Learning to walk on air
Change is afoot at Radio New Zealand. But musical chairs on the flagship news shows is just the beginning, reports
ON WEDNESDAY morning, during a particularly badly-timed commute on Auckland’s morning motorways, I finally switched off Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report.
Simon Mercep had been burbling about plain-packaged cigarettes, Geoff Robinson had crossed live to the UK where a reporter confirmed that it was raining a lot, and I’d been stuck in traffic so very, very long that the news bulletins had started repeating themselves.
I could have switched to NewsTalk ZB to check whether Mike Hosking was still insufferably smug, or sampled RadioLive, where I rather enjoy Hilary Barry’s roundup of silliness from the internet, but I chose a far more compelling alternative.
I found my smartphone, tapped up a podcast of the American radio show RadioLab, and listened in awe as a bunch of clever and witty New Yorkers spoke captivatingly about bitumen, neurotransmitters and the stock market, among other things. Rush-hour flew by.
OK, by Thursday morning I was back in the bosom of RNZ National – it occupies the first button on my car stereo after all (student station BFM in on 2 and RNZ Concert is on 3), but that temporary switch of loyalty summed up two of the big problems facing our state broadcaster. Firstly, Morning Report has become really quite boring, and secondly, there are an amazing number of excellent radio shows from abroad that New Zealanders can listen to instead.
The first problem may soon be fixed: retiring Geoff Robinson and even-more-retiring Simon Mercep are about to pass their Morning Report chairs to Guyon Espiner and Susie Ferguson. (In a wider game of musical chairs, Mercep will snaffle much of Jim Mora’s Afternoons slot. Mora will hold on to The Panel at 4pm, then join Mary Wilson on the drivetime news show Checkpoint. Meanwhile, Sunday mornings should get more interesting too, as RadioLive’s offbeat brainbox Wallace Chapman replaces the soporific Chris Laidlaw.)
But that second problem – whether Radio New Zealand can remain a force as the internet profoundly changes the way we consume our media – is going to be trickier.
The guy who’s meant to be figuring this all out is Paul Thompson, who became RNZ’s chief executive late last year. Before that he was group executive editor at Fairfax (which owns this newspaper), where he oversaw a push towards an increased online presence. Fairfax, like all print publishers, is anxiously trying to figure out how to keep making money, now that the internet has snaffled the advertising that once made newspapers cash cows.
Happily for Thompson, Radio New Zealand doesn’t have to worry about that. Its $40m-odd annual budget comes from the government, and there are no plans to supplement that with advertising or sponsorship any time soon.
‘‘It’s been nice,’’ concedes Thompson, ‘‘to come into an organisation that’s not so exposed to those amazing forces of change.
‘‘The challenge around publishing is that even if you do everything right, and you take bold steps and you have a great strategy, it’s still a really tough business.’’
Of late, Thompson has been busy fiddling with presenter personnel, but he says there’s far wider change to come in the coming year or so, especially in RNZ’s internet offerings. He wants a ‘‘sharper’’ radionz.co.nz website that builds on last year’s relaunch.
He wants to improve RNZ’s smartphone and tablet apps so they contain fresh news feeds, rather than simply allowing a listener to ‘‘play that interview that Kim Hill did on Saturday morning on sharks or whatever’’. He particularly likes some of the functionality of the apps currently available from America’s NPR – a nationwide network of hundreds of public radio stations.
He says the youth-oriented TheWireless.co.nz website, developed under his predecessor Peter Cavanagh and launched late last year, has been a success, but wonders whether it needs an app too, and whether more of its content should be feeding back into on-air programming. Social media, too, is an area that could do with a closer look.
Of course, Thompson adds soothingly, this is ‘‘not about loving digital and neglecting onair; we’ve got to do both’’. A nice sentiment, but RNZ’s budget has been frozen since 2008. So which part of his organisation will Thompson slash first to free up funds for all this online excitement?
Thompson, who is nothing if not diplomatic, claims nothing leaps out yet. ‘‘It’s a lean organisation. There are certainly no low-hanging fruit – they’ve long been grabbed.’’
For the record, though, Thompson says he has no plans to introduce advertising or sponsorship, and that he is fully committed to retaining the classical music station RNZ Concert. And, the secret to getting good at digital won’t be hiring lots of new people, he says. ‘‘We’re going to do it by investing in the expertise and skills of our current staff.’’
Even if Thompson’s grand plans may have to involve loaves and fishes, technology commentator Peter Griffin says there’s no question the broadcaster needs to leap into the digital realm.
The near future of public radio, says Griffin, will be rather like what we’ve just seen with music, where mobile apps such as Spotify and Pandora have all-but perfected the on-demand channel whose algorithms spookily intuit just what you want to hear next.
NPR’s ‘‘Infinite Radio’’ service shows the technology is already feasible, says Griffin. ‘‘You can listen to various shows and if you like it you vote it up, and it gives you more of that sort of thing.’’ He suspects this is the route RNZ will take.
‘‘You’ll have an identity within the Radio New Zealand ecosystem. You’ll log in and you’ll have preferences, and you’ll be able to share that content with your social network as well.’’
Griffin reckons we’re on the brink of a worldwide renaissance for public radio. Listeners will win because they can listen to the best stuff from around the world. Meanwhile the broadcasters’ central funding, however meagre, lets them sidestep the revenuegathering horrors that are looming for commercial broadcasters if, for example, people abandon broadcasts in favour of apps that aggregate the best bits from numerous different radio stations.
So should Radio New Zealand be anxious about my rush-hour abandonment of Morning Report in favour of some amalgam of my favourite shows on the planet?
Sure, says Thompson, we realise that New Zealanders are listening to top-class stuff from around the world – he listens to the UK Guardian’s football and books podcasts, and NPR’s This American Life himself – ‘‘and we need to match that quality. I think we do in part of our programming at present, but other parts do need improvement’’.
What you have to remember, though, says Thompson, is that ‘‘we’re a New Zealand broadcaster and we tell New Zealand stories, and we need to tell them better than anyone else.
‘‘You won’t find that content via any international website or broadcaster.’’