turns 20 stuff
From unwanted child to biggest NZ website
In 1999, the year the world feared a bug known as Y2K would obliterate computer systems, a small team planned to take on New Zealand’s internet. Their idea was to ensure Independent Newspapers Ltd (INL) captured the growing trend of online news. But that meant convincing newspaper managers and editors, steeped in the industry’s ink-dyed history, that this was the future. ‘‘I’ll never forget a comment from a senior executive at INL,’’ recalls Fiona Reid, one of the website’s first staff. ‘‘He said, ‘The internet’s just a passing fad – we don’t need to worry about it’.’’ Nevertheless, the website, Stuff.co. nz, went live on June 27, 2000, launched into a market dominated by Telecom’s Xtra, TVNZ’s Nzoom, and Wilson & Horton’s Herald Online. Yet it grew. By July 2005, Stuff, then owned by Fairfax Media, hit one million total unique viewers a month. ‘‘That was an absolute milestone,’’ says Reid. The Y2K bug never really bit. When the year rolled over to 2000, the feared computer glitch had either been fixed or fizzed. Twenty years later, Stuff – in New Zealand hands after chief executive Sinead Boucher’s management buyout – is now New Zealand’s biggest website, with a unique audience of around two million a month. In March, when New Zealanders feared a very real virus, Stuff’s domestic audience peaked at 2.4 million unique browsers a day. To mark Stuff’s 20th birthday, it’s time to turn the clock back, to see where it came from, and how it got to where it is today. 1999: INL managing director Mike Robson assembles a team, including Mark Wierzbicki, Stuff’s first general manager. Mark Wierzbicki (Stuff GM, 1999-2002): Mike Robson was quite clear he wanted INL to have an online presence, and it be the best in New Zealand. It was very much, ‘This is the way the world’s going. We have to react’. We were really starting from ‘INL has a bunch of newspapers up and down the country – how are we going to integrate that all into one place? How are we going to convince the general managers this is a good idea?’ David Mitchell (Stuff’s first editor 1999-2001): I was sent on a tour of all the INL newspapers to explain what we were doing and you can imagine the reception. Fiona Reid (GM, Fairfax Interactive, 2002-2006): I started off in the sales team; we had a significant budget, well in excess of seven figures, to market Stuff. 2000: The website is launched at an Auckland cybercafe. The big reveal? The name: Stuff.co.nz Wierzbicki: There were some lastminute technical issues we were sorting through, and I remember being at work till late. Then I got up really early and flew to Auckland for the launch party. All the senior managers had black shirts with the Stuff logo and one letter of Stuff .I think mine was a T. I still have it. Reid: INL engaged Saatchi & Saatchi to come up with brand development. And there were such names as Pavlova.co.nz. Mitchell: There were two options tossed around our newsroom – one was ‘‘Newz’’, and another was ‘‘News Now’’, which I quite liked. Reid: They eventually went for Stuff because it’s a word that’s quite colloquial – we talk about stuff all the time. So it had that relatability, but also it was infinite in terms of its meaning. Mitchell: I didn’t like it. I thought it was slangy. To me it’s also associated with that expression, ‘I don’t give a stuff’. Reid: You had a conservative media organisation going out of character to choose an unconservative brand. That was a brave move. But it also set Stuff apart from these conservative mastheads, and enabled it to be positioned quite differently.
The website begins as mostly a home for INL’s newspaper content. Then, just six months in, the company is devastated when Robson dies suddenly after a run, aged 61. Wierzbicki: It hit the office hard. Newspaper people, you see them in the movies, and they’re hard, tough people. And they were kind of like that. But when Mike Robson died, people were really upset. Mitchell: He was a visionary and a very capable leader. Wierzbicki: [INL] brought in Tom Mockridge. He was much more about getting it to generate revenue. He just wanted to get more focus on ‘how do we make money out of this thing?’ Whereas Mike was more, ‘I know we have to do this, and we’ll figure out how we make money later.’ Reid: We had to look at how we could deliver a more viable, sustainable business. We had to downsize the team from 20 to about 12. 2002: Reid becomes general manager and hires news editor Kristine Garcia, with a mandate to develop the site’s journalism. Kristine Garcia (news editor, 2003-2006): We all wanted to do more – we all wanted to be publishing stories throughout the day. We wanted to break news during the day and get stories filed from the different regions in real time. The newspapers weren’t there yet.
Even for big news events, such as the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States, Stuff didn’t figure in the thinking of the company’s other journalists. Mark Stevens (Stuff editor 2007-2013, Stuff editorial director): During 9/11, I remember being in the Evening Post newsroom so vividly and I don’t even remember Stuff being on my mind – yet they were in the same building. The only thing we had to worry about was the newspaper editions that started at 9.30am. Patrick Crewdson (Stuff editor in chief): When I came to the Dominion Post in 2004 on an internship, Stuff was invisible. I don’t recall it being mentioned at all. Garcia: Within Stuff, there was a feeling that we’re ‘the new thing’ – this is where it’s all going. So it kind of kept you motivated. Reid: We had this mentality to give things a crack and not take ourselves too seriously. The newspapers were these juggernaut cargo cruisers that were slow to turn because they were so cumbersome.
Garcia: I pushed it and I found advocates at the papers. We had micro-sites for each paper. And if you went to those sites, all you saw was like a dump of the copy from the paper.
Reid: So the press.co.nz were just gearing up and there was someone at The Press who was into digital, trying to push boundaries. They clearly had ambition and drive and vision to do things. And that person was Sinead Boucher.
Sinead Boucher (Stuff chief executive): It’s terrible when I think back on it now, but actually, Stuff was like one of your competitors who you tried to beat.
Crewdson: I was the Dominion Post’s first web editor, and the prevailing idea was that Stuff, the Dominion Post and The Press would compete internally.
Boucher: Kristine was one of the drivers of what Stuff became in those early days. And at that time, the Stuff team were virtually kept in a cupboard somewhere in Wellington. The company had invested in building Stuff, but then really hadn’t invested and committed to driving it.
Reid: We outsourced our development to [New Zealand IT company] Catalyst. It saved us a lot of money. 2006: the website has its first major redesign. Dylan Thomsen (Stuff newsroom, 2003-2007): A small group of us were in the Wellington newsroom when we swapped over to the new site and it immediately crashed. I [went] home about 3am with no idea whether we’d have a site live or not when I woke up. James McLean (Stuff head of delivery, Product): There was one stage, it was half the old site and half the new site. I think it was 6 or 7 in the morning before it stabilised.
Thomsen: By the time people were logging in the next morning, the newlook Stuff was there, and the feedback started pouring in. A lot of the audience felt a really strong ownership of Stuff and making changes to it was a huge deal for them.
McLean: In 2008-2009, we had another redesign of the Stuff website, a massive one. We were pushing the site live at 4 or 5 in the morning and an outstanding developer pushed his last enter button on a piece of code and once that had gone live, he collapsed in a heap on the couch.
2007: The company’s Australian owner, Fairfax, wants to develop digital. Boucher is hired as group digital editor, but by the time she arrives in Wellington, her boss has resigned. Boucher: When I turned up, there was no-one to tell me what to do or give me any sense of what the job was going to be. It led to an incredible period of freedom to do what we wanted to drive Stuff.
She hires Mark Stevens as editor. Stevens: We were this rogue group. [In 2013] we decided to take a stand on marriage equality, and we changed Stuff’s logo to a rainbow. One of the bosses complained I hadn’t said we were going to campaign on something. And I had to say, ‘Fair cop, guv, I should have told you, but you know we launched this two days ago?’ It had taken him two days to notice our masthead had changed. We were off the radar. Guy MacGibbon (web editor 2007-2010, homepage editor 2010-now): We were still new enough to be quite experimental. I like unusual animals and I thought when I’ve got a spare hour, I’m going to write a piece about a strange animal like a dugong, a tamandua or a tarsier and have a cool picture of it and then
a poll which says cute, weird, or cute and weird? It’s not groundbreaking journalism but it was fun. Clio Francis (one of Stuff’s first dedicated reporters, now chief news director): It was a start-up culture. A bit fly-by-the-seat of your pants, just get out there and do it. Mark and Sinead were very hands on. In the 2008 election, they were doing coverage themselves, typing into files.
Stevens: I remember Sinead liveblogging a royal wedding.
Boucher: Kate and William [2011].
Stevens: We are a trusted news source, but there’s been some extraordinarily crazy and fun moments. There’s a video of the Harlem Shake which includes a person in a sleeping bag wriggling around on the floor who may or may not have been Sinead Boucher.
Boucher: They don’t know what they’re talking about.
MacGibbon: I’m there. I can tell you that is Sinead in a sleeping bag.
Boucher: Yes, all right, I’m the sleeping bag. It can finally be revealed.
Stevens: There’s someone in a gorilla suit who may or may not have been Mark Stevens.
September 2010: The first Christchurch earthquake brings a sense that Stuff’s role has changed.
Stevens: That was a turning point when we went from being a place where we publish stories to being a live news environment. For weeks, it was user-generated content, video, a live rolling blog.
Boucher: But it was only a dress rehearsal for what happened in February when the big quake struck. Kamala Hayman (editor, The
Press, Stuff Canterbury): You could hear the building grinding and crunching and the screaming of metal bars – the most extraordinary sound. I got under my desk. The first thing I did was text Stuff: ‘‘This is the big one’’.
Boucher: One of the things I remember clearly is walking along Lambton Quay and getting a phone call from Kamala: ‘‘There’s been another quake. It’s really bad’’.
Hayman: When I went outside and saw the cathedral had collapsed I thought, I know there will be deaths. My next text was: ‘‘There will be deaths this time’’.
MacGibbon: It certainly felt like an end of innocence and a time when all of a sudden there wasn’t time for as much frippery and there was a responsibility to deliver news and information that people needed.
Hayman: One thing we learned was the importance of need-to-know stuff. Comment, clever writing and analysis is important, but when there’s a big news event the basics are so important to readers: Where can I get my water? When is the electricity coming back on? Nigel Tutt (GM, Fairfax Digital, 2010-2013): All hell broke loose, and
obviously we had a tragedy because we lost someone [a staff member died when The Press building collapsed], and there were about 10 people trapped in there. We were rattled for our people.
McLean: The website was struggling to keep up with the traffic. I was talking to Catalyst about giving the website a repeated set of resuscitations, basically to keep it running. That was a big turning point for us where we realised we needed loads of capacity for those massive news events.
2013: Changes are under way, including bringing development inhouse, and the appointment of Boucher as group executive editor.
Boucher: I had the ability to deliberately restructure the editorial workforce into a digital-first structure. Crewdson: Stuff was clearly ascendant in the business.
Tutt: Strategically we knew we had to push forward because the future of the business depended on it . . . The big threat was Google and Facebook.
Boucher: Advertising and subscriptions had always been a healthy income for newspapers, but a lot of advertising moved into digital. But most of it – 80-90 per cent of those dollars – goes to the global platforms like Facebook and Google.
Crewdson: [Boucher] was making it clear to staff that Stuff was at the centre. So it wasn’t the ugly child any more, which is not to say it was embraced by everybody in the family.
Tutt: I don’t think I’ve had a job where I’ve had to defend my business unit as much as that one. Literally half the time I was having to defend why we weren’t putting up a paywall or why we should have this content, or why we should have people with video cameras or iphones.
Sometimes Stuff is attacked by its audience, like when an infamous headline briefly appears on the site after Team New Zealand’s 2013 America’s Cup defeat to Oracle. The
headline: ‘‘Choke on this NZ’’.
Stevens: I was overcome by this need to do it because we had choked.
MacGibbon: I have to fess up: I wrote the headline but I didn’t want to at first. The news editor and I were saying, ‘We don’t think that’s the mood’ but to Mark, it was clear.
Stevens: They kept saying, ‘Are you sure?’ I was standing over Guy’s shoulder saying, ‘Yep, push it live’.
Francis: The reaction was swift, furious, and very unimpressed.
Stevens: Even my friends and family called me out.
Francis: Comments were piling up, we were getting emailed complaints, people were outraged because the national psyche was deeply invested. So I guess when New Zealand were feeling bruised, Stuff put the boot in, in an uncool way.
MacGibbon: It was the wrong time and it was a lesson in thinking before you publish.
Stevens: I’ve made some significant and tough decisions. That isn’t one of them. But it’s stuck as having the biggest impact. It got this ridiculous cult status.
Reading audience reaction to the site is changing – in the early 2010s more data is giving editors instant feedback about stories.
MacGibbon: All of a sudden we had real-time statistics and you could see quickly and in a blunt way what’s working and what’s not. When that’s brand new, it’s intoxicating. I liken it to simple sugars versus complex carbohydrates.
Stevens: I remember those sugar hits, those spikes. They were part of the upward trajectory. But I’m still proud we were never driven by the numbers. We always paid as much attention to our gut.
MacGibbon: When I think of clickbait I think of the notion of withholding a certain amount of information to make it look like more than it is – to oversell the story through omission. There were times we would do that because you’d have real-time statistics to say, ‘hey, that works’. We consciously moved away from that and sometimes I’m the click-bait police saying, ‘We need to say more, we need to be more honest’.
Crewdson: We don’t indulge clickbait because that’s tricking your audience. Yeah, the sugar gives you a spike. But we want a healthy diet.
Stevens: We can now see the stories people are most engaged with; we can see certain stories attract disloyal, one-night-stand-and-never-hear-fromthem-again readers, versus those readers you’re going to have a longterm relationship with.
Crewdson: There was a point where we needed to tell staff, ‘Hey, we’ve got this reputation, it’s not really fair, so let’s make sure we don’t give people who believe that any reason to believe that’. So we explicitly shared an anti-clickbait policy.
Boucher: We need to make sure people value the work we produce because one way or another we need that work to be funded – either through payments for content or advertising or other businesses. We need to really build on the levels of trust we have with the public – that becomes our most important metric for the business.
Crewdson: There came a period where the company hired Stuff Circuit, we set up the National Correspondents team, and we were really deliberate about showcasing the best journalism from our big hitters in a more meaningful way. Later on, we set up our climate team. So, there were a series of steps that showed Stuff’s evolution into being a proper, grown-up, respectable site.
May 31, 2020: Boucher buys the company from Australian owner Nine, which had merged with Fairfax Media in 2018 and immediately flagged it had no intention of retaining its New Zealand assets.
Boucher: One way or another the whole business had been up for sale for four years and certainly in active sale process for the previous year and a half. It’s really damaging to be held in a state of not being able to move forward.
Stevens: I think our future, our security, our sustainability are no different. This hasn’t changed that other than allowing us to press ahead at a greater pace.
Boucher: I wanted us to draw a line under all that uncertainty and get to the point where we were making decisions for ourselves, about our own business and looking into the future.
Tutt: Most of the team I was associated with in those days were the upstarts. Those are the people now running the place.
Boucher: The problem is: are we the rebels now? Maybe there’s still a streak of that in us but I love to see the new rebels coming through, too. When I think about the people who set up Stuff 20 years ago, this onestop shop for all the publications in the INL stable, I think that was such a far-sighted decision that has given us the best chance of success of any media company operating here now. Mark Wierzbicki: Stuff has permeated the New Zealand culture. When you say, ‘look it up on Stuff’, people know exactly what you mean. Whenever I hear about it winning awards or anything like that 20 years later, I can’t really claim it, but I take a bit of pride in that.
Fiona Reid: I’m Stuff for life. I’m really proud to have been part of that pioneering spirit.
Crewdson: I think Stuff is all grown up. It’s 20. It’s respectable, without being tame. We pride ourselves on being a mirror of the country. A mirror can give you an unstinting, unsparing view of yourself and that’s the role of the media. And sometimes that is in a celebratory, ‘Hey, New Zealand, you look great today, love that dress on you New Zealand’. Other days it’s, ‘New Zealand, that’s not your best look’.
‘‘We went from being a place where we publish stories to being a live news environment. For weeks, it was usergenerated content, video, a live rolling blog.’’ Mark Stevens, on the effect of the 2011 Christchurch quake on the site