Moves to cut staff and outsource production are causing upheaval in New Zealand. Is it the end of quality journalism or just another change with which to contend, asks Martin Hirst. Illustration by Rod Emmerson.

It’s probably not a good time to be an expat Aussie journalist trying to establisha career in the New Zealand media, but that’s what former senior Nine Network reporter and editor Anthony Flannery is trying to do.
Flannery has taken over as head of news and current affairs at TVNZ, the state-owned hybrid New Zealand broadcaster, at a time when the network is in financial trouble and shedding staff at a rate of knots. It’s also attempting to launch a new 24-hour news channel and bed down its on-demand television-over-the-web service. And if that’s not enough to give Flannery a headache, TVNZ is also involved with a consortium that’s just established a new satellite delivery service for free-to-air programming in a market dominated by Murdoch’s SkyTV.

In the past few months, TVNZ has put off several news reporters and is aiming to cut the newsroom staff by about 60 nationwide. Morale at the network is said to be close to rock-bottom as the news service attempts to do more with less and audiences and advertising revenue continue to sink.

It’s also not a good time to be a large Australian-based media multinational operating in New Zealand, particularly if your Irish parent company is squeezing you for more shareholder value and looking to shave production costs.

Australian Provincial Newspapers (APN), publisher of The New Zealand Herald and a stable of regional papers and magazines, has embarked on a cost-cutting strategy that involves outsourcing much of its subediting to the Australian company Pagemasters, which has set up an operation in an Auckland suburb.

According to one well connected industry insider, both scenarios indicate a series of “twilight days” for the New Zealand news media that could signal a long-term decline in the credibility of journalism and the dumbing down of the news agenda to a steady diet of “crime, sport and celebrity”.

He thinks suggestions that the APN outsourcing means the immediate end of quality New Zealand journalism are “overblown”, and notes that since the industry embraced digital production technologies in the late 1980s there have been few periods of stability and a lot more times of rapid change and uncertainty. In this insider’s view, APN and the wider media will “weather the storm”.

However, this guarded optimism is not shared by others, including leading unionist and New Zealand Herald social affairs writer Simon Collins. Collins and several of his colleagues took their concerns to the stage at the New Zealand Qantas Media Awards presentation in Wellington on May 18.

Carrying a large banner saying “Save Our Subs”, Collins, New Zealand Herald Pacific affairs reporter Angela Gregory and health reporter Martin Johnston, Canvas deputy editor Claire Harvey (another expat Aussie) and Wanganui Chronicle reporter Anne-Marie Emerson jumped on stage at the start of the evening to protest at the APN outsourcing move.

Collins got a minute into his prepared speech – saying it was inappropriate to be celebrating excellence in journalism while employers were cutting editorial staffing – before the lights and audio were turned off. (Footage of the incident is on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F-FEorzf5c.)

APN plans to replace about 70 in-house subeditors across all its titles with a contract service managed by Pagemasters. Critics have described the move as a “one-size-fits-all” approach that will damage localism in APN’s regional newspapers and shatter the credibility of its mastheads and magazines. At least one APN New Zealand executive has said that although the decision makes financial sense for shareholders, it does not sit well with him journalistically.

Everyone involved acknowledges that the subs’ bench is one of the most expensive parts of the production process, but our well-placed insider says if the savings are invested in more reporting staff, the change won’t necessarily be bad.

“Most journalists working on newspapers in New Zealand today have less than five years’ experience and they are underpaid,” he says. In the past, he continues, this was offset by the experienced subs’ bench, but now even this important knowledge base is disappearing. And while outsourcing may well work for “readymade pages”, it raises a series of technical issues if they don’t fit the news hole or can’t work around local advertising, which is the lifeblood of the regional press.

Other New Zealand media companies with strong Australian connections are shifting and changing, too. Australian Consolidated Press (ACP), which is New Zealand’s biggest magazine publisher, has announced it will merge the editorial departments of two leading titles, Metro and North & South. And CanWest, which has interests in Australian radio and television, has recently sold its New Zealand operations to an Australian-based equity capital group.

While Australian companies have always been big players in the New Zealand media market, this current surge in cross-Tasman activity appears, from an Auckland perspective, like a tsunami.

In the eyes of Collins, this wave of change has the potential to drown any democratic media voices across the Shaky Isles. “We see the proposed cuts at TVNZ and APN, the ACP editorial merger and the sale of CanWest’s media assets to an equity capitalist as a fundamental attack on news quality that will lead to less in-depth coverage, less accuracy and, more important, stories left untold,” he says.

“As journalists we feel a responsibility to speak out in the interests of the New Zealand public and demand media companies invest in good journalism so we can fulfil our proper democratic function.”

The EPMU is currently running the OurMedia! campaign for quality news media For more information about the campaign go to www.OurMedia.org.nz.