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Stuff boss Sinead Boucher has been a longtime critic of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook
Stuff boss Sinead Boucher has been a longtime critic of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook

MediaJuly 6, 2020

NZ news giant Stuff quits Facebook ‘until further notice’ – leaked internal memo

Stuff boss Sinead Boucher has been a longtime critic of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook
Stuff boss Sinead Boucher has been a longtime critic of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook

The biggest news site in New Zealand, and the country’s fifth biggest site overall, Stuff has embarked on an experiment in dropping the use of Facebook and Instagram. It has been launched ‘in the context of the international Boycott Facebook movement’, according to a memo leaked to The Spinoff.  

A leaked internal communication from Stuff’s deputy editor shows the country’s largest news organisation launching an extraordinary challenge to the biggest social media platform in the world. In “ceasing all activity” on Facebook and its partner networks, the site’s reproach is likely to make waves around the world.

“Effective immediately, Stuff is trialling ceasing all activity on Facebook-owned networks. This experiment applies to all Facebook pages, groups and Instagram accounts across our entire group,” announces the email.

The decision had been taken for ethical reasons, the memo explained, with global controversy swelling over the platform leading to advertisers choosing to boycott the platform.

“We stopped advertising on Facebook soon after the Christchurch mosque attacks in Christchurch, as we did not want to contribute financially to a platform that profits of publishing hate speech and violence. The current experiment is in the context of the international Boycott Facebook movement, and applies until further notice.”

A range of major international companies have made similar moves, including Coca-Cola, Unilever, Ford, Adidas and Starbucks. Sporadic boycotts have taken place in the past, and the latest round appears to be related to a refusal from Facebook to fact-check posts by US president Donald Trump, who has frequently been accused of using the platform to incite division and violence.

Several days ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told staff that the company had no plans to change policies, and that the advertisers would come crawling back “soon enough”, according to a report on tech site The Intelligence. While a huge share of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising, Zuckerberg also characterised the issue as a “reputational and a partner issue”, rather than an economic threat.

For Stuff, the experiment will almost inevitably cause a decline in website traffic. While the exact proportion of the site’s traffic that comes from Facebook-owned platforms is not known, according to a report from SimilarWeb, 10% of Stuff’s traffic comes from social platforms. A Stuff employee (not the original leaker) later sent through documentation that suggested the actual proportion of traffic from social is slightly lower.

Stuff has about 900,000 likes on Facebook on its main page, along with a range of other more specialised pages and groups. It also has 134,000 Instagram followers, which is generally understood as a less important platform for driving website traffic than Facebook.

The email to Stuff staff is understood to have been sent this morning. The last post on Stuff’s Facebook page was made at about 7.00am, and since then there has been nothing. This in itself is unusual for news sites, which generally heavily use the window between 7-9am to get stories in front of readers.

Stuff has recently come back into New Zealand ownership, with chief executive Sinead Boucher buying the company for $1 from previous owners Nine in Australia. That purchase also involved fending off a buyout attempt from local rival NZME, which publishes the NZ Herald.

It is the largest single employer of journalists in the country, with newsrooms in all major cities, and dozens of individual newspapers in the stable.

During the recent hearings of the Epidemic Response Committee, Boucher told MPs that Covid-19 had hit advertising spending for Stuff properties hard, with revenue halving between early March to mid-April. That also came at a time when interest in news and the need for accurate information spiked.

She told the committee that it was “the news media that is devoting its resources through its journalism to exposing those lies and debunking the myths, and presenting accurate and balanced coverage people can trust,” in contrast to social media platforms that are funded by a range of organisations, including the government.

In a statement, Stuff editor-in-chief Patrick Crewdson echoed this sentiment, saying public trust was going to be the “key measure of success” in the future.

“We’ve all seen examples of social ills on Facebook that aren’t compatible with trust – for instance the spreading of fake news and hate speech. Stuff itself is frequently frustrated by other sites posing as our website on Facebook.”

Stuff is also unusual in the world in that it is a news website that is also among the most highly visited sites in the country in which it is based, at fifth in the country, behind Google, Youtube, Facebook and TradeMe.

Generally even major news sites are further down those rankings – for example in Australia, the highest-ranked news site is 12th overall in the country.

Facebook has been approached for further comment, and this story will be updated with responses.

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A selection of local Woman’s Day covers from over the years
A selection of local Woman’s Day covers from over the years

MediaJuly 4, 2020

The fight to tell New Zealand stories in New Zealand magazines

A selection of local Woman’s Day covers from over the years
A selection of local Woman’s Day covers from over the years

With the collapse of Bauer NZ resulting in Australian magazines flooding our shelves, Wendyl Nissen looks back at her battle to get homegrown content given the star billing it deserved.

Thanks to some hard-fought battles 30 years ago, New Zealand women have been enjoying their own version of Woman’s Day and Australian Women’s Weekly (AWW) magazines for decades.

But that is all over now. They didn’t tell their readers but since they closed their New Zealand operations, Bauer has quietly been sending the all-Australian editions of those two magazines to sit at the end of the checkouts and – hopefully – keep being the nice little earners that our New Zealand editors had made them into. Woman’s Day and AWW were the biggest-selling magazines in the country.

“Ordinary people doing extraordinary things and extraordinary people doing ordinary things.” So went the mantra according to Nene King, queen of women’s magazines in Australia in the early 1990s, as a guide for suitable editorial content for women’s magazines. 

As editor of Australia’s top-selling magazine Woman’s Day, she knew what women wanted to read. Australian women, that is. Every week she served them up a delicate balance of celebrity, royals, real-life reads and news stories and sold over a million copies a week. 

In the late 80s, Australian Consolidated Press, the owner of Woman’s Day and employer of Nene King, cast its eye across the Tasman to New Zealand. What if its put its top-selling magazines into the New Zealand market but earned more dollars by selling New Zealand advertising in their pages?

And so New Zealand women were introduced to specially printed New Zealand editions of Woman’s Day and AWW, featuring highly lucrative New Zealand advertising but not a centimetre of New Zealand editorial. 

In return for their purchase, New Zealand women got to read about Australian people being ordinary and extraordinary. 

Wendyl Nissen’s editor’s picture from her early days at Woman’s Day, and a 1993 newspaper clipping announcing her new job (Photos: Supplied)

In 1993 I was offered the job of editor of Woman’s Day magazine, which had recently enjoyed the rather extravagant addition of a New Zealand editor and some editorial staff. The idea being that perhaps a few New Zealand stories might help to win the circulation war against the long-standing “over the teacups” favourite, the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, and therefore enable Woman’s Day NZ  to sell even more advertising.  

The previous editor, Gill Chalmers, bought Paul Holmes’ wedding story when he married Hinemoa Elder and the magazine’s circulation went through the roof. To this day I believe it was the best-selling edition of the magazine in New Zealand, selling about 230,000 copies. It turned out New Zealand women loved to read a good wedding story about one of their own.

Chalmers was Australian and very much felt the magazine didn’t want to get too carried away with running New Zealand content. 

As her deputy I rallied against this. I spent a lot of time explaining to her and my bosses across the Tasman that New Zealand had a very different culture to Australia. For a start we had our own soap stars, some of whom were Māori, Pacific Island and Asian. We had our own newsreaders, our own crime stories, our own victims triumphing over adversity. 

At the time, NZ On Air had just launched with the intention of helping television and radio to “tell our stories”. It was time that we, as a country, celebrated our own culture and reflected our own lives in what we watched and listened to, rather than soak up a diet of American, British and Australian television, which was more commercially viable for the networks. So NZ On Air gave the networks money to make documentaries and series reflecting our diverse culture. 

I felt strongly that we should also do this in what we read, especially with a magazine that was selling nearly 200,000 copies a week.

When I was offered the job of editor, I saw my chance to make a change. In my magazine memoir Bitch and Famous, I wrote this:

“I felt that there was some ill-feeling from readers and the industry that we were still writing about Aussie soap stars we had never heard of instead of pulling those stories and replacing them with our own soap stars, which we were well able to do now that Shortland Street had started. So I proved that we could do more, without it costing too much, and petitioned for a bigger percentage of the magazine’s upfront editorial content to go local. They agreed, and I accepted the job.”

Under my editorship, the magazine went full noise on New Zealand content. We were really very busy and the magazine rose to its biggest ever circulation of 220,000 a week. The advertisers, well, they just loved the environment. I remember stamping my feet when there were so many ads that we had little room for stories. Seems incredible now.

Across the Tasman, brown faces never made the cover and were rarely seen inside the mags. Brown did not go in Woman’s Day. Ever. Gay people? Are you kidding?

For the past nine years, Woman’s Day editor Sido Kitchin has continued the local content drive to the point that at the time of the magazine’s demise on April 2, when Bauer closed its doors, it was taking only 25% of Australian content – which was mainly middle-of-the-book stuff like recipes, puzzles, horoscopes and health. Kitchin had also put the Topp Twins and Anika Moa and Natasha Utting’s wedding on covers and kept the magazine diverse. And, as it was 30 years ago, it was still a cash cow for Bauer magazines, raking in the dollars. When the AWW New Zealand edition closed, it was taking about 60% content from Australia. 

Today we are back where it all began 30 years ago, with Woman’s Day and AWW being dumped into our market with not one piece of New Zealand editorial. AWW still puts the words “New Zealand edition” on its cover and Woman’s Day has a line in a tiny font near the spine on page three, which advises that “all prices and values are in Australian dollars. Please confirm prices with local retailers”. I doubt whether the new owners of these two magazines will be too fussed about telling our stories.

So who will? We are yet to see whether those other fine storytellers, the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, the Listener, North and South and Metro, will be revived.

Increasingly, funding for online newspapers has been coming from government sources such as Creative New Zealand, the Copyright Licensing Fund and NZ on Air, as well as universities. Our government doesn’t seem to really “get” magazines, first classing them as non-essential during lockdown, stopping all sales,  and then not inviting one magazine representative to the Epidemic Response Committee, which resulted in a $50 million fund for media, too late to save Bauer magazines.  

The time has come for NZ On Air, which has a mandate to “ensure New Zealanders can experience public media that is authentically New Zealand”, to have a side arm: NZ In Print. It could use some of the $149 million it gets annually to launch a Listener or a Woman’s Weekly or both and fight off the Australian imports we are unknowingly supporting. There are a few good editors, like Sido Kitchin, out there ready to take on the challenge, who would probably turn a profit while they are at it. That’s a great return on investment. 

Disclosure: Rather naively, after the closures in April I contacted the Australian editor of AWW, Nicole Byers, and offered my services to provide New Zealand content for their New Zealand editions. I had lost all my work when Bauer closed and it seemed like a good idea at the time. She said she’d “keep me in mind”, which was nice.  

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