Trust down, jobs gone — what’s the media to do now?
Trust in media has dropped 20 percentage points in the last five years. The AUT annual Trust in News survey was released on Monday with the startling news that New Zealanders’ trust in media has fallen from 53 per cent in 2020 to 33 per cent this year.
What a week. Warner Bros Discovery confirmed it was closing down its entire Newshub operation. TVNZ confirmed it was closing Sunday and Fair Go, scaling back its digital, youth-oriented service Re: News, and making other cuts to its journalism.
A leading social scientist suggested to me on Tuesday that New Zealand might become the first country in the world to lose linear TV.
Linear TV is broadcast TV — the programmes you watch as they are being broadcast — rather than the programmes you choose to watch when you go to a media app or website.
In the media we like to tell ourselves we’re not making baked beans. It’s true. News media isn’t a commodity product, it’s crafted by highly skilled people who work hard to do a good job. Most of them could get much better-paid work doing something else, but they do journalism because they like it and, especially, because they believe in it.
Still, what if we were making baked beans? If people told us they didn’t like the taste, we’d do something about the recipe pretty damn quick.
Journalism has to do the same. In the mainstream we’re losing audiences to social media. In broadcast and print, we’re losing out to apps and websites.
We’re responding by building the strength of our own apps and websites, as we should. That involves the quality of what we offer online, the breadth of coverage and style of how we do it. And, importantly, the revenue-generating potential and the algorithmic wizardry required to succeed. It’s a new and fast-changing world and we’re learning about it, just like our audiences. But is there enough debate about what news is and what it should be? Is there bias in the ways we choose stories and frame them, the language we use and the values we reinforce with those choices?
The AUT survey contains some telling results. Among them: trust is highest among the young and the old, lowest among 45-64 year olds, and lowest among Pākehā/European New Zealanders.
Middle-aged Pākehā dominating the debate? Where have we heard that before? Only everywhere.
Turns out the people who complain the most about media are the people who complain the most about everything. Lower speed limits. Climate change. Housing density. All the ways Māori get “special treatment”.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. Of course the people who complain the most about social and cultural change are the people who complain the most about the media. In the media, we reflect the changes they’re complaining about, and mostly it’s done very inclusively. Weather presenters, for example, haven’t abandoned the name Dunedin, they’ve just added Ō tepoti. But the complainers don’t want the warm and friendlies. They want it all to stop.
And yet paradoxically, because this demographic complains so much, their views get into the media more than everyone else’s.
All that makes it easy to think the media is dominated by these issues. TV presenters use the evolving te reoinfused language of Aotearoa New Zealand and it leads to noisy debates about whether it should be happening. “Tēnā koutou katoa” has become common, and so has shouting “Woke!”
But this has nothing to do with the main reason media is in trouble.
It’s money. TV companies lost 14 per cent of their ad revenue last year.
TVNZ boss Jodi O’Donnell says 90 per cent of digital news advertising revenue now goes to social media platforms and therefore leaves the country.
As Charlotte Grimshaw put it in the Listener this week, social media platforms are destroying local journalism. The question she asked was: Are we really going to let this happen?
The answer, to date, is yes. Those platforms have not only sucked up most of the available revenue, they feed off media companies for content, they pay very little tax and we just let them do it. They’re hardly constrained by regulation and they’re among the biggest companies in the world.
And the Minister of Broadcasting, Melissa Lee, has not yet said a single coherent thing about it.
Digital media has a superpower: it can connect advertisers directly with individual consumers whose online behaviour marks them as good targets for those advertisers. Broadcast TV and newspapers can’t do that.
But it’s not just social media that has the superpower. The apps and websites of mainstream media do too.
This is why media companies are refocusing to “digital first”.
Lack of revenue is crippling. It leads to staff layoffs, so there are fewer stories and less time available for quality control. It means broadcast programmes and print titles are shut down.
And it inhibits innovation, which is both essential and extremely difficult when there’s no money to employ new talent, to experiment and launch new ventures.
Next problem: Media consumption is changing fast. A podcast I took part in this week achieved a reasonable audience, but the reach will grow exponentially by the time they’ve finished slicing and dicing it into little pieces of content for a whole range of platforms.
Among people under 25, the most popular media form in the world right now is said to be the six-second video. On TikTok and Snapchat.
How do you package news into that? Should you even try?
And AI is on its way. Google “Wayne Brown Auckland port” at the moment and you’ll get a range of news reports and analysis from the media. How long before you’ll just get an AI-generated response?
In the search for relevance and profitability, not all the decisions media companies have made seem wise.
Why close community newspapers, when community bonds are so important? Why close Sunday and Fair Go, when they’re among the most-watched, loved and best-quality programmes you offer? You’re just telling readers and viewers you don’t care about them.
Why cut back Re:News, which in style and target market seems like the closest thing to the future TVNZ has?
Ah yes, but what about all that other bias: the opinion writing! You might think I’m biased about this myself, but I think it’s part of the media’s job to present analysis and well-argued points of view.
At the Herald, we value being a pluralist newspaper: along with the news, you can read all those points of view and make up your own mind.
How does media manage its way through all this? I don’t think anybody knows. But in my view, a couple of things are worth clinging to.
First, we’ll need to stake a bigger claim to the hearts and minds of people who believe in a decent, inclusive, cohesive society. Let’s be biased towards them.
Yes, that means we should stop paying so much attention to all the angry people shouting at us.
Related, we have to keep working long and hard with advertisers so they share the dream.
Second, we have to get very nimble with the technologies and methods by which we do journalism. We have to be constantly upping our skills, take risks, be brave.