Stuff, New Zealand’s biggest news organisation, reaches 82% of the population each month – an audience of 2.2 million. Last year, it “consciously uncoupled” the newsroom into two distinct business units: Stuff Digital and Masthead Publishing.
The Masthead operation produces journalism tailored for its subscribers in key metropolitan and local areas.
Stuff Digital provides news for the country’s biggest news website, Stuff.nz, and produces a daily news bulletin for TV Three, the entertainment channel owned by Warner Bros. Discovery.
Stuff Digital is determinedly growing its direct relationship with readers – mindful of new legislation, similar to a law in Canada and Australia, working its way through the country’s Parliament.
If passed, it could lead to platforms being required to pay news organisations for access to news. Google has already signalled it will no longer index news organisations in New Zealand if this goes ahead.
On the sidelines of WAN-IFRA’s Asian Media Leaders Summit in Singapore last week, Keith Lynch, Editor-in-Chief of Stuff Digital, spoke of his editorial priorities amid the challenges in the New Zealand news market.
As Stuff’s former explainer editor, explain the current state of the New Zealand news industry.
Kevin Lynch: Economic conditions for the media are challenging. This year Newshub, the news service owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, was closed down.
Now TVNZ, one of the public broadcasters (along with RNZ), has announced it is cutting 50 jobs.
It’s been hard for the commercial players; the big ones being Stuff, TVNZ, and The New Zealand Herald.
Radio New Zealand, the public broadcaster, has had a significant cash injection recently, so they’ve been fairly insulated. But for the rest of us, it has been a challenging market.
We’ve been honest with both our staff and audience about where we’re at.
And we know the most important thing is still delivering trusted journalism that matters for New Zealand..
New Zealand’s biggest news websites, particularly Stuff and The Herald, are incredibly well read. There’s been talk recently of a decline in trust in media here, and we take this seriously, but our audience is really strong.
Stuff is the biggest news website and the seventh biggest website in New Zealand.
We are not immune to commercial pressures, but we still have a loyal audience and a really strong readership that is loyal to us. This presents opportunities.
What’s working for Stuff?
We’ve had a really big year. We started off by re-platforming Stuff; we put it on a new tech stack to make it more sustainable and flexible.
After Newshub closed, we submitted the winning pitch to Warner Bros. Discovery to deliver a transformed 6pm news broadcast for TV Three – and went through a hugely transformative project pretty much within two months.
We developed a TV news bulletin, which we now do from our newsroom every weekday for an hour, and every weekend for half an hour.
To get there, we hired a range of specialist staff, developed a studio, developed a look and feel, and developed new workflows.
Integrating, essentially, a different newsroom into the Stuff newsroom was a hugely challenging project but one that has created new revenue streams for us.
We have also been developing some really interesting commercial partnerships: we just partnered with Team New Zealand and the Americas Cup to livestream the yachting race in Barcelona; we embarked on a commercial mission to find the right sponsors for when we broadcast all of those races live on Stuff.
Last year, we delivered live coverage of 12 Rugby World Cup games during the World Cup in France, including live coverage of the All Blacks in France game. This was unusual for a news organisation, but we decided to broadcast live with the support of commercial partners and other key stakeholders.
We also did it for the FIFA Women’s World Cup, held in Australia and New Zealand, where we livestreamed 26 games, strategically positioning it on the site to leverage all of our other journalism – be that sport or lifestyle content.
The masthead or publishing arm – essentially our legacy newspapers and newspaper products – is also growing its subscriber base, and converting print-only users to digital, which gives us different revenue streams.
So it’s been a hard year, but I’m optimistic that we have managed the newsroom really well, with the right reporters in the right place, a strong editorial strategy that is aligned with our resources, and we have alternative revenue streams.
So, I’m also optimistic because our audience is very, very strong, and they love what Stuff offers.
Given the closure of news organisations, how do you balance the national agenda with local coverage; what’s your focus?
Stuff very much covers the biggest stories happening right now in New Zealand. That is our focus. With regards to local coverage, Stuff will, of course, also look to cover the biggest stories in key local markets such as Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland.
One of the wonders of Stuff is that the biggest story of the day can be a global headline, like the US election, or it could be a rather light or quirky local story.
Are there any topics that are really resonating or that you’re doing really well?
For one, the foundational part of what we do: live and breaking news. This is hugely important. We spend a lot of energy and time ensuring we’re fast and accurate
I like to think that if something major is happening outside your door, you can read about it on Stuff.
This year we’ve been doing a lot more reporting about how and where New Zealanders are choosing to live, and how that has changed. This also touches on property which NZers really care about.
For example, we’ve been doing a lot of reporting around suburban areas around Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington that are now really flourishing after previously floundering, which I think reflects some societal changes around working from home, or flexible working, or people just not wanting to live in big cities.
We’ve also made efforts to ensure our politics coverage is less confrontational and have focused as much as possible on the idea of keeping our audience ‘informed.’ We have leaned into specific formats, moving on from ‘reverse pyramid’ style reporting, to allow our reporters to deliver a broader and balanced picture to our readers.
Have you made decisions about what not to cover?
This is always challenging, because Stuff can be seen as all things for all people, as we deliver to a very wide national audience.
But we need to pick our battles and choose stories that align best with our editorial priorities, which are what we believe matter most for our audience.
We’ve also had to be quite smart about the formats we use to tell stories. We’ve obviously been using the Three News integration as a step to allow us to do better video, and execute the right kind of video for Stuff and the right kind of video for news.
Do you use video with every story?
Ideally yes… I ask editors to look for really good visual opportunities with every story. While producing a TV-style package with every story is not realistic, there are different and engaging ways to tell visual stories. Social media has taught us this.
Since we’ve integrated the TV bulletin, we’ve helped upskill our team to be more comfortable, for example, doing live crosses and pieces to camera. A lot of our reporters have embraced that – which was probably once unthinkable for a lot of them.
This gives us huge flexibility in our video storytelling.
And do you do TikTok?
We are on TikTok. Instagram, too. But we see direct audiences as the most important, and we want to grow that.
The post Editor to Editor: Finding the right Stuff to keep news alive in New Zealand appeared first on WAN-IFRA.
Source: Editor to Editor: Finding the right Stuff to keep news alive in New Zealand
