The new news has been impressively executed – but the ratings paint a worrying picture. 

The debut of Stuff’s ThreeNews was a local mass media event with a degree of difficulty we might never see again. Stuff was a business made from the steady accumulation of dozens of print newspapers. While it has become a modern digital news organisation, it remains a place where a large majority of its staff cover the news with the intention of typing it up. To boldly leap into creating a 6pm nightly TV news bulletin was a very audacious move.

Many wondered whether they could pull it off. Yet watching over the last month, it’s clear that the team Stuff had assembled had achieved something borderline miraculous. A comparatively tiny group, composed of largely ex-Newshubbers, supported by some Stuff staffers, have made a bulletin that manages to capture the thrust of the day’s events, locally and internationally, with composure and energy. All at a fraction of Newshub’s scale. 

The TV imports help a lot. Laura Tupou and Sam Hayes show the huge value they bring in gluing the package together, while Newshub field reporters assuredly tackle major events, more often than they might have in a more heavily staffed bureau. The Stuff print journalists have sometimes shone – Glenn McConnell put together an impactful package on the day the abuse in care inquiry’s final report was released. ThreeNews arguably outdid Stuff’s own coverage of that report in the immediate aftermath.

Naturally, it hasn’t been seamless. The first coverage of the (admittedly complex) Darleen Tana saga felt highly convoluted, and a graphic told us Tova O’Brien was in Barcelona when she was in Washington DC. Bulletins initially felt too pacy, overeager to show off Stuff’s scale with an excess of stories. They quickly course corrected though – it has ironed out early kinks and is running smoothly night-to-night.

Losing the Olympics

There is one area where the contrast with TVNZ is glaringly obvious. It’s unfortunate that the Olympics were timed to open within a few short weeks of ThreeNews’ debut. They are a hugely challenging event to cover – running for weeks on the other side of the world in a tough time zone. TVNZ, despite its own budget challenges, has loaded up on the games – they have a dozen staff on the ground, producing the kind of comprehensive coverage a seasoned team at that scale can deliver. 

Stuff, by contrast, has a team of just four filing across the website, TV and audio, and often a single reporter, Imogen Wells, fronting its coverage. Wells co-hosts Stuff’s Gen Z-targeting Newsable podcast, and is an engaging screen presence – but compared to TVNZ’s squad of hardened sports pros, it’s not a fair fight. 

There is likely one very good reason for the thinner crew, and it’s financial. State-owned TVNZ has – despite projecting huge losses – strategically decided to meet the eye-watering costs of comprehensively covering the games, while Stuff, working with a far more modest budget, has elected to do what it can within much more limited means.

It’s illustrative of the wider issue that confronts Stuff as it creates the ThreeNews product, an amplified version of the one familiar to everyone who has ever run Three’s newsroom. TVNZ has much more money and is unafraid to spend it to make a more crafted bulletin. As Adam Hollingworth recounted on his superb two-part history of news on Three for RNZ, its reporters were sometimes hitchhiking, while TVNZ’s were on helicopters. That doesn’t happen today, but a more modest modern version of it endures.

What do viewers make of it all?

TV is unique within media for a number of reasons, most notably that its work is measured in something close to real time by ratings agency Nielsen. Mapping the performance of ThreeNews against 1News in the month since Stuff’s product debuted has been a wild ride.

It was initially a blast of hope. The final, emotional weekdays of Newshub saw it draw a nightly average of 94,000 on linear TV (all figures quoted in this story are for Three’s targeted 25-54 demographic, as 5+ is known to hugely favour TVNZ). A curious audience of over 66,000 stuck around for ThreeNews’ weekend debut, while the first week saw an average 64,900 for ThreeNews – not radically down on the 68,900 who watched Newshub at 6pm in mid-June. ThreeNews was just outside the top 10 shows in that demographic – holding up its job to start the night off strongly for Three.

A spokesperson for Three’s parent company Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) noted, in the arcane language of TV ratings, that “the first 15 days of ThreeNews reached 1,167,800 total viewers 5+, up 4% for the same period last year, versus 1 News down 3%.” 

It seemed to imply that the huge volume of publicity had created a curiosity about the new product. For a moment, it implied a tantalising idea – that shutting Newshub might have had  only a small impact on viewership, and that people were willing to give this experiment a shot. Perhaps they’d try it, like it, and stick around?

Recent weeks have seemed to dash that notion. Ratings have plummeted, most sharply in the 25-54 demographic that has long been Three’s main selling point to advertisers. Figures supplied to The Spinoff by Nielsen, Three and TVNZ reveal a stark picture of a steep decline, and a corresponding rise for TVNZ. 

Most recent data from TVNZ across the last five weekdays showed Three earning 47,400 viewers aged 25-54, versus 147,900 for TVNZ. This implies that Stuff’s 6pm product has dropped over a quarter of its 25-54 viewership in a matter of weeks. It also meant that, from mid-July, ThreeNews had dropped out of the top 20 shows for 25-54 entirely – a catastrophic decline, given the crucial role of news in starting viewership for the rest of primetime.

When contacted, Three’s owners WBD put a brave face on the numbers. “We continue to be happy with the performance of ThreeNews, both from a quality perspective and a ratings perspective,” a spokesperson wrote in a statement. “This was a tricky few weeks to launch in, with variables such as school holidays and major sporting events, but even with these variables the numbers are broadly holding up well.”

Three also provided some figures that showed an uplift in streaming, and some year-on-year comparisons that were not quite so troubling – yet these seemed to take into account that early rush of interest, and not the recent drop-off.

How about Stuff’s view? Nadia Tolich, MD of Stuff Digital, told The Spinoff in a statement that “ThreeNews continues to evolve and we are thrilled that audiences are enjoying the fresh but familiar format, the new audience engagement opportunities and the new story formats we are using.” She also pointed out that Stuff had seen “a significant increase in video engagement on site and associated uptick in advertising revenue from our commercial partners”. That last part is crucial – it was in many ways the whole point of Stuff’s bid to make TV news in the first place.

A spokesperson for TVNZ confirmed that 1News had been the beneficiary of the audience loss. “The four most-watched broadcasts of 1News in 2024 to date have all occurred in the last 17 days,” a spokesperson for TVNZ told The Spinoff. They also noted that the six “highest-reaching” broadcasts – which note the total scale of audience, versus the average – have occurred in the last 17 days.

Where to from here?

No one was anticipating that ThreeNews would match Newshub’s audience. For one thing, TV viewership is in long-established decline, and is shedding audience naturally year over year. Still, all involved will have hoped that any decline associated with the product would occur more gradually, and be in the order of 10% to 15% – not 20,000 in the target demo, within a month. It will be taken as bitter proof by some that TV news is harder than it looks, and that Newshub’s scale was leaner and more necessary than some assumed.

The ratings dive isn’t necessarily for ever – a string of scoops could haul it back, or Olympics fever might pass. TVNZ is by no means out of the financial woods, so further cuts might crimp its ability to overwhelm ThreeNews with resource. It’s also important to note that both ThreeNow and TVNZ+ have had strong years for viewership, with TVNZ noting June as seeing “44 million streams across 1.27 million accounts, [making June] TVNZ+’s biggest month ever, smashing previous records”. 

Still, with the fragmentation of digital audiences and how strongly sales teams remain geared to selling linear, few in advertising and media believe digital audiences will ever regain anything like those on linear. And because 6pm is so crucial to advertising income, it’s inevitable that Three’s revenues will be correspondingly impacted. That hurts Three, obviously, but will ultimately flow downstream to Stuff. 

It’s not full panic stations yet – the Olympics really are an outlier, and will soon pass. ThreeNews will only get better as a product. But these ratings have moved further and faster than many thought possible, and suggest that this unstable era for local television will continue, or even accelerate, through the back half of the year.