Stuff-Me is dead, with the merger between media companies Stuff and NZME once again denied by the courts. A different combination now looms large as a possibility, but would it work? 

At a certain point, you probably have to accept that they’ll never let you be together. That’s the harsh lesson for Stuff and NZME, who have now had their merger rejected by the Court of Appeal, the High Court, and the Commerce Commission. NZME says they’re going to continue to look at their options, but surely it’s all over now.

The reason given is the same as it has been the last few times – the potential loss of media diversity. Between them, a merged entity would have owned pretty much the entire newspaper market (barring a few small exceptions like the Otago Daily Times and Greymouth Star) about half the commercial radio market, and the two websites that utterly dominate the online market. It would have also owned a range of other products like Neighbourly, One Roof and Yudu, but that’s unlikely to have factored into the decision, which was made on the grounds that it would concentrate too much editorial power in one place.

The merger was floated in the first place because media companies are finding it more and more difficult to make ends meet, and the companies wanted the scale to compete in the advertising market with the likes of Google and Facebook. Even this country’s biggest players are but a blip compared to those global giants. And in the intervening time between the merger first being proposed and the latest rejection, none of those problems have got any better for Stuff or NZME. In fact, they’ve inarguably gotten worse.

Stuff is now basically a speck on the shoe of its owners. When owner Fairfax merged with Channel Nine in Australia, Stuff wasn’t even mentioned in the initial announcement. The Australians say Stuff is a “free agent” in New Zealand, and they’ve been forthright about wanting it to find a dance partner, and soon, as well as recently slashing the value of the assets. As for NZME, they’re currently working towards the introduction of a paywall for their premium journalism content, and recently reported their own EBIDTA results as merely “solid” – not exactly cause for panic, but a long way away from when classifieds gave newspapers a license to print money. A good recent radio survey result – one of the traditional breadwinners of the business – will give hope that there is room to move.

So under the fairly safe assumption that Stuff-Me is now off the table, what other options are out there for the two suitors? One in particular gets talked about with the most seriousness – a merger between Stuff and Mediaworks. That would see Stuff’s massive website and rapidly diminishing collection of newspapers combined with the TV channel Three, a network of very successful music radio stations and a not particularly successful talk radio station, and the overall Newshub TV and online brand.

One thing that people get fixated on when it comes to media mergers is news. And the reasons why are obvious – the sorts of people who talk about media mergers are probably also interested in news, and believe that news is important for society, and so on. But strictly speaking, news is generally a subset of the operations of media companies, and an expensive one at that. Media companies are in the business of content. And between the two of them, the content operations of Stuff and Mediaworks would be mutually very attractive.

Mediaworks have been incredibly effective at wringing more content out of their personalities, whether they are radio hosts and TV presenters, reality TV contestants, and even their journalists. Newshub tends to get a lot of value out of people like Lloyd Burr, Tova O’Brien and Patrick Gower. Shows like The Block and Dancing with the Stars are often ratings behemoths, and they’ve got a huge stable of talent to call on for shows like Jono and Ben, The Project, and 7 Days. Being multi-platform, they can create a media ecosystem that holds the attention of audiences throughout the day. The absurd ‘Newshub Challenge‘ aside, a lot of New Zealanders actually do just that. Imagine the impact that having ready access to the largest click-for-click website in the country would have on the commercial value of their entertainment content.

Would news diversity be affected by that too though? Such a merged entity would instantly become the most powerful news organisation in the country (provided there weren’t large scale layoffs) but it wouldn’t have a monopoly in any particular medium. Newshub at 6 and The Project still tend to rate considerably collectively lower than 1 News and Seven Sharp, (though The Project wins a few nights each week) RadioLive lags heavily behind Newstalk ZB, and while Stuff is the country’s biggest website, the NZ Herald, TVNZ, and Radio NZ would still be competitive (along with plucky upstarts like your old mates at The Spinoff.)

Regardless though, cuts in the newsroom are almost certainly now coming across many, and perhaps all commercial media companies. It has already begun in the sports department at the NZ Herald, with staff being told they’ll need to reapply for a smaller number of jobs. Both Stuff and NZME have also recently been making quality hires, with the Herald picking up Chris Keall and Duncan Bridgeman from the NBR, while Stuff have hired aggressively from across the industry all year. But that’s almost certainly not sustainable if costs need to be cut. The two companies have been operating on the assumption that the merger won’t go ahead, and they’ll need to keep fighting the eternal war for eyeballs. Now that has been all but confirmed, new alliances will need to be forged.

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Media bias, collective guilt for Nazi atrocities and being on the wrong side of history: It was a pretty heavy Sunday night on Radio Sport.

“Look, a lot of us want to say that we would’ve been definitely anti-Nazi during Nazi Germany, but statistics will tell you that 90% of us would’ve gone along with it. Because you just go along with it for all sorts of reasons. For most people to say, oh I totally would’ve been in the minority that was completely against it and fought against it, statistically, nah.”

That’s a sample quote in a remarkable seven minutes of radio from the most unlikely of places. It was a conversation that ranged over deep questions about political change, society and media, conducted by two blokes who sounded like they had stumbled into each other in the smoking area at the pub.

Radio Sport has long been seen – sometimes unfairly, sometimes not – as a bastion of the pale, male and stale stereotype of sporting culture in New Zealand, and the conversation started off on a vaguely sporting topic. Hosts Andrew Clay and Beaven Dewar were filling the Sunday evening hours between commentaries and highlights on Radio Sport by taking calls on the way things used to be, but after eight o’clock not a lot of calls were coming in. So they riffed, and one of the things that was better, according to Clay, were the protests – especially the Springbok Tour ones.

“And they were fair protests too,” a shouting Dewar interjected, before both hosts agreed that a “mad keen, like, mental keen on rugby” guy like him would have “probably been on the wrong side of history.”

“As a country we bask in the fact that eventually we did the right thing,” elaborated Clay, on stopping sporting contact with apartheid South Africa. “But I tell you what, people like John Minto were hated in this country. There was no grey area, it was this country like you’ve never seen it before.”

“I guess when you look at it now, if there’s any social injustice movement now, that you might go, look at these weirdo hippies, blah blah blah all the rest of it, have a look. Those people you might think are a bit fringy, because they’ve got dreadlocks or whatever, are they going to be on the right side of history as well?”

At this point Dewar admitted that they had strayed a long way from sports chat, but they were too far gone and there wasn’t a lot more time to fill, so why not talk about whether the media had become too left leaning? It had, said Dewar, arguing both out of an amorphous feeling that the TV news was unbalanced, and the rather more quantifiable idea that the vast majority of young journalists coming into the industry didn’t share the views of the likes of Mike Hosking and Leighton Smith, who broadcast on Radio Sport’s sister station Newstalk ZB. That kept the hosts more than occupied until the ads.

Remember, Radio Sport is a station that two years ago had what long-time listener Hayden Donnell described as “the worst 10 minutes of radio” – the so-called Controversy Corner which managed to crack the big three of sexism, racism and homophobia all in one dramatic burst.

So is this all a sign that the editorial direction of Radio Sport is changing? Probably not. One thing that isn’t widely or well understood about talk radio stations is that there isn’t really a party line that broadcasters are meant to follow – there are just people with opinions who get put in front of microphones. Their opinions are their own, rather than being the result of managerial directives.

But it is potentially a reflection of the sweeping cultural changes taking place in the sporting world. Sporting organisations now run campaigns to stamp out scourges like sideline racism, and athletes are increasingly using their platforms to advocate for progressive politics. American footballers and basketballers are protesting police racism, the All Blacks have thrown their weight behind pro-diversity and LGBT efforts, and women’s sport has never been more prominent. Incidentally, Radio Sport’s news team have long taken women’s sport seriously, even if the presenting lineup has pretty much always been a boy’s club.

After wrestling with some of the thorniest issues currently facing the world, normal service resumed, and the hosts threw to highlights, followed by a long-form interview with Barbara Kendall from the archives. But for a few brief, thrilling minutes, listeners were treated to the anarchic freedom of discussion that only live radio can really unleash. When there is nothing but a blank board of calls and time to fill, good broadcasters are able to draw deep from the well of the human experience to bring out something, anything, interesting to talk about, and it can get pretty real. Like dancers with nobody watching, Dewar and Clay broadcast like nobody was listening. Who said sport and politics shouldn’t mix?

The Bulletin is The Spinoff’s acclaimed, free daily curated digest of all the most important stories from around New Zealand delivered directly to your inbox each morning.