Bulletins and beloved current affairs programmes fell like flies in an agonising year for screen journalism.

You don’t know what you don’t know. The great vanishing of news and current affairs from New Zealand television is a tragedy not simply, or even principally, because of the many hours of compelling viewing that are no longer. They leave in their wake also a parade of voices unheard, stones unturned, things unknown. 

Thankfully many of our best journalists have found new homes in the wider news media that survives. Most haven’t, though, and who can say what stories they won’t now tell, whether that be a political scandal or an insight into a corner of Aotearoa rarely seen?

Television was far from alone in being affected: we lost community newspapers, magazines distressed, digital outlets, ourselves included, were forced to pare back. But the deepest cuts were in the world of screen. And so, in the spirit of celebrating what they produced and mourning what might have been, this is the television journalism we lost in 2024.

Newshub at 6pm 

The hammer fell in February. Thirty five years after the news landscape in New Zealand was changed forever with the launch of TV3, built around the nucleus of an innovative, puckish, sometimes punkish news operation, it was done. Warner Brothers Discovery, owners of the channel these days called Three, couldn’t make the numbers work and was shutting it all down. 

This was a disaster – for employees, for audiences, for the plurality of coverage intrinsic to a functioning liberal democracy. In one blow, the number of journalists and the volume of journalism was slashed. There was a reprieve of sorts: the news at 6pm continued, produced by Stuff under contract. They could only take on a minor slice of the Newshub team but, against the odds, that small team has performed wonders to deliver a quality bulletin, developing talent and keeping both politicians and the TVNZ newsroom on their toes. Who knows what next year could hold – a shorter nightly bulletin with a studio interview as the final act of the hour, at once filling a gap and carving out a real point of difference with 1News?

(One more thing: in recent days a very, very welcome announcement – the archive of those 35 years of news and current affairs will be taken into the care of the saintly archivists at Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision.)

Te Ao Māori News

The other bookmark for the infernal, emaciating 2024 arrived just last week, with news that the Te Ao Māori News 4.30pm bulletin is coming to an end, after a two decade run dating back to the founding of Māori Television, now Whakaata Māori. It’s reported that 27 jobs will go.

Liam Ratana lays out the context, and what next for the channel, here. 

Sunday

Agenda-setting, probing, meticulous, and almost invariably spellbinding: Sunday was the cream of the investigative journalism crop. Its end in the middle of 2024 marked the disappearance of the form from primetime TV. The stories – so many stories!

Fair Go

Just a few years shy of its 50th birthday, that bastion of New Zealand consumer journalism, that wellspring of so much talent, that scourge of bullshit artists and rip-off merchants everywhere met its maker. The scoundrels of Aotearoa have slept sounder since.

Newshub and TVNZ daytime bulletins

In the distant mists of time, by which I mean earlier this year, there were news bulletins during the day and in the later evenings on remote buttons 1 and 3. Now all we have is 6pm (and, hanging in there, TVNZ Breakfast with cornflakes, thankfully). 

Prime News First at 5.30

It had changed its name to Sky Open by the end, but whatever. Yes, this was in large part a re (pre?) packaged version of the 6pm bulletin, but it had the mana and tender assurance of Eric Young so it was something very special. Reportedly Eric Young is off having a lovely time with his family now, but that won’t do for the rest of us. Bring back Eric Young and bring back Eric Young now. 

AM Show

Chlöe Swarbrick and David Seymour would get stuck in on a Monday morning and the breakfast show would keep fizzing through the week. Like so much on the channel across the years they were always trying something new, having a go. 

The unnamed Three 7pm show

Ryan Bridge had spent months preparing for a new, unnamed nightly current affairs show – it never materialised, getting cancelled in the Newshub obliteration before it had begun. Fortunately Bridge, a superb broadcaster, has been scooped up by Newstalk ZB, but there is still a sense of loss for what might have been.

Newshub Nation 

A groaning hole has opened up in the Saturday mornings of political tragics. The loss of Newshub Nation, a decades long institution in various guises, got too little attention, such was the flurry of decimation around it. We’re much poorer for the lack of it, though – fewer politicians being grilled, fewer investigations launched, and an absence of a competitive prod for the good people across at Q+A. Much missed.