It’s possible to view TVNZ shutting its news website as a retrenchment from digital. In fact, it’s the opposite, argues Duncan Greive.
Has there ever been a year like 2024 for news about the news? First Newshub fell, then TVNZ killed two of its most popular current affairs shows, then Stuff started making ThreeNews. Just last week, Google made public its intention to shut down news on its platforms should a contentious bill pass. Now TVNZ is proposing to shut down 1news.co.nz from early 2025 – should that eventuate, New Zealand will have lost two of its five most-read news sites in less than 12 months.
Some will view this as a catastrophic failure of management by TVNZ. 1news.co.nz attracts a monthly audience of roughly 1m, and over the past couple of years it has developed a distinct tonal identity. There’s strong longform writing from some of its flagship journalists, a robust opinion section and the kind of quizzes and newsletters which are found on many news sites. Its platform is well-designed, fast and easy to navigate. It is a very good news site.
Still, the decision has a fundamental logic. 1news.co.nz’s core output is text-based news. There are two huge incumbents in that space in Stuff and the NZ Herald, with RNZ seemingly having taken over third place. There is no prospect of TVNZ running any of them down without massive investment – and the whole point of this exercise is to find a huge $30m in savings or new revenue. 1news.co.nz also requires journalists and editors skilled in creating and publishing text-based news – even granted a level of multi-skilled personnel, this inevitably means some degree of duplication alongside the core video team.
The site also likely makes a relatively trivial sum for TVNZ – it’s focused on text-driven stories wrapped with display advertising, and doesn’t indulge in the autoplay shenanigans of other text-driven sites, meaning its video impressions will be limited. There is no good reason to believe that will meaningfully change in years to come. The best strategy for funding text-based news sites is audience revenue – yet because TVNZ’s digital news offering is not powerfully differentiated from the much larger sites, it’s hard to see how a paywall or membership model could work.
Perhaps the most powerful argument in favour of the move is to look at TVNZ as a whole. The whole point of TVNZ is that it’s #1 everywhere it goes – the biggest audiences, the most famous stars, the category defining leader in video news. Its 6pm bulletin is the single biggest news product in the market – websites might have bigger audiences overall, but not all at once like 6pm. Having the distant 4th-ranked news site just doesn’t fit with the brand. With Newshub exiting the market, it has an opportunity to dominate video news more profoundly than at any point since the arrival of TV3 more than 30 years ago.
To do that, it needs to radically change the way it presents news on TVNZ+. It has made strides there – it currently gives prominent position to John Campbell’s new true crime series, and recently introduced individual stories to its core carousel. Ultimately it can lead to a bulletin which is always live – updated throughout the day and evening. There’s even the prospect of a live digital news FAST (free ad-supported) channel, composed of its news, current affairs and documentary offerings, interspersed with news analysis, talk and regular bulletins. All creating more valuable video ad inventory.
That is only possible if the newsroom has a total purity of focus, one which is tightly aligned with the digital content strategy of the company as a whole. Losing the standalone website hurts in the short term, and is brutal for the staff who’ve worked so hard to make it such a strong product in recent years. But TVNZ admitting that it’s a video-first organisation makes a huge amount of sense. All its sales staff live to sell video ads. All its content delivery is built around surfacing video. Sadly for me, a writer, the whole internet is increasingly driven by video – so if that’s what you’re great at, why wouldn’t you commit all of your energy to it?
It is manifestly the right call. But there is one group outside TVNZ who will be rightly infuriated by this move. Six months ago we went through the same process, with the end result that the core video teams which created Sunday and Fair Go left the building, while Re:News was significantly downsized. In the 1news.co.nz era, that made sense, to an extent. In a TVNZ+ News era, it’s tragic. Sunday made impactful longform current affairs video. Fair Go made wildly popular consumer advocacy video. Re:News made smartly targeted youth focused video.
All of these products should have been taonga for any video news operation. They’re the teeth, the brand, the differentiator which stops your news product becoming overwhelmed by 2-4m packages, and gives you something deeper. Something your competition can’t match. So while this is a hard decision with an undeniable argument underneath it, there’s still a deep sadness associated with it – both for those impacted today, and those needlessly abandoned earlier this year.