Campbell claims the radio crown

The ‘‘king of breakfast radio’’ Mike Hosking has been dethroned by state broadcaster RNZ’s Morning Report .

RNZ attracted the highest national audience against commercial radio news rivals in all key time slots, results from a survey released this week show.

In the first time in 17 years that RNZ has been compared with its commercial competitors, RNZ’s Morning Report , hosted by Guyon Espiner and Susie Ferguson, had about 386,000 listeners.

In May, Newstalk ZB had reported that Mike Hosking was the ‘‘king of breakfast radio’’ but it now seems he’s a distant second.

RNZ shows Nine to Noon with Kathryn Ryan, Jesse Mulligan’s Afternoons and Checkpoint with John Campbell all led their time slots against rival stations.

Mediaworks-owned pop station The Edge was the top-ranked station nationwide with 663,000 weekly listeners followed by RNZ with 529,000 listeners. Newstalk ZB was third with 504,000 listeners.

Campbell said RNZ’s position across the board shows the public had an appetite for robust and independent journalism rather than ‘‘writing endlessly about the Kardashians or The Bachelor’’.

‘‘These were some of the tensions that existed at MediaWorks around what people wanted Campbell Live to be and what we were not prepared to be.’’

Since chief executive Paul Thompson joined in 2013, RNZ has undergone dramatic change, including the departure of longstanding staff members and the introduction of younger, more well known faces including Espiner, Campbell, Mulligan and Wallace Chapman. Some programmes and services have been cut and other programmes, such as Checkpoint with John Campbell, have been relaunched.

There has also been a much greater focus on digital, with the launch of its youth news website The Wireless and, more recently, a refreshed website.

The broadcaster is also dipping its toes in the commercial space sharing content with MSN and this week announcing a deal with Fairfax Media to publish RNZ audio and video on Stuff.