New Zealand’s biggest news publisher Stuff has seen an “extraordinary” pace of growth in the past 18 months after splitting the business in two and launching digital subscriptions for its legacy newspapers.

In April last year, Stuff Ltd restructured into two distinct businesses with different strategies: Masthead Publishing, which launched digital subscriptions for its legacy titles, and Stuff Digital for the un-paywalled flagship Stuff website.

Digital subscriptions were first launched for The Post, The Press and the Waikato Times before six more regional brands and one national Sunday paper were added to the package. The main bundle, which gives access to all the company’s digital news publications together and also includes some magazines, costs NZ$149 (about £69) per year.

Digital and print subscribers now deliver almost double the reach of print alone. Although digital revenue is still smaller than print for these titles, the “pace of growth has been extraordinary,” head of content development Elise Johnson told Press Gazette.

Johnson said the decision to split the business into two divisions “was a logical one, as they both served very different purposes.

“Stuff, as the most-read news website in New Zealand, has a focus on reaching the widest audience possible, giving Kiwis reliable and fast news coverage. Whereas the newspapers focus on in-depth reporting on issues relevant to a smaller but highly engaged audience.”

The three Masthead Publishing titles all have “very different voices and audiences” and offer something complementary to the bundle. The Post is based in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, and has a wider national and political focus. The Press is based in Christchurch and is the voice for the South Island, while The Waikato Times website has a strong regional tone as it comprises a stable of local newspapers.

Johnson said the initial subscriptions launch was “carefully crafted to retain the existing readership and get them excited about the websites”. The three newspapers all gave prominence to information about the digital offer across their first three pages including letters from the editors.

The opportunity was also taken to modernise, including by changing the name of The Dominion Post to The Post with the slogan: “Under no-one’s dominion” as a reference to New Zealand’s past relationship with the UK.

“It also had a double meaning, that The Post now would be obtaining new digital subscribers and no longer hosting their articles online on Stuff – this is pretty empowering for the journalists and editors alike because our digital subscription growth is directly linked to our editorial content,” Johnson said.

According to Nielsen figures for September shared by Stuff, the digital subscription sites have a combined unique audience of just under 750,000 while the Stuff website itself has a unique audience of 2.2 million people. New Zealand has a population of about 5.5 million.

[Read more: How NZ news site Stuff is tackling news avoidance]

Shift from page views to subs as key metric drives in-depth reporting

Overall the Stuff group employs 350 journalists. The biggest strategic change in the Masthead Publishing newsrooms, Johnson said, was the shift in focus from page views to paid-for digital subscriptions.

“We can clearly see from the numbers that big breaking news brings in the page views (which is still important to us) but it’s the analysis, opinion, and exclusives around those news stories that motivate people to subscribe,” she said. “So we are prioritising that style of editorial content more and more.”

She added: “We all know how addictive page views are, and so initially the newsrooms did find it hard to shift to using subscriber acquisition as the new key metric. However, after seeing the uplift in subscriber numbers for their articles and the willingness of readers to pay online, there was a positive shift in the newsrooms.

“The act of paying for high-quality content is a powerful endorsement of what we do. Our journalists can see this is how our sector remains relevant and healthy in the digital age.”

Johnson also described the heritage newspapers as having “something of a start-up vibe when it comes to knowing that editorial lines will bring in the subscriptions”.

Johnson, who arrived at Stuff shortly before the new strategy went live, brought experience from UK subscription businesses The Telegraph and The New Statesman. Asked about the differences between the local news markets in the UK and New Zealand, she said: “New Zealand has a very loyal newspaper audience, although as with the UK, print is in steady decline.

“There is a dispersed population and the cost of delivery in NZ is substantial. Coupled with the increased cost of paper, the need to move to digital sooner rather than later is critical. To help migrate readers from print to digital, current print subscribers automatically get access to the websites. This is to encourage them to use digital products.”

She added: “The New Zealand market is very different market to the UK. There are only 5.5 million people, therefore, most people tend to have closer personal connections with small towns across the country and an interest in what is happening there. This means local stories resonate with people outside their locality. To leverage this feature, we have incorporated small local paper news as part of the wider subscription. This helps keep our local papers viable.

“Additionally, as the cost of living in New Zealand goes up, and a newspaper subscription might feel like more of a luxury, if people can no longer afford to pay for the paper we can offer them a digital-only subscription, which can be very appealing.”

Print remains “financially important to us as does delivering a high-quality product to our customers,” Johnson said. “However, we accept that there is an inexorable shift to digital news consumption, hence we want to form digital habits now with these websites.”

As Stuff is a private company it does not share its subscriber numbers or related figures.

But Belinda Lush, director of reader revenue, told Press Gazette that the “launch of our digital subscription products has delivered incremental revenue and audience growth.

“We see the growth of our digital subscriber base as a critical investment in the sustainability of independent journalism in New Zealand.”

Sharing her key lessons for other publishers, Johnson said: “The fundamentals of making any transition like this are to have a well-thought-out strategy, to communicate well with customers and take them with you, and to make sure the staff get and own the strategy.

“Of course, the financials need to be robust and the metrics for success crystal clear. In practice this is of course hard and needs determination, resilience and strong leadership,” she added, citing in particular chief executive Sinead Boucher, who bought Stuff for $1 in management buyout in 2020, and managing director Joanna Norris.

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New Zealand’s Stuff “abandoned” the traditional inverted pyramid structure for its “most contentious” stories as part of its battle against news avoidance.

Stuff.co.nz introduced a sentiment tracker asking readers for their emotional response to stories and discovered that changing the way certain stories were written had resulted in “much less negative” emotions.

Ben Haywood, chief product officer at parent company Stuff, set out the newsbrand’s response to news avoidance at the recent INMA World News Media Congress in London.

The traditional inverted pyramid approach to news begins with a ‘hard intro’ where readers are given the most important information first – the who, what, when, where and why of the story.

But for stories that could sow division, Stuff has instead decided to adopt a softer explainer-style approach that leads people into the most important and contentious elements of a story, including subjective takes on it, further down.

For example a story published on Monday about a politician’s online newsletter byline being edited to include a derogatory term began with the sentence: “Has National MP Maureen Pugh been the victim of a hack?” And another political story began simply: “Te Pāti Māori wants to set up its own parliament.”

Three-quarters of Kiwis avoid news to some extent

A report about trust in New Zealand news published in April found that about 75% of those surveyed said they actively avoided the news to some extent, up from 69% a year earlier.

Last year’s Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that 36% of people across markets said they avoided news often – two percentage points lower than in 2022 but seven percentage points higher than 2017.

Haywood said news avoidance was a “real threat” to Stuff’s mission “to help make New Zealand a better place”.

“You couldn’t get a better mission for an organisation. It requires, though, our journalism to have impact – and for our journalism to have impact it needs to reach people.”

He said Stuff data backs up the news avoidance report, with people “consuming fewer sorts of news and spending less time”.

One reason for the growth in news avoidance, he said citing the report, was that people were “finding us boring and repetitive, and a lack of variety from day to day and between publications.

“But also they’re finding us biased or opinionated and feel fed up by opinion masquerading as news or bias or perceived bias… But then also really importantly, they’re seeing us as a threat to their mental health.

“They’re seeing that negativity in our news either in the subject or the way that we’re handling it. And they consider us to be emphasising conflict and division.”

He continued: “So how are we thinking about that at Stuff? Less as a problem, but more as a signal from our audience that they want to have a healthier relationship with news.

“So our starting point is we think mindful news consumption is a good thing and we want to find ways to support them to have a better relationship with the news. How might we give people more control of their news experience? How might we ensure that people can trust Stuff with their mood and with their wellbeing?

“If the way that news avoidance is showing up in data in New Zealand is people choosing fewer sources, how can we make sure that we’re the source that they’re coming to?”

Stuff sentiment tracker gets thousands of reactions a day

This is why, Haywood said, Stuff developed a sentiment tracker that asks readers to choose an emotion at the bottom of each story – although it can be turned off for the most sensitive articles – to show how it made them feel. The options are “happy”, “angry”, “concerned”, “sad”, “like”, and “don’t care”.

People can also choose to write extra detail in response to the question: “Why did this story make you feel that way?”

“This is generating thousands of reactions every single day and a really deep data set for us to understand and a new human data point for our newsroom to consider alongside its other metrics,” Haywood said.

Generally speaking, stories about art, music and culture, cute animals, resilience and bittersweet stories make people feel happy. They like it when national rugby union team the All Blacks win, as well as stories about food, travel and local issues. They are concerned about climate change, housing affordability and the cost of living. Stories about the All Blacks losing, natural disasters, cost of living and floods make them feel sad. They feel angry about unfairness, injustice, government policies and agencies. And they claim not to care about celebrities.

Haywood said this data is used to look at how broader topics are performing and how people respond to them, as well as the more traditional data for individual stories.

“It also allows us to see how people or brands or issues in the news are changing over time,” he said.

“Because it collects this data in real time, it’s also allowing us to think about how we might provide more thoughtful recommendations to people based on how they feel. So for example, if we’re seeing that people are feeling really down and out after a tough climate story, how might we recommend something that’s a bit more proactive and solutions-focused as their next story.”

The data also has commercial applications, Haywood said, which is “really important to us, because we found that advertisers can be news avoiders too.

“That was displayed really graphically to us when last year we published a story that Google didn’t consider safe for its advertisers. It was on the homepage and our programmatic ad revenue dropped until we could find that story and figure out what the problem was.

“But we also see this anecdotally in our conversations with advertisers and their discomfort sometimes around some of the topics that we’re covering. The sentiment tracking data has allowed us to have a more sophisticated conversation with our advertisers about their brands, about their industries and how they’re being perceived in the market. And those have been great conversations that have led to new business for Stuff.”

Stuff ‘not shying away from difficult stories’

Editorially, the newsroom is “taking really great care not to amplify conflict” and this has meant a change in the way stories are written.

Haywood referred to a quote from Stuff.co.nz editor-in-chief Keith Lynch, who said: “Journalists have been taught for years to put the most important piece of information in the lead paragraph of a story. But sometimes this is swapped out for someone’s subjective view of an issue or topic.

“This can sometimes mean we are incentivising simplicity and amplifying conflict over helping our readers understand a complicated topic that impacts their lives.”

Haywood said: “So how does the newsroom deploy this? In a really, really simple way that didn’t even require the product team to build anything, which was awesome.

“They have abandoned the inverted pyramid for some of the most contentious stories and politics stories and planning stories, things that would often sow division, and taken more of a real-time explainer approach to structuring those stories.

“And it’s been really effective. The stories are getting just as much engagement, but the debate that’s happening in the comments is much more civil, and the responses we’re getting from a sentiment perspective are much less negative.”

However, Haywood added that these changes are “not about shying away from difficult stories.

“It’s about organising ourselves to hold people’s attention so when we do have difficult stories to tell they have impact.”

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One of New Zealand’s largest news organisations is in talks to sign a multi-million-dollar licensing deal with Google.

New Zealand Media and Entertainment (NZME) said on Friday morning (local time) that it has signed a “letter of intent” with Google and suggested it may also agree a deal with Facebook owner Meta.

The talks mean that NZME has broken ranks with other New Zealand publishers that intended to collectively bargain cash-for-content deals with Google and Meta.

Under the potential Google agreement, NZME would supply content from its titles – which include the New Zealand Herald and Businessdesk – for News Showcase, an aggregation service, and “for other news products and projects”.

It is not clear how much Google would be paying the company. But NZME said that if the deal goes through, it would expect its 2022 Ebitda to be between NZ$67-72m (£35-38m) – up from NZ$66m in 2021. An NZ media source speculated that it would be worth roughly NZ$5m a year to NZME.

On Friday morning in New Zealand, NZME’s share price was up 9%.

The company said it will now spend up to 90 days working out the final terms of the deal, which is expected to cover a period of at least five years.

NZME said it was also “currently in commercial discussions with Meta with regards to them supporting a number of digital transformation projects over the next year”.

The news appears to have come as a surprise to rival media organisations. As previously reported by Press Gazette, New Zealand’s News Publishers’ Association (NPA) had applied for the right to collectively negotiate deals with Google and Meta.

NZME said today that, as a result of signing a letter of intent with Google, it has notified the NPA that it will not be involved in collective bargaining talks unless its own deal falls through.

A senior source at a rival publisher said NZME’s announcement had come as a shock to the rest of the industry. They said NZ’s news media companies have been working towards negotiating collectively and described NZME’s breakaway as “snaky”.

“We wanted to avoid the Australian situation, where the largest companies were offered better deals on terms that independent publishers could never access. This looks like it gives NZME $5m to go shopping for our journalists before we agree a deal.”

The source added that, while large publishers will probably be offered deals as well, “smaller indie news organisations are likely to suffer”.

Publishers applied to New Zealand’s Commerce Commission for the collective bargaining rights in November.

They said they wanted the ability to strike licensing deals with Google and Meta and believed they could not fairly negotiate with the tech giants alone.

Publishers said that this was especially important because rival media companies in neighbouring Australia are benefiting from Canberra’s news media bargaining code. This forced Google and Meta to start paying for news content.

In February, Manatū Taonga, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, wrote to the Commerce Commission in support of NPA’s application. Its submission also suggested that the government may consider Australia-style legislation in the future.

“Financial agreements for news media content are primarily a commercial matter,” it said. “News content has value best determined by the market. However, due to the lack of progress in commercial discussions, Manatū Taonga is considering options to support New Zealand media companies to reach commercial arrangements with digital platforms, should financial compensation not materialise through negotiations.

“The development of government regulation is time consuming and requires considerable public funding and resources. Developing effective regulatory solutions commonly takes years.”

Following the NZME announcement, Caroline Rainsford, Google New Zealand’s country director, said: “We are proud to support original, trusted, and quality journalism and are pleased to reach an agreement with NZME as a major New Zealand publishing partner. This partnership will support the future of journalism in New Zealand, including through projects that will contribute to the digital transformation of one of the country’s leading integrated media companies.”

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A group of New Zealand news publishers has applied to the island country’s competition regulator for the power to engage in collective bargaining with Google and Facebook.

The Kiwi journalism industry is one of several around the world that is seeking to follow the example of Australia, where regulatory changes have enabled news companies to strike lucrative cash-for-content deals with the tech giants.

In New Zealand, according to one publisher spoken to by Press Gazette, the need for such deals is made particularly urgent because of the situation in Australia. Duncan Greive, founder and publisher of the Spinoff, explained that his outlet and others compete directly with Australian news companies that are benefiting from big tech payments now. 

As in Australia, the tech giants are likely to lobby against any regulatory intervention in this area.

Facebook – or Meta, as it is now known at a corporate level – has already come out fighting in response to the application. In a submission to the Commerce Commission, Meta claimed that news is “highly substitutable” on its platforms. The company made the same claim in Australia during Canberra’s news media bargaining code consultation.

The New Zealand publishing group’s application to the Commerce Commission makes dozens of references to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), which was the architect of new legislation in Australia.

New Zealand’s government, led by Jacinda Ardern, does not appear to have immediate plans to introduce a version of Australia’s news media bargaining code.

But media minister Kris Faafoi recently called on Google and Facebook to “engage with New Zealand media entities to reach meaningful, fair and equitable arrangements for content usage”.

Publishers believe that collective bargaining power would help them secure such deals. Currently, New Zealand competition laws prevent publishers from banding together.

Why publishers want the power to negotiate together

The application for collective bargaining was made to the Commerce Commission by the News Publishers’ Association of New Zealand (NPA), a membership organisation that includes New Zealand Herald publisher NZME, Stuff and Allied Press.

As well as negotiating for its members, the NPA said that it would welcome participation from other Kiwi news publishers. The Spinoff, run by Duncan Greive, was listed as a non-member outlet that has already shown interest in collaborating with the NPA.

Since the application was filed on 25 November, New Zealand broadcasters have written to the Commerce Commission suggesting that they too should be allowed to be part of the collective negotiation. They would be excluded under the original wording of the NPA’s application.

The NPA-led group is specifically seeking ten-year authorisation to collectively negotiate with Google and Facebook “to secure fair compensation to individual publishers for the content the participants produce that appears on [the] digital platforms”.

The NPA believes it needs these powers because “there is a symbiotic (albeit significantly unbalanced) relationship between” Google and Facebook – known collectively as the duopoly because of their dominance of the online advertising market – and the country’s news media.

“Approximately only ten cents in every dollar spent on digital advertising in New Zealand goes to New Zealand news producers that invest in producing journalism and news content,” the NPA said.

“This lack of fair and appropriate remuneration to [news publishers], in particular in light of the significant reductions in advertising revenue as a result of successive Covid-19 lockdowns, is one of the factors imperilling the viability and sustainability of the [news media] sector.”

The NPA further noted that publishers are now having to use editorial resources to “combat disinformation/malinformation” circulating on platforms associated with Google (which owns YouTube) and Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp).

The group believes that collective negotiation power will help publishers “achieve more efficient and effective negotiations” with the tech giants, and “may enable members to become more informed and improve their input into contracts due to members benefiting from greater levels of resourcing and expertise available”.

The application also stated that joint negotiations would help benefit “smaller regional and community titles” that might otherwise not have the resources to strike deals.

Collective bargaining reform was a key component of Australia’s code. It is also being sought by publishers in other countries including the US (through the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act) and Canada (which is expected to pass its own Australia-style legislation in the near future).

The Australian rules have enabled different organisations – including Country Press Australia and the Public Interest Publishers Alliance – to negotiate with Google and Facebook on behalf of small publishing members.

‘Once you do it in Australia, you have to do it in New Zealand’

To better understand the dynamics at play in New Zealand, Press Gazette spoke to Duncan Greive, the founder and publisher of the Spinoff, which is not an NPA member but is part of the application.

Greive says the Spinoff has benefited from significant financial support from Facebook through the Accelerator programme. But he does not believe these relationships should stop the New Zealand media from pursuing cash-for-content deals with the tech giants.

Greive also explains that the situation in Australia – where many publishers have already signed licensing deals with Google and Facebook – has created a competitive issue for the Kiwi media.

“Why we’re doing this now is because of what happened in Australia earlier this year,” he said. “There is a close economic relationship between New Zealand and Australia – we share a huge amount both culturally as well as legally. Fundamentally, there are half a million New Zealanders – equivalent to 10% of our population – who live in Australia.”

He suggests that the tech companies would like “what happened in Australia to be unique to Australia. But you can’t do that. You can’t do that to a much bigger economy that is so closely linked to ours – pour hundreds of millions of dollars into it and not expect that to have an impact here.

“Some of the people who got those settlements – most notably, the Guardian Australia – are literally on the ground here. They have small but growing teams and are actively selling memberships and audiences here. So the idea that this is a microcosm off to the side, and has no relationship to New Zealand, just doesn’t stand up.”

A Press Gazette investigation into Google News Showcase recently reported that Guardian Australia had signed a Showcase-related deal with Google worth an estimated AU$5m ($3.6m/£2.7m) per year. Australia’s largest news companies – News Corp, Nine, Seven West and ABC – are each thought to have signed deals worth tens of millions of dollars a year.

“Australia and New Zealand are basically one big economy,” says Greive. “You can’t just do it for those six states and then just not do it for New Zealand.

“Our journalism’s suffering enough without having the Murdochs and the Nines and Seven Wests with big war chests, saying, ‘You know what? We need these kind of journalists [in New Zealand], take them over.’

“That’s just not sustainable. Once you do it in Australia, you have to do it in New Zealand. You can say we don’t want to do it anywhere else in the world – and good luck to you – but you can’t do it in Australia and not New Zealand.”

Beyond the Commerce Commission’s judgment on his group’s application for collective bargaining, Greive is confident that his country – and others – will in time pass legislation similar to Australia’s news media bargaining code.

“I think it’s inevitable – it’s coming everywhere,” he says.

“We have a long history of looking at Australian legislation and saying something much like that could be created here.”

Facebook fightback: News is ‘highly substitutable’ for us

It is not clear how long the Commerce Commission will take to decide on the NPA group’s application. After the filing was made on 25 November, a consultation period was launched.

Within days, broadcasters Television New Zealand, Radio New Zealand and Discovery each filed suggested amendments to the application that would allow them to become part of negotiations with Google and Facebook.

On Wednesday 8 December, Meta also filed a response to the application, challenging several claims made by the NPA.

Meta’s arguments mirror many of those it made in the run-up to Australia introducing its news media bargaining code. The tech giant claims “news represents a very small proportion of content that people see when they use Facebook”. It told the Commerce Commission that news is “highly substitutable” for Facebook.

Meta went on to say that, because the company recognises that “news is a public good”, it has launched several financial initiatives – including the Accelerator programme – for the benefit of publishers.

Meta specifically referenced the success of the Spinoff, which has been the beneficiary of Accelerator funding, in its submission to the Commerce Commission. (Greive’s response to this: “They seem to think there’s a contradiction in our participation in and enthusiasm for the Accelerator programme, which I think fundamentally misunderstands what we’re talking about. I.e. training and intermittent and contingent grants, while very helpful, have only a limited impact on our ability to meet the boring realities of paying the humans to create journalism.”)

The tech company suggested it was inappropriate for the NPA to reference the findings of Australia’s ACCC. “Wholesale comparisons to Australia, without detailed consideration, are not appropriate,” it said. 

Meta also challenged the NPA’s reference to the cost that publishers rack up by fighting falsehoods that spread on social media.

“We note that the application refers to costs that are borne by New Zealand publishers to counter misinformation on our services,” Meta said.  “To assist the NZCC in its consideration of the application, we have outlined the considerable work we do to combat misinformation online.

“This includes policies and proactive detection technology to prohibit and remove fake accounts and harmful health misinformation, increasingly before people are exposed to it. It also includes our investment in third-party fact-checking and systems to reduce the distribution of content rated as false by our fact-checkers, and products to inform New Zealanders about misinformation and provide more context around the content they see on Facebook.”

The New Zealand media is likely to take issue with this characterisation.

In his interview with Press Gazette, conducted before Meta’s document was filed, Greive said: “We had a massacre – our worst act of modern terrorism – livestreamed on Facebook.

“We, two weeks ago, had a huge, thousand-strong march on Parliament of anti-vaxxers who have been radicalised on social media saying that they want to kill politicians and kill journalists.

“I feel like that’s material to this case.”

Photo credit: REUTERS/Mike Hutchings

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The head of the BBC’s Local Democracy Reporter scheme has said he is confident other countries with follow with similar schemes of their own after media organisations in New Zealand launched a version of the project.

Eight journalists will be recruited in New Zealand through a NZ$1m pilot scheme launched last week by public service broadcaster Radio New Zealand, broadcast funding agency NZ On Air, and an alliance of publishers through the country’s Newspaper Publishers’ Association.

In New Zealand, as in the UK, the reporters will be required to cover publicly-funded local authorities, such as councils, council committees and health boards, in their roles.

They are employed by a host publisher but expected to make their copy available to other eligible media organisations who sign up, mirroring the set up between the BBC and local news publishers in the UK.

Just under 150 local journalists were recruited under the Local News Partnership between the BBC and the News Media Association in the UK.

The first LDR was appointed in Kent in January 2018 and within 12 months the scheme’s reporters had filed 50,000 news stories.

Matthew Barraclough (pictured), head of local news partnerships at the BBC, told Press Gazette he expects other countries to follow in the UK’s footsteps, saying the LDR scheme is a good example of the corporation’s wider role to take creative risks.

The BBC has had “plenty of conversations” with other public service broadcasters and news organisations around the world who are keen to learn from its experiences, he added.

“We believe local news is a public good in any country and so we’re delighted if other places can learn from us and use anything we’re doing as a model to take action. New Zealand is the first, but I’m confident others will follow,” he said.

“A number of countries in Europe, North America and down under have been watching the LDRS with interest, because the issues it’s trying to address are common is so many media markets.

“It is a tribute to the reporters, their employers and the wider partnership that the model can be adopted elsewhere in the world.”

Explaining why the scheme is working so well and what makes it replicable, Barraclough said: “The key point about the scheme is the work of the Local Democracy Reporters supports a broad base of local news organisations, not just the ones that employ them. So any money spent on a scheme of this nature creates a lot of benefit.

“The service also targets the parts of public life that are arguably hardest to resource and yet also essential in a healthy democracy.”

New Zealand Herald editor Murray Kirkness, editor-in-chief of newsrooms at Stuff.com Bernadette Courtney and RNZ news director Alex van Wel visited ten of the UK LDR scheme’s local news partners over a week in January.

They visited the Hackney Citizen in London, Cambridge Evening News, Get West London, Glasgow Evening Times, Edinburgh Evening News, Manchester Evening News, Northampton Chronicle & Echo, Free Radio in Birmingham; BBC London radio and KM FM radio station in Kent.

In New Zealand, the funding is guaranteed for 12 months from the one-off NZ$6m RNZ/NZ On Air Innovation Fund, with later funding dependent on the success of the pilot.

NZ On Air chief executive Jane Wrightson called the scheme a “timely intervention”.

“NZ On Air’s role is to ensure public media funding addresses gaps in the market,” she said.

“It has become increasingly clear that New Zealanders want and need more reporting on the issues at home, that affect them and that the commercial news market is finding it difficult to meet these needs.”

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According to the Herald, staff photographer Glenn Jeffrey’s shirt was torn in half in what he claims was an unprovoked attack.

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