Duncan Greive, founder, owner of The Spinoff

What’s the one word to sum up your mood as we look back on 2023 and forward to 2024?

Exhausted — definitely crawled to the line, even more so than the usual December.

How would you describe your year?

Rejuvenating. It involved me stepping away from leading the company I founded, while also reintegrating myself into more writing and reporting (you might find that a familiar sensation, Shayne).

It wasn’t always easy, unlearning the habits of control. But our new CEO Amber Easby and editor Madeleine Chapman fronted a whole new generation of leadership within the organisation, and watching them pilot The Spinoff with such care and energy was probably the most enjoyable experience I’ve had in business.

On the other side, our creative and digital agency Daylight had a breakthrough year, shipping The Delivery for the World Health Organisation and the new brand and platform for the Pacific Media Network — two pieces of work amongst many that felt like real breakthroughs for the company’s thesis: that beautiful things happen when you put technology and creativity alongside one another.

What’s the best initiative/project/ campaign in your own business — and one that you thought a rival did well?

The cost-of-living crunch made it a hard year for many in business, which is why I was so pleased to see our crowdfunded exploration of food, What’s Eating Aotearoa?, get over the line. It was a huge amount of work for the team, and will flow out through 2024, touching on a subject that cuts across cultural, economic and social lines — perfect material for The Spinoff to get its teeth into, if you’ll somehow pardon the pun.

As far as something a rival did well — I’m on the record as a huge fan of what BusinessDesk does. The product sense and editorial vision and discipline that Pattrick Smellie and Matt Martel have shown there, pre- and post-the NZME acquisition, is truly world-class. I love the new platform they launched last year. But I think it was the infrastructure reporting that stood out for me — the Business of Blowouts and Waste is Money series in particular. These aren’t glamorous rounds, but as a relatively poor country, getting this stuff right really matters, and the scrutiny that team delivered was absolutely vital.

How do you think 2024 will play out for New Zealand media — what’s the biggest priority for you?

I think 2024 shapes as one of the most defining years in our media’s history. I wrote a play-by-play of the year’s media news (leaning heavily on your Media Insider columns, thanks for that), which bundled a lot of smaller stories in an attempt to show the larger narrative — that all our domestic media were challenged in 2023.

The transition to digital is now well past the halfway point, and that could lead to a pretty devastating event at one or more of our major media companies.

It will put pressure on a very fresh government to decide how to respond, if only because it’s such a major presence in the sector through its ownership of TVNZ and RNZ. The Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill is crucial — that shapes as a pivotal event in terms of redressing the power imbalance between NZ’s formal content producers and the technology companies that distribute that information.

What’s the biggest issue that keeps you awake at night?

The power of huge tech companies grows more phenomenal by the day — yet we continue to virtually ignore them from a tax and regulatory perspective.

I think it’s largely down to how the products are distributed: were they to have set up factories and employed people, there’s no way our politicians would not look closely at companies with combined annual revenues in the billions and immense exposure to school-age children, to pick one element.

One day an intelligent and principled politician will seriously interrogate that dichotomy, and try to ensure we reap the benefits of big tech while also ensuring it works more for our national interest than its own margin.

The longer we wait for that day, the more difficult the task becomes, and the more New Zealand becomes a client state to businesses that barely know we exist.

What’s the biggest mistake media/ marketing / advertising people need to avoid in 2024?

It’s related to my answer above. Those companies are everywhere, and like water.

Some proportion of marketing spend must flow through those channels.

But spreading the balance among NZ’s domestic media has an enormous impact on the quantity and quality of content created by and for our people.

A dollar spent here can be easily as impactful as more money funnelled off to Meta — but spent at Three or Stuff or Mediaworks or Sky TV or TVNZ or NZME (and, I humbly suggest, The Spinoff) it has the gift-with-purchase of generating news and entertainment content about this country, too.

What are your plans for the summer break?

I will try my best to stop thinking about all this stuff — or less directly. I have a stack of books to get through: a few on the fourth Labour Government, for a major project we have coming next year; the autobiography of famed Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, lent to me by one of The Spinoff’s members; and a book by political theorist Christopher Lasch.