk you’ll have TVNZ, our kind of public-but-not-really TV broadcaster, which earns most of its $310m yearly revenue from commercial advertising and has a history of bucking government attempts to saddle it with public service responsibilities.

With a different audience, different content and most probably different pay scales, it’s difficult to see the two playing nice together. Yet the struggle is real, and the merger has been deemed essential to preserve New Zealand’s private and public media and throw an advertising bone to TVNZ’s struggling commercial competitors.

As of this week, the government’s strategy for the merger remains behind locked doors – even leading media academics have no idea what’s going on. PWC has been hired to oversee a business plan, but at this stage the government’s vision – and how it intends to see it through – remains a mystery.

Because the merger is uncharted territory and the melding of commercial and public media interests is such a paradox, it has been frequently compared with other mixed-funding public service broadcasters abroad to help understand the challenges and benefits that lie ahead. Ireland’s national public broadcaster RTÉ is consistently cited as a case study.

With roots going back to 1926, Raidió Teilifís Éireann is one of oldest broadcasters in the world and serves a country of an almost identical population to New Zealand. It provides a suite of television channels and radio stations, which collectively make it the most popular media outlet by market share in the country. What makes RTÉ especially relevant to New Zealand, however, is that it’s a hybrid – funded roughly equally from advertising revenue and public sources.

How RTÉ is funded

Throughout most of its 94-year history, RTÉ has relied mostly on broadcasting licence fees, which were traditionally added to the cost of a radio set. Because most households had a radio, RTÉ was funded directly by its listeners. In recent years the fee has been applied to televisions, but there has been talk of changing this yet again, as more people shift to consuming media on their phones and thereby avoid paying their fees.

Then there’s advertising revenue, which has formed an increasing share of RTÉ’s funding since the 1980s, reaching a peak in 2007. Despite its age and legacy, however, the broadcaster is not immune to the global pressure on media wrought by the likes of Facebook and Google, and advertising revenue has dropped considerably in the past decade. RTÉ reported €150m (NZD$246m) commercial revenues in 2018, a 39% decrease from 2008. The broadcaster itself has admitted it is in the grips of a cash crisis and has started cutting jobs, selling real estate and valuable artwork – including a William Scott piece for €220,000 – to raise more revenue. Increasingly, it is looking for more efficient ways to capture funding from a more elusive public to balance the books.

RTÉ’s statement when it sold its artwork.

According to Roderick Flynn, a lecturer in communications at Dublin City University, although RTÉ is a traditional public broadcaster, it has evolved to be largely commercial in both market engagement and internal culture, very similarly to TVNZ. Naturally, this can influence the content the broadcaster chooses to run, especially on the main television channel RTÉ 1, which often features programmes that entertain, rather than educate or inform.

“RTÉ has an eye to the commercial market that a fully funded public broadcaster would not, or might not have,” he says.

“We have a show called Dancing with the Stars. It’s really hard to see how you would say, ‘there you have public service broadcasting at its finest.’ It’s populist. And it’s harmless in a sense until you think the space that it’s occupying could be used for something else, maybe something a bit more public service orientated.”

On the radio arm, RTÉ’s Radio 1 is the most listened-to station in the country and features a mainly talk-based service similar to RNZ National. 2FM, RTÉ’s pop station, is a useful case study for RNZ which last month announced controversial plans to establish a youth station to attract more young listeners. While the 40-year-old 2FM also has difficulty attracting younger listeners, Flynn says RTÉ doesn’t seem interested in adapting the station or creating a new one in an already saturated youth radio market, but would rather focus on digital to reach a diverse audience.

The public’s broadcaster

While RTÉ operates in similar ways to a commercial enterprise, what differentiates it is that it is still thought of as the national public broadcaster by the people of Ireland.

“It’s still seen as the channel of record, and it invests a lot more into news and current affairs which commercial channels aren’t in a position to do. It has evaded the perception that it is the state broadcaster or the mouthpiece of the state,” says Flynn.

The RTÉ 1 news studio

According to Massey University media studies lecturer Sean Phelan, who is Irish, RTÉ’s privileged position in the media landscape is thanks to the broadcasting licence fee, which has given people a sense of ownership over their public broadcaster. This could be the biggest obstacle for an equivalent New Zealand model, which doesn’t and probably won’t ever have any such mechanism in place to connect the funders – the New Zealand public – with the end product, the broadcaster.

“The politics of how the public identifies with the public service broadcaster is crucial… and I think that’s probably the huge challenge with New Zealand,” says Phelan.

While RNZ is funded by the crown via New Zealand On Air, there is no specific public tax or levy, something that if applied could bolster a crucial sense of ownership between the public and their broadcaster. TVNZ once had a broadcasting licence free, but it was scrapped in 1999 when the National-led coalition moved to privatise the company and it has since relied on heavy TV advertising. According to Phelan, the frequency of the advertisements on RTÉ is another key difference with TVNZ in its current commercial form, something that may need to change for the merger with ad-free RNZ to be successful.

“One of the reasons that [RTÉ’s advertisements] are not a problem compared to the norms of let’s say TVNZ is you don’t have as many damn advertising breaks on RTÉ as you have in New Zealand. My sense is they don’t impose themselves into the broadcasting space that’s perhaps the norm at TVNZ.”

TVNZ CEO Kevin Kenrick received a $120,000 pay rise in 2019, taking his annual salary to $1.55 million (photo supplied)

Commercial culture

A similar parallel between the commercial nature of the two organisations is also the high – and often criticised – salaries of the broadcasters, with some RTÉ salaries over NZD$800,000. Similar complaints have been levied at the pay culture of TVNZ, which could taint the merger with RNZ should there be a systemic gap in average pay between the two operations.

Peter Thompson, senior lecturer in media studies at Victoria University, agrees that this could be a major impediment to the success of the New Zealand model.

“I suspect there might be a culture clash between the people in radio who get paid significant less – partly because it’s public service broadcasting – and the salaries that still reflect I think the heyday of commercial TV and the idea that we’re all in showbiz.

“This is where the rubber hits the road – you can’t just sack everyone at TVNZ and invite them back at a lower salary, that will go down like lead balloon. But on the other hand you probably can’t say to the people in radio ‘great you’re all getting double salary next year’. Dealing with the anomalous premium that has been attached to TV sector salaries for the last few decades is going to become a public policy issue.”

One of many, it seems. Thompson says that in order to merge RNZ and TVNZ into a functional and sustainable public service broadcaster, the government will need to spend an enormous amount of money to push TVNZ away from commercial reliance and toward a public service remit. This, he says, is one of the biggest obstacles to achieving a model similar to RTÉ.

“First of all, RTÉ is more established as a hybrid operator – but it’s the commercial side that is deteriorating and that creates pressure for increased support on the public side. If you’re looking at RTÉ as a model you’re going to need to find $150m to start getting [TVNZ] up to the level of funding that RTÉ receives from public sources.”

So far the government has made no such commitments, or any for that matter, with details of the business case concealed within the ranks of PWC.

“I don’t know what the government’s thinking because they haven’t told anyone. Quite frankly it’s been one of the closely guarded secrets in broadcasting policy I’ve ever encountered in 20 years of doing research. They’ve played it incredibly close to the chest,” Thompson says.

Whenever the plan is revealed, Thompson says it’s essential for the government to configure both the funding and the structure simultaneously, in order to have a chance at establishing an entity that can provide a sustained and authentic public service.

“We will see, but it will be rather ironic if come the PWC report the next thing the government says is ‘OK well this looks like a plan, where are we going to get the money?’”

While that could certainly be possible, until the plans are public the New Zealand media will continue to wonder about the cost and structure of the new merger, if it will be similar to RTÉ or a new model entirely – and which company, RNZ or TVNZ, will get the top bunk.

Keep going!
Getty Images
Getty Images

OPINIONBusinessMarch 8, 2020

The niceness trap: Navigating the ‘rules’ for women leaders in the workplace

Getty Images
Getty Images

Female leaders have historically been forced to tread lightly in order to succeed in male-dominated industries. But as IT executive Hilary Walton writes, women don’t need to change – the system does.

Imagine for a minute you’re a female manager. You overexert yourself to be nice and likeable at work while still trying to balance all the other traits we expect of a leader, like being decisive and confident. Suddenly, you’re being framed for “mothering” a group because you’re either too nurturing or too assertive. Or instead, you decide to be honest and vulnerable and open yourself to abuse. We need only look to the #MeToo Movement to see documented examples of the devastating outcomes women face when they don’t feel they can assert their right to safety and respect at work.

As one of the few female leaders in New Zealand’s male-dominated IT industry, I’ve experienced first-hand the tightrope female leaders walk. I can recall a specific time in a previous role where I was the project lead and running a meeting with a group of men. The conversation got unruly, combative, and at times downright unprofessional. My harmonising approach to keep everyone on track wasn’t working. I played the likeability card and came up short on authority. So I changed tact and increased assertiveness, causing the meeting to end unproductively. It took management intervention for things to move forward. So how should female leaders behave? Well, it’s complicated.

Four years ago, European researchers conducting a study of a group of software development engineers made a discovery. Colleagues of the engineers’ evaluated them on competence and warmth – two universally accepted dimensions of how we judge others. The research was conducted on the hypothesis that people who are influential are more likely to be promoted to leadership roles and it looked at what traits in both men and woman contribute to their professional influence.

The study showed female engineers had to be likeable and warm along with competent in order to be influential at work. Men were seen as confident and influential whether they were warm or not. In other words, male leaders can be cold in the workplace but provided they perform well at their job they will be respected. Yet a woman’s professional achievement is evaluated along with with how “nice” she is.

The data also supported something many women intuitively already know. Women in the workplace find themselves in the “double-bind dilemma” where the traits we commonly associate with leadership – assertiveness, strength, control – aren’t seen as “nice girl” attributes. In other words, female leaders are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

Some men struggle to deal with the notion of sexual harassment in the workplace in a confident and practical matter. They either ignore the issue or go out of their way to avoid women lest they trip up and act inappropriately. I recall one male mentor early in my career who took me on as a mentee but would only meet with me one-to-one during the day and for coffee only – a rule he brought in for all his female mentees. What a relief it was when my current manager at Kordia happily had dinner with me on a recent overseas business trip. He treated me no differently than a male colleague, and I thought, this is great!

Getty Images

New culture

For woman, the phrase “you catch more bees with honey then you do with vinegar” is universal. But what if rather than asking women to modify their behaviour to suit others, we implement a new management culture that favours both men and women? Can we teach more men that it’s okay to not know the answer every time, to be appreciative of others and to show more kindness in the workplace while assuring them that they won’t lose credibility as leaders?

Being liked at work shouldn’t be something just women have to strive for; it should be part of all organisations’ leadership cultures, in my opinion. If your leadership style is to rule by fear it will lead to conformity, causing creativity and ingenuity to suffer. You’re not going to get new thinking from fear. What’s wrong with being likeable? Whether you like it or not, warmth matters; in politics and business and in our personal and professional relationships. It also matters on social media, a medium that exposes and amplifies existing cultural norms.

There’s much written about the lack of women in the IT sector. In New Zealand a mere 20% of women make up the total workforce, and that number thins out further at management level. Unless women are intentionally included, they will be unintentionally excluded.

Combating bias

So what does this mean for men sitting in leadership positions? As a registered psychologist, I can confirm the tried and true way to combat bias and heuristics is to understand them, be aware of how they might affect performance, consciously bring them into the conversation, and put in place measures to avoid or reduce the chances of them occurring.

Something as simple as building diversity into the recruitment process to check biases aren’t at play can make a big difference. It’s important to have diverse selection panels to avoid a situation where male participants make all the decisions. One common psychological heuristic is that we tend to be attracted to those that are like ourselves. So for example, unless an all-male interview panel takes active measures to prevent biases, they have an increased chance of progressing a male applicant over a female as they “see themselves” in the male applicant. For women like me who are in management level roles in male-dominated sectors like tech and security, I can vouch first-hand how intimidating it can be to sit in front of a male interview panel even without the compounding fear of unconscious bias.

It’s important for all business leaders to actively review the language or intent of policies to ensure there are no more negative outcomes for one group or gender over another. I have battled on behalf of others with previous employers who had poor policies for diversity and inclusion for women returning to work after maternity leave, and while I have some scars from those encounters, I’ve been able to find a fair and reasonable way forward for both parties.

Maintaining your voice

For women, as difficult as it may be, it’s important to maintain your voice. While Kordia is very supportive, I am commonly the only female sitting around the table in meetings – be that workplace operations, leadership or board meetings. I kindly and respectfully advocate for others to understand the value of different points of view in recruitment processes, work on increasing gender friendly language in the workplace, and champion discussions on other diversity and inclusion related topics. I am careful to maintain my diverse voice in those circumstances to help those teams and groups reach better outcomes.

It can be tempting to be like others in your group to seem more “likeable” and to fit in. But what use am I as the diverse voice if I don’t bring it, if I dilute it and start sounding too much like others at the table?

But wait there's more!