What’s worse is they come from different times in the last twelve months.
In October the company proposed to cut staff in its regional newsrooms. Cities like Palmerston North, Nelson, and Timaru would have just 3 reporters to cover their region across the week, instead of 7. There was some plan to have a sort of head office regional reporting team to compliment that arrangement but I don’t know if that plan ever went ahead.
Then in May there were reports about 16 sub-editing jobs being made redundant.
Now the latest plan is for another 8 people in the so called National Correspondents team to go as well.
So that’s 36 job losses in the last 10 months, close to ten percent of the company’s journalists.
Then there’s been the departure of the new editor of the Post in Wellington, the Head of News and a couple of high profile, albeit very woke, senior reporters and columnists who specialized in climate and feminist issues.
All of which begs the question, just what kind of financial state is the company formerly known as Fairfax and INL really in?
The Executive Chair of Stuff Sinead Boucher was allowed to buy the company for a dollar in 2020. She made great pronouncements then about how wonderful it was to have the company back in local ownership again.
Plans for 10 percent of the company to be gifted to a trust for the benefit of staff, with a further opportunity for staff to buy more shares down the track were announced.
Nothing appears to have come of those plans.
As far as we know Sinead Boucher is still the beneficial owner of 100 percent of the company, although if it was only worth a dollar in 2020 it’s hard to see how the value has increased since.
It’s had a decent chunk of taxpayer money through the Public Interest Journalism Fund – somewhere in the vicinity of 6 million dollars but we haven’t seen any indication of the company’s financial performance since it was taken over by Sinead Boucher.
Even the country’s other large non-government owned and non-share market listed media companies Mediaworks and Discovery have their financials reported through the companies office.
That’s even if the news is bad and even if, as is the case with Mediaworks at the moment, the reporting is seriously overdue.
But we know nothing about how Stuff is doing. All we can do is hazard a guess the place is still losing truckloads.
The number and frequency of redundancies tell you that.
Peter Williams was a writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines. Peter blogs regularly on Peter’s Substack where this article was sourced.
Now the latest plan is for another 8 people in the so called National Correspondents team to go as well.
So that’s 36 job losses in the last 10 months, close to ten percent of the company’s journalists.
Then there’s been the departure of the new editor of the Post in Wellington, the Head of News and a couple of high profile, albeit very woke, senior reporters and columnists who specialized in climate and feminist issues.
All of which begs the question, just what kind of financial state is the company formerly known as Fairfax and INL really in?
The Executive Chair of Stuff Sinead Boucher was allowed to buy the company for a dollar in 2020. She made great pronouncements then about how wonderful it was to have the company back in local ownership again.
Plans for 10 percent of the company to be gifted to a trust for the benefit of staff, with a further opportunity for staff to buy more shares down the track were announced.
Nothing appears to have come of those plans.
As far as we know Sinead Boucher is still the beneficial owner of 100 percent of the company, although if it was only worth a dollar in 2020 it’s hard to see how the value has increased since.
It’s had a decent chunk of taxpayer money through the Public Interest Journalism Fund – somewhere in the vicinity of 6 million dollars but we haven’t seen any indication of the company’s financial performance since it was taken over by Sinead Boucher.
Even the country’s other large non-government owned and non-share market listed media companies Mediaworks and Discovery have their financials reported through the companies office.
That’s even if the news is bad and even if, as is the case with Mediaworks at the moment, the reporting is seriously overdue.
But we know nothing about how Stuff is doing. All we can do is hazard a guess the place is still losing truckloads.
The number and frequency of redundancies tell you that.
Peter Williams was a writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines. Peter blogs regularly on Peter’s Substack where this article was sourced.
4 comments:
That’s very interesting Peter and encouraging for someone who has watched the plummeting decay of the Christchurch Press. This once pretty respected newspaper has become the worst of the worst in an already diabolical mainstream media arena. How poorly served the NZ public has become since Ardern blatantly bought off the media to control the narrative with her propaganda, liking freedom of speech as weapons of war.
How refreshing it is to watch new platforms like Breaking Views flourish as its audience clambers for what we once had.
I for one no longer have a sunbscription to my local paper and do not view articles in Stuff for the very reason they are no longer bi-partisan journalists.
They have become quite clearly leftist hacks who denegrate their readers with a disclarity of reporting.
They either are one sided in their reportage or they ommit large amounts of evidence in their reporting.
They steadfastly support all things leftist while either ignoring or disparaging all things centre/right. Their ongoing sob stories about victims of everything from climate to race are outrageous in their misinformation which they seem comfortable in making.
They have become the clear winners in the art of gaslighting their readership at the same time as being qualified professionals in the dark art of disinformation and indeed propoganda.
They frankly are no longer a news agency they are much more like a state owned shill paper.
"So that’s 36 job losses in the last 10 months, close to ten percent of the company’s journalists."
Come on. They can do much better than that.
I'd happily double Sinead's money for her and buy Stuff for $2. Then I'd close it down and splash out on a $5 coffee and a scratchy to celebrate.
Despite truckloads of tax-payers money to prop it up, given by our corrupt Labour government to make them look good, they still can't attract a viable readership.
Clearly, Stuff is stuffed !
Good riddance to NZ's own Pravda !
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