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Image: Getty; Additional design: The Spinoff
Image: Getty; Additional design: The Spinoff

MediaNovember 28, 2022

Notes from the TV industry’s most dramatic week of the year

Image: Getty; Additional design: The Spinoff
Image: Getty; Additional design: The Spinoff

Duncan Greive spends 24 hours in the TV world as it stares down the most epochal changes in its history.

It doesn’t make any sense. Why would you schedule your biggest party of the year right before your biggest conference of the year? But that’s what the TV world did. Its annual awards night came on November 24, just before Spada got everyone together to have a big think.

The awards were fun for half the room – everyone duly got dressed up, turned out and watched TVNZ absolutely dominate. The night was expertly MCed by Kura Forrester, whose jokes had just the right amount of edge. It had a La La Land / Moonlight moment, when Newsroom and Q+A both thought they’d won, providing the unintentional highlight of the night. And The Panthers took home over 20% of the awards, in so doing showing an industry which is starting to look and feel very different, in a beautiful, hopeful way.

Then the next morning, a decent chunk of the crowd, nursing varying hangovers, dragged themselves out to Spada’s annual conference. Spada is the organisation which represents producers and screen development in Aotearoa – the people who make the vast bulk of the local shows on TV and streaming – and the conference was hotly anticipated within the industry. That’s because it is in a moment of unprecedented flux. After a decade of audience migration to digital platforms, with broadcasters, revenue and funders lagging behind, the whole system is being redesigned.

The government is merging TVNZ and RNZ into ANZPM, or “Anz-Pam”, as it is known within the organisations now. It’s also gifting ANZPM well over $100m a year in new money with an explicit mandate to make public media content that serves audiences (like tamariki, rangatahi, Māori, Pacific, Pan-Asian and migrant communities) it does not currently reach well, versus those (like older Pākehā) that it does. At the same time, the same government is chopping out a huge chunk of NZ on Air’s budget. NZ on Air is New Zealand’s decentralised public broadcaster, a strange unicorn which exists only here, but has served New Zealand pretty well for over 30 years.

On stage at Spada the TV sector gathered to hear NZ on Air explain how it would change to reflect its chastened circumstances, and later have TVNZ and RNZ talk through the state of the merger, and how it would impact the production community. It was a hectic and fascinating 24 hour bloc, in the exact opposite order you’d expect it to unfold. I went along to both events – here are 10 things that leapt out.

The merger hangs over everything

As NZ on Air chief executive Cam Harland said at the start of its presentation, “all of these assumptions are based on ANZPM being up and running”. The merger is a seismic event, turning the production sector’s focus from NZ on Air and its $100m-ish budget to ANZPM, which will have as much as $200m to spend on local shows.

It’s also something which hasn’t happened yet – the draft legislation was harshly criticised by almost the whole media sector, and we’ve yet to see a revised bill. At various times it has felt a little shaky, and National increasingly uses it as shorthand for out-of-control government spending that no one particularly wants.

For all that, broadcasting minister Willie Jackson told me that even after Reserve Bank governor Adrian Orr suggested all new spending should be paused, “the government is committed to the continuation of the work on the ANZPM bill”. So everyone has to act like this thing is definitely going to happen, even though it hasn’t actually happened and still plausibly might not.

The TVNZ historical drama Panthers was the big winner at the 2022 NZ TV Awards

TVNZ 45, Warner Bros. Discovery 2

Tracey Martin, the former NZ First MP chairing the board putting ANZPM together, has been at pains to say that it will be a gentle friend to the industry, helping all boats float, contra the very real fears of the private sector.

Yet TVNZ absolutely dominated the TV awards – to such an extent that it was a bit grotesque, almost politically inconvenient. A word search of the press release that went out after the awards mentioned its name 45 times (admittedly slightly inflated by shows which ran across linear and TVNZ+). As for Warner Bros. Discovery, the owners of Three? Their name came up just twice. Of the 39 awards, just 12 went to non-TVNZ platforms. It’s a chilling omen, as ANZPM will create an organisation 50% larger by revenue – and no matter how friendly the giant, it’s hard to imagine other media platforms not getting crushed under its feet. Or them showing up to awards ceremonies to fill the other podium spots while ANZPM celebrates itself.

Willie Jackson disappears (with a decent excuse)

When the Spada conference was first announced, it featured one extremely high profile guest: the broadcasting minister, who was scheduled to introduce the discussion between TVNZ and RNZ. Just days before, though, he was a scratch. Did this mean the merger was on shaky ground? It’s an unpopular policy which might have been given air cover to be abandoned by Adrian Orr’s OCR bazooka on Wednesday. The truth was more prosaic – with parliament in a four-day, ultra-long period of urgency, the minister was required in Wellington. It doesn’t mean the merger is a done deal, but Jackson remains very committed to this one.

Introducing a smaller, humbler NZ on Air

I bumped into NZ on Air’s Cam Harland and Amie Mills on Federal Street prior to Spada. The pair had the air of prisoners walking to the dock for sentencing. They have had a pretty rough year since finding out their budget was being taken away and handed to ANZPM, meaning they have to achieve the same huge remit – to entertain and inform New Zealanders – with a much more modest budget.

But their presentation was the best thing about the whole 24 hours – clear, thoughtful, a pragmatic but quietly visionary response to their changed circumstances. Even John Barnett, former head of South Pacific Pictures and a reliable antagonist of whomever is on stage, could only muster a fairly half-hearted critique.

It’s all the more surprising because the production community will be disproportionately impacted in its relationship with NZ on Air. This is because it is maintaining its full funding of things ANZPM can’t fund – music, most prominently, but also a range of smaller platforms like NZ on Screen. This means it can only spend a tiny $15m on scripted drama and comedy, for example. For scale, a single season of a big drama like Westside can run close to $10m.

Harland and Mills admitted that those kind of shows are gone from their remit now. They seem to view themselves instead as being really focused on research, development and providing “gap funding” that will help productions like Rūrangi make the leap from web series to international platforms. Almost like a venture capital firm seeking to maximise its ROI. It’s not a bad idea, particularly given it has been assembled in a matter of weeks. By the end of their presentation, you got the feeling that NZ on Air might like its new small-budget strategy more than the one it left behind.

The transgender drama Rūrangi made the leap from web series to international feature film with the help of NZ on Air

The whole industry is literally and metaphorically hungover 

The literally part was down to the after party, when the TV awards moved from the waterfront to Groove Bar in Kingsland, to keep the party going. Groove is owned by Bailey Mackey, who also owns Pango Productions and is on too many boards to count, but was still roped in to work the bar due to the sheer volume of TV people drinking to celebrate or commiserate. At Spada, poor Cate Slater, director of content at TVNZ, was singled out by NZ on Air’s Harland for her hangover, which is absolutely not what a hungover person wants in a room full of 200 of her peers (for the record, when she was on stage later, Slater performed admirably).

The metaphorical hangover is related to the web of post-Covid responses still working their way through different parts of the industry. There was the Public Interest Journalism fund, which has rumbled through the news media. There’s the Te Puna Kairangi fund, which pumped $50m into premium productions. TVNZ and Discovery both upped their local commissioning while the pandemic shut off some of their international productions, while Amazon and Netflix both shot big budget productions too. All of this created an overheated production environment where there were a lot more shows than usual. Now the sector sits in suspended animation, with the old NZ on Air world fading and the new ANZPM one not yet clear. It’s freaking people out, as you would expect.

WATA and data

One thing which sits uneasily through all this is a fundamental question of measurement. We know people are leaving linear television – the raw number of people watching shows is well down, per Nielsen (and even that data must now be taken somewhat circumspectly, given recent disclosures). But just how many people are watching online remains hotly contested. There are still substantial parts of the production sector which resent any funding going to non-broadcast platforms, because the audiences don’t seem to be at the same scale as even the sharply reduced numbers still watching television. Yet it seems morally repugnant not to address the fact that millions of New Zealand taxpayers are funding shows and services they never, ever watch.

NZ on Air has been focused on this question, and now views research and data-gathering as a core part of its remit. On Tuesday it releases a special youth-focused edition of its much-anticipated, highly-debated Where Are the Audiences? (WATA) survey. It will show which channels, brands and platforms under 25s are watching, and not watching. NZ on Air will be dialling up this research, which is now part of the thinking of everyone from media companies to ad agencies, and is encouraging all platforms to sign up to a new analytics platform whenever they run NZ on Air-funded content. This will prove controversial, but anything which improves comparable data in the space should be welcomed.

PASC and Niu Waves and the future of development

Two initiatives that were singled out by NZ on Air as little markers of where they’re going, and how the industry should understand them, came from the Pan Asian Screen Collective and Pacific Island Screen Artists. Both are pilot programmes run by mission-oriented not-for-profits which aim to increase the training and access of their communities to the screen industry. While ANZPM will surely commission many more Pacific and pan-Asian creators over time, it seems vital that organisations independent of it help nurture talent and visibility within those communities. PASC’s work and Niu Waves, one it inspired from PISA, are increasingly central to funders’ thoughts.

‘Media is under threat. Help save The Spinoff with an ongoing commitment to support our work.’
Duncan Greive
— Founder

Are we making too much content?

This was a question posed by South Pacific Picture’s Kelly Martin after RNZ and TVNZ’s session. While it has been part of a familiar refrain from the big players (to suggest NZ on Air should stop funding the small players), it was something I heard echoed in private from the small players too. That there was a bit of exhaustion as all shows require crews to be assembled and productions run, and then to compete for attention. NZ on Air addressed this, saying it was likely to cap both the number of applications and budgets for different platforms, so as to encourage the sector to only create what it really, really wanted. You could feel sighs of relief the whole way around.

RNZ and TVNZ, havin’ a lil chat

It’s not a secret that RNZ is much more enthusiastic about the merger than TVNZ, largely because it has worse offices, worse pay and more challenges. It also already has a charter that it lives with every day, meaning less of a change. So it was refreshing to see two execs from RNZ and two from TVNZ happily sharing a stage, during a panel moderated by Spada’s effervescent chair Irene Gardiner. All were more convincing in the case they made for the merger than the government has been at times, which is probably a good sign.

Stephen Smith, head of strategy at RNZ, harked back to a talk he made at the same conference in 2005, when he was acting CE for TVNZ, making the case for another contentious piece of legislation, TVNZ’s charter. He talked about how most fears never came to pass then, and suggested those circulating now might not either.

TVNZ’s Slater provided a little window into the gulf between the organisations when she made reference to the “commercial demographics” – that is, audiences which advertisers will pay to sell to, a totally alien concept to RNZ. She also posited that “all local content is public media content”, which is an argument I have a lot of time for, but again, that would imply that FBOY Island is public media, and Beef+Lamb’s new barbecue show too. There will be many who would dispute that.

RNZ’s Megan Whelan made perhaps the most salient point of all, saying “we have to stop talking about radio and television, we need to start talking about the internet”. This is something the whole industry still struggles to do – it might be that only ANZPM is a big and substantial enough change to make that happen.

How long will this go on?

Related to Whelan’s point, on the morning of Spada, the very good, very cutting industry email newsletter ShowNews landed. It was particularly pointed, and contained this eye-popping paragraph:

“Sometime in 2020 linear broadcast surrendered its lead as people’s preferred method of consuming screen content, across all age groups, despite the Gold Carders’ best efforts. It might be fun to joke about grandparents’ ability to use a remote, but it remained better than their ability to use the internet. The dead and dying are now TVNZ’s key demographic, and while it’s impolite to shout that from the rooftops, just look at the advertisers who remain loyal. They’re happy – not only is advertising cheaper but there’s a captive audience of people who struggle to get out of a chair and who can no longer fart without fear.”

To be clear, this is hyperbole, albeit hyperbole built on a foundation of truth. The backdrop to all this is that younger audiences are more fickle and elusive than ever. TikTok and YouTube were regularly mentioned and are undoubtedly part of the solution. Yet they simply don’t have commissioners the way that TV companies do, nor anything like the same revenue opportunities for production companies. TVNZ released statistics last week which showed even streaming, one the future of the industry, flat to declining as far as audience goes.

What that says is that the expensive business of making professionally produced TV shows is losing to the chaos and pace of user-generated content for the global social platforms. And until this industry – from the talent at the TV awards to the producers in that conference room – really inhales that reality, they will continue to be fighting a losing battle. Those are simply the stakes of the decade, and ANZPM, NZ on Air and the whole TV industry must recognise that if it is to survive.

Follow Duncan Greive’s NZ media podcast The Fold on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider.

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The now-deleted article and disclaimer running on the NZ Herald (image: screenshot)
The now-deleted article and disclaimer running on the NZ Herald (image: screenshot)

MediaNovember 22, 2022

NZ Herald pulls paid Chinese government-linked propaganda after reader backlash

The now-deleted article and disclaimer running on the NZ Herald (image: screenshot)
The now-deleted article and disclaimer running on the NZ Herald (image: screenshot)

A glowing sponsored story spoke of a historic poverty reduction. But reader feedback to the Chinese Communist Party-linked story has seen NZME pull it down and reassess its policies, reports Duncan Greive.

Under the subheading “Relocation & revitalisation see 100m people lifted out of poverty” sits an unambiguously positive story about the Chinese government’s role in raising incomes and living standards in China. It contains lengthy quotes from the Chinese president Xi Jinping, and notes that he “has taken a personal interest in alleviating poverty, having visited almost all the most poverty-stricken areas in China since the 18th national congress”. 

It goes on to quote citizens speaking passionately about their jobs growing fruit (“The apples grown here taste nice and are popular nationwide”) and making other extremely on-message statements (“Compared to before, life is considerably better”). It is basically a boilerplate example of the kind of propaganda routinely created by authoritarian regimes to illustrate their excellence.

And it ran on the website of the NZ Herald, New Zealand’s most popular newspaper. The NZ Herald, like most media organisations in this country (including The Spinoff), runs stories from partners who pay to be placed on their sites. Some of these will be crafted by a journalist at the organisation, others simply supplied and posted unaltered.

This piece of content had an unusually explicit level of distancing involved, with a disclaimer included as a boxed image at the top of the story.

Disclaimer at top of NZHerald post about poverty in China
The disclaimer at the top of the now-removed article (Screenshot: nzherald.co.nz)

It said the story “has been produced and published by the People’s Daily who take sole responsibility for the content” and goes on to underline that “the New Zealand Herald does not necessarily agree with or endorse any opinions which may be expressed here”. This is the most full-throated distancing I’ve seen on a story, far more aggressive than the simple “sponsored by” which accompanies most stories of this nature.

When I contacted the NZ Herald, it pulled the story down within hours of the email landing, and a spokesperson supplied a statement explaining why. “This came out of a commercial agreement that sees us host a very small amount of sponsored content online, which is clearly labelled as sponsored. It’s made clear that the advertiser takes full responsibility for the content, and that the NZ Herald doesn’t necessarily agree with nor endorse any opinions contained within.

“However, following reader feedback on this particular advertisement, it has now been removed and we are reviewing this type of sponsored content arrangement moving forward.”

‘Media is under threat. Help save The Spinoff with an ongoing commitment to support our work.’
Duncan Greive
— Founder

How is this different to any other piece of sponsored content? The most crucial difference is that the People’s Daily is not just any other client. It’s a newspaper group owned and controlled by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party – China’s most powerful elite leadership group. It is headed by Chinese leader Xi Jinping – he is functionally the publisher of the story which quotes him so admiringly. 

While the story has been pulled, many others remain. NZME calls it “a very small amount” of sponsored content, but there are more than 30 stories on a dedicated homepage, going back months. A scoop earlier this year from Critic – Te Arohi noted a similar practice at the Otago Daily Times. In it, journalist Denzel Chung noted that he had approached other news organisations, including NZME, to ask whether they had similar deals. NZME did not reply. When contacted, NZME rival Stuff confirmed to The Spinoff that it had no current deal with the People’s Daily.

Some of the content from People’s Daily Online that has been republished on the NZ Herald

So what’s the problem?

Gavin Ellis, former editor of the NZ Herald, pointed out that there should not be anything stopping the Herald publishing stories of this nature, “but if it does, it should contain a fact-check panel. That if there are facts contained in there which are verifiably untrue, it should say so”.

He pointed out that China is fundamentally a different kind of government to our own. “It’s coming from an increasingly autocratic state, it should be treated with great care, in the interests of their readers.” Additionally, he pointed out that the People’s Daily is “not just another newspaper”. Its status as the mouthpiece for the Central Committee of the CCP means that by publishing its work you are publishing the views of the Chinese leadership. 

Ellis believes that because that link is not made clear on the stories, it runs the risk of violating an Advertising Standards Authority guidance note, which states that “advocacy advertising must clearly state the identity and position of the advertiser”. A spokesperson for the ASA told The Spinoff that it had “have dealt with complaints about advocacy ads in this space” but that they “don’t comment on the likelihood of code compliance for specific ads, in case we get a complaint.”

This is not uncomplicated. Tourism New Zealand is a massive advertiser, in and out of this country, while also being a Crown-owned entity. This is not noted on its ads or content, and nor would anyone expect it to be. But China is committed to a giant global propaganda campaign which aims to burnish its reputation and undermine that of Western democratic states. 

A major Guardian investigation said that “China is trying to reshape the global information environment with massive infusions of money – funding paid-for advertorials, sponsored journalistic coverage and heavily massaged positive messages from boosters. While within China the press is increasingly tightly controlled, abroad Beijing has sought to exploit the vulnerabilities of the free press to its advantage.”

Most of the previous stories published in the series are less explicitly political. They talk about the potential of 5G to fuel economic growth, driverless taxis and “fish robots” – the future-gazing heart of many sponsored stories the world over. Yet the ultimate motive of this advertiser is very different. With its identity obscured, it’s not at all clear that the average reader would know exactly what they were reading – or why.

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