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How COVID-19 changed Fresh Zealand’s media landscape in 2020
Jul
When Bauer Media announced the closure its Fresh Zealand warehouse operations just a week into the Level 4 lockdown in early April, things looked ominous for local media. Revenues and editorial were already shrinking. It was demanding to see any improvement.
But while the full picture is still unclear, it seems that most of Fresh Zealand’s TV, radio and print media have come through the COVID-19 crisis battered and bruised – but alive. Sadly, an estimated 637 media jobs have been lost in the process.
In low, 2020 brought a major restructuring to the Fresh Zealand media market.
Perhaps most importantly, as the tenth New Zealand Media Ownership Report there are more independent news outlets operating in the market today than at any other time in the past decade.
This trend was highlighted by the Australian company Nine Entertainment selling (for NZ$1) its Fresh Zealand subsidiary Stuff to CEO Sinead Boucher. The sale returned the country’s largest digital news platform and 12 national and regional newspapers to local ownership.
Massacre in the warehouse
Many of these structural changes to the country’s media landscape would have happened anyway, but the pandemic has certainly accelerated some decisions.
Bauer is a case in point. The company blamed the shutdown on the “solemn economic impact of COVID-19,” but it had been struggling with failing advertising revenues long before the pandemic hit. That was it got worse when in March and April during the lockdown, magazines were not classified as imperative goods and services.
So the farmer closed titles in Australia, but in June the company’s Australasian warehouses were sold to Australian private equity group Mercury Capital. The up-to-date owner relaunched Woman’s Day, Fresh Zealand Woman’s Weekly, Australian Women’s Weekly NZ, Your Home & Garden, NZ Listener and Kia Ora.
Later, the flagship journalistic titles North & South and Metro appeared. sold to independent publishers and reissued in November.
Government lifeline
It can be said that the country’s media survived the pandemic with a little facilitate from friends and even enemies: the government, readers and Google.
In April, the government announced $50 million media crisis relief package — the lion’s share went to the broadcaster.
Read more: Funding public interest journalism requires imaginative solutions. Tax relief for news media could work
However, most news organisations in the country received support from the government’s wage subsidy programme, including NZ Media and Entertainment (NZME) and Stuff – the two largest publishers of print and online news.
Without this government support, it is clear that many news organisations would have been hit harder. The NZ Herald received $8.6m in wage subsidies and Stuff $6.2m. State broadcaster TVNZ received $5.9m and private equity firm MediaWorks $3.6m.
This program has helped many smaller news outlets stay afloat, and some have even grown.
Google Factor
Some news agencies received additional funding from Google Emergency Aid Fund for Journalists — somewhat ironic, given the digital giant’s influence on advertising revenues in established media (hence the term “frenemy”).
A total of 76 news organizations across the Pacific have taken advantage of Google’s “short-term relief.” While smaller publishers welcomed the move, the money spent on the outlet was unlikely to be a major drain on Google’s budget—it was more of a gesture of goodwill.
Read more: Courting the Chameleon: How the US Election Reveals Rupert Murdoch’s Political Views
For example, the Queenstown-based non-profit media organization Point received $5,000. For comparison, in the first half of 2020, search engines — mainly Google — received Fresh Zealand’s digital advertising revenues total $361 million, with social media platforms accounting for 72% of the country’s total digital advertising spend.
For my part, Google says did more for journalism in the country than just providing financial assistance and “training almost 600 journalists in dozens of newsrooms across the country.”
More traffic and more donations
News companies have also been coping with little facilitate from readers during the pandemic. The NZ Herald reported “total number of readers of the printed and digital versions […] at a record level and newspaper readership [at] “the highest level in almost a decade.”
Independent digital news services Editorial Team AND Spin off also saw increases in readership, donations, and subscriptions. Web analytics confirm that overall traffic to news sites has increased significantly during the pandemic.
Read more: Social media disinformation fuels vaccine hesitancy: Global study shows link
According to data analysts Similar networkTotal visits to the NZ Herald website rose from 36.5 million in May to 46.4 million in August. Similarly, total visits to Stuff rose from 39.7 million in May to 43 million in August, while The Spinoff rose from 2.4 million in May to 2.9 million in July.
These positive changes have been offset by many negative developments. Many commercial newsrooms have shrunk significantly and hundreds of jobs have been lost. The full effects of the pandemic will not be known for some time, and it is hard to predict what the industry will look like in 12 months.
But one thing is clear: if Fresh Zealand wants a robust media system to become part of its democracy, more government support will be needed in the coming years.
