How Re: News is navigating uncertain times
Re: News journalist Baz Macdonald discusses the tricky landscape for news media right now, and how the launch of a News channel on TVNZ+, and Re: News involvement in that, is one way of tackling it.
You might have noticed that the news media is in a tough spot right now.
That has been particularly obvious in New Zealand this year - with the closure of Newshub, the end of Sunday and Fair Go (and the downsizing of our own team here at Re: News), and it seems every week we’re hearing about the closure of yet another regional newspaper.
But it’s not just here. Around the world media organisations are desperately trying to figure out how to make news financially viable in our digital world.
VICE announcing bankruptcy last year was a particularly hard blow in that conversation, as they were once seen as the answer to that question.
TVNZ is government-owned, but not government funded. Its revenue comes from advertising, and so it’s just as subject to the struggles many other media outlets here and abroad are experiencing.
Despite what you may see in Facebook comments (‘Go Woke, Go Broke’ being the most common catchphrase), viewership is not the problem.
People are as engaged with news media as ever before. The problem is making that viewership financially viable.
This is particularly true for platforms such as ours that are social media first.
Unpacking the complicated relationship between news and the online platforms is an essay in itself but, long-story short, it’s not currently financially viable for many news companies to operate on social media alone - especially in a small country like ours.
There are solutions to this problem being explored in New Zealand, including a possible amendment to the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill to increase the revenue news media can get from social media.
But even that doesn’t address the underlying vulnerability of primarily using a platform someone else owns to reach audiences.
A good example is that a similar piece of legislation in Canada led to Meta blocking access to news media on Facebook and Instagram in their country.
And so, a key way for New Zealand media to survive these tricky times is to double down on the platforms we own and operate, where we are not at the whims of social media algorithms and business practices.
The bold new era of news on TVNZ+
For many social-first news organisations this means trying to build their own independent platform to reduce their reliance on social media.
Luckily Re: News is part of TVNZ which already has (in my opinion) a bloody great streaming platform in TVNZ+.
And as of last week, TVNZ+ launched its News tab, where you can watch the news and current affairs content being produced at TVNZ - including from us here at Re: News!
I was very proud to have my piece on why young people are ditching school be launched with the channel, and used as the first featured piece on the platform.
For Re: News, the News tab on TVNZ+ means we can produce the video content we always have, from our shorter features and profiles to our long-form investigations, and have a space to publish and promote them that we have full control over.
This means that we will be taking a slightly different approach to how we release our videos from now on.
You may have noticed that last week we published a 1-minute version of my piece on school truancy, which ended with a prompt to watch the full-piece on TVNZ+. This is how we will be approaching publishing much of our video content from now on.
Rest assured, social media will still be a key way of connecting with you all, but we really hope you’ll come with us on this journey to balance our use of social media with the sustainability offered by platforms like TVNZ+.
We will continue to refine our approach to sharing content on social media, so if you have any thoughts we would love to hear from you.
Flick me an email at baz@renews.co.nz.
Re: News recommendations
These are not paid recommendations - they’re just things we like 💗
Considering this newsletter was focussed on the freshly launched News tab on TVNZ+, here are some of my recommendations from it.
Golriz Ghahraman's first full interview: In her first full interview since stepping down as an MP following her shoplifting charges, Golriz Ghamaran speaks candidly with John Campbell about what led to her actions and the fallout of them. It gives really emotional insight into the toll of leadership and is well worth a watch.
Remembering the moon landing: One of the coolest features of the TVNZ+ news tab is a section called ‘From the Archives’. TVNZ is New Zealand’s oldest broadcaster, and so we have libraries full of footage going back to the start of the 20th century. This is a cool piece from that section compiling New Zealand coverage of the first moon landing.
Re: Investigates Ram Raids: As well as our new videos, the News tab of TVNZ+ also features a bunch of the Re: News series and videos from the last couple of years. Featured in the In Depth tab at the moment is this excellent piece by our fearless leader Anna Harcourt on ram raids.