Last week, Duncan Greive announced an urgent fund-raising drive as a do-or-die moment for the The Spinoff, which he founded in 2014. At the very least, unless enough money rolled in from readers, more staff would lose their jobs in addition to the few roles that had already been disestablished.
He and the two other senior staffers who signed the open letter identified The Spinoff’s three “main buckets” of revenue — advertising and commercial partnerships; readers’ contributions; and taxpayer funding. The buckets were leaking badly.
The writers seemed particularly aggrieved that the taxpayer funding “bucket” had apparently dried up. NZ on Air, they said, had turned down funding for proposals put to it by The Spinoff in the last two of its funding rounds.
“Just last Friday, we discovered that all our key competitors had projects funded, but all our proposals were declined. This is the second straight NZ On Air funding round where this has happened.
“Meanwhile, our Creative NZ funding has been halved this year, and the Public Interest Journalism Fund, which currently supports two roles within our small team of 31, is due to finish next year. While the state is under no obligation to fund our work, it’s hard to watch as other platforms continue to be heavily backed while your own funding stops dead.”
Greive’s appeal for financial support from readers got plenty of publicity. RNZ ran an article headed “No plan B to save The Spinoff”. The NZ Herald’s regular Media Insider column described the letter as “an SOS plea to its readers”.
On Friday, The Platform’s Sean Plunket interviewed Greive. A few minutes into the interview, Plunket asked: “How much government or taxpayer funding from any source would you estimate The Spinoff has received in its lifetime?”
Greive was obviously very reluctant to answer the question. He said he didn’t want to “get into the weeds” and instead proceeded to explain how NZ on Air funding worked.
Plunket pressed him further for a straight answer.
Greive: “It isn’t money [going] directly to The Spinoff. A relatively small figure… maybe one or two million [dollars].”
When Plunket asked if it was as much as $10 million, Greive insisted the amount of taxpayer cash his organisation had received was “significantly less”.
Clearly uncomfortable with the line of questioning, he claimed taxpayer funding didn’t always go to The Spinoff itself but often to production houses — just as money granted to TVNZ might go to South Pacific Pictures or Great Southern Television to create programmes for TVNZ to broadcast.
“For most part the money goes to an external production company… which are literally separate businesses.”
That is true of a small number of the grants made to The Spinoff. One, for $698,947, was earmarked in 2017 for Great Southern Television to produce Spinoff TV, which turned out to be one of the nation’s most notable entertainment embarrassments.
Some smaller production houses were also given funding via The Spinoff for specific projects. But they represent only about a fifth of the amount of money that NZ on Air clearly records as being granted to The Spinoff/Hexwork or Hexwork Productions.
NZ on Air’s website has an easy-to-use search function for finding out how much money individual media organisations have been granted. If you type in “The Spinoff”, 52 grants dating back to 2016 are recorded. The total comes to $10,790,828.
Even generously subtracting the taxpayer money that enabled The Spinoff to commission work from external sources (and thereby get “free” content), the total that NZ on Air specifies as going to The Spinoff/Hex Work, and Hexwork Productions comes to an impressive $8,947,080. And that, of course, leaves aside the question of how much of the funding assigned to out-of-house collaborators is paid to The Spinoff for its part in developing the projects.
There have been other smaller grants from various government agencies. In 2021, the Ministry of Culture and Heritage granted $172,556 to Hex Work Ltd as part of a subscription initiative that boosted the finances of nine selected media outlets — including Newsroom, NBR and BusinessDesk — during Covid.
And Creative NZ has supported The Spinoff’s books pages since 2017, with amounts between $25,000 and $54,000 a year.
So, the correct answer to Plunket’s question about how much government or taxpayer funding has been provided to The Spinoff is evidently a lot more than the “one to two million dollars” Greive estimated. The “ballpark” figure that Plunket requested is somewhere around $10 million.
If Greive remains adamant The Spinoff has received no more than $2 million, he really should inform the Taxpayers’ Union, which seems to believe it has received many millions more than he is willing to acknowledge. As long ago as July 2021, the TU recorded that $6,117,198 in taxpayer funding from NZ On Air had been awarded to The Spinoff in the four and a half years from its first grant in December 2016.
The TU has been watching The Spinoff’s use of taxpayer funds for some time. In 2018, it objected to Inland Revenue paying the website $40,000 for a series of columns titled “Tax Heroes”.
Executive director Jordan Williams said, “The Tax Heroes series was a terrible use of $40,000 in taxpayer money. The articles were effectively taxpayer-funded, pro-tax propaganda, with the first article pushing the Orwellian message that ‘Tax is love’.”
Williams also claimed The Spinoff had breached its agreement with IRD to be politically neutral by promoting policies such as a capital gains tax, which the Greens backed. He concluded: “This kind of taxpayer-funded media rort may keep quasi-news platforms like The Spinoff afloat, but it does no good for ordinary taxpayers.”
The state’s largesse, it seems, often goes unacknowledged. When Greive announced he was stepping down from his role as CEO of The Spinoff in January last year to return to writing, he explained his reasons for quitting in an open letter published on his website.
His potted history of the site raised eyebrows among some readers given he attributed its success entirely to his staff’s ingenuity and the support of members.
“Using nothing but our own will and ingenuity we built [The Spinoff and its associated arms Hex Work Productions and Daylight], which now reach hundreds of thousands of people every month... We also went from being a largely commercially funded organisation to one which relied on its members for the largest part of its income.”
Taxpayers generally don’t like their extensive cash contributions to an organisation being overlooked or minimised. And especially when that organisation makes a habit of vilifying ordinary people who are obliged to support it through their taxes.
In one episode of Alice Snedden’s series Bad News — funded by $381,026
of public money — she assessed New Zealand as “racist as fuck” and opined: “Racism may be white people’s worst invention.”
Those who object to any aspect of transgender ideology and the denial of biological reality can expect to be accused of being “transphobic”. Indeed, when the new Chief Human Rights Commissioner, Stephen Rainbow, and Race Relations Commissioner Melissa Derby were appointed in August, The Spinoff’s editor, Madeleine Chapman, suggested they were both guilty of transphobia.
Needless to say, anyone who questions the current orthodoxy about the causes of climate change is automatically classed pejoratively by The Spinoff’s writers as a “climate-change denier”.
The public certainly didn’t hold back on social media last week when news of The Spinoff’s possible demise was broadcast. It became clear very quickly just how much people deeply resent being forced to pay for their own public vilification.
Independent journalist Chris Lynch, from Christchurch, made no secret of his disdain while taking part in The Platform’s Free Speech Fridays segment: “It’s just lovely to hear of The Spinoff’s downfall… I can’t wait for it to close.”
He said he had “nothing but contempt” for it, describing it as a “disgrace” that was “nasty”, “divisive” and “had done nothing for democracy”.
He particularly objected to what he saw as The Spinoff’s willingness to imply that ordinary New Zealanders — including himself — were somehow complicit in the mosque murders of 2019.
Amongst an avalanche of hostile reactions on social media, a common strand of objections centred on The Spinoff’s perceived role as a mouthpiece for the policies and values of the Ardern-Hipkins government — not least for enthusiastically supporting its heavy-handed management of Covid-19.
Greive told Plunket the accusation of left-wing bias was untrue but later made a revealing statement: “The government procures all kinds of things… and one of the things it procures is content it would like to see in the world.”
That sounds awfully like an inadvertent admission that The Spinoff was happy to accept millions of public money to further the Labour government’s policy aims.
Graham Adams is an Auckland-based freelance editor, journalist and columnist. This article was originally published by ThePlatform.kiwi and is published here with kind permission.
“Just last Friday, we discovered that all our key competitors had projects funded, but all our proposals were declined. This is the second straight NZ On Air funding round where this has happened.
“Meanwhile, our Creative NZ funding has been halved this year, and the Public Interest Journalism Fund, which currently supports two roles within our small team of 31, is due to finish next year. While the state is under no obligation to fund our work, it’s hard to watch as other platforms continue to be heavily backed while your own funding stops dead.”
Greive’s appeal for financial support from readers got plenty of publicity. RNZ ran an article headed “No plan B to save The Spinoff”. The NZ Herald’s regular Media Insider column described the letter as “an SOS plea to its readers”.
On Friday, The Platform’s Sean Plunket interviewed Greive. A few minutes into the interview, Plunket asked: “How much government or taxpayer funding from any source would you estimate The Spinoff has received in its lifetime?”
Greive was obviously very reluctant to answer the question. He said he didn’t want to “get into the weeds” and instead proceeded to explain how NZ on Air funding worked.
Plunket pressed him further for a straight answer.
Greive: “It isn’t money [going] directly to The Spinoff. A relatively small figure… maybe one or two million [dollars].”
When Plunket asked if it was as much as $10 million, Greive insisted the amount of taxpayer cash his organisation had received was “significantly less”.
Clearly uncomfortable with the line of questioning, he claimed taxpayer funding didn’t always go to The Spinoff itself but often to production houses — just as money granted to TVNZ might go to South Pacific Pictures or Great Southern Television to create programmes for TVNZ to broadcast.
“For most part the money goes to an external production company… which are literally separate businesses.”
That is true of a small number of the grants made to The Spinoff. One, for $698,947, was earmarked in 2017 for Great Southern Television to produce Spinoff TV, which turned out to be one of the nation’s most notable entertainment embarrassments.
Some smaller production houses were also given funding via The Spinoff for specific projects. But they represent only about a fifth of the amount of money that NZ on Air clearly records as being granted to The Spinoff/Hexwork or Hexwork Productions.
NZ on Air’s website has an easy-to-use search function for finding out how much money individual media organisations have been granted. If you type in “The Spinoff”, 52 grants dating back to 2016 are recorded. The total comes to $10,790,828.
Even generously subtracting the taxpayer money that enabled The Spinoff to commission work from external sources (and thereby get “free” content), the total that NZ on Air specifies as going to The Spinoff/Hex Work, and Hexwork Productions comes to an impressive $8,947,080. And that, of course, leaves aside the question of how much of the funding assigned to out-of-house collaborators is paid to The Spinoff for its part in developing the projects.
There have been other smaller grants from various government agencies. In 2021, the Ministry of Culture and Heritage granted $172,556 to Hex Work Ltd as part of a subscription initiative that boosted the finances of nine selected media outlets — including Newsroom, NBR and BusinessDesk — during Covid.
And Creative NZ has supported The Spinoff’s books pages since 2017, with amounts between $25,000 and $54,000 a year.
So, the correct answer to Plunket’s question about how much government or taxpayer funding has been provided to The Spinoff is evidently a lot more than the “one to two million dollars” Greive estimated. The “ballpark” figure that Plunket requested is somewhere around $10 million.
If Greive remains adamant The Spinoff has received no more than $2 million, he really should inform the Taxpayers’ Union, which seems to believe it has received many millions more than he is willing to acknowledge. As long ago as July 2021, the TU recorded that $6,117,198 in taxpayer funding from NZ On Air had been awarded to The Spinoff in the four and a half years from its first grant in December 2016.
The TU has been watching The Spinoff’s use of taxpayer funds for some time. In 2018, it objected to Inland Revenue paying the website $40,000 for a series of columns titled “Tax Heroes”.
Executive director Jordan Williams said, “The Tax Heroes series was a terrible use of $40,000 in taxpayer money. The articles were effectively taxpayer-funded, pro-tax propaganda, with the first article pushing the Orwellian message that ‘Tax is love’.”
Williams also claimed The Spinoff had breached its agreement with IRD to be politically neutral by promoting policies such as a capital gains tax, which the Greens backed. He concluded: “This kind of taxpayer-funded media rort may keep quasi-news platforms like The Spinoff afloat, but it does no good for ordinary taxpayers.”
The state’s largesse, it seems, often goes unacknowledged. When Greive announced he was stepping down from his role as CEO of The Spinoff in January last year to return to writing, he explained his reasons for quitting in an open letter published on his website.
His potted history of the site raised eyebrows among some readers given he attributed its success entirely to his staff’s ingenuity and the support of members.
“Using nothing but our own will and ingenuity we built [The Spinoff and its associated arms Hex Work Productions and Daylight], which now reach hundreds of thousands of people every month... We also went from being a largely commercially funded organisation to one which relied on its members for the largest part of its income.”
Taxpayers generally don’t like their extensive cash contributions to an organisation being overlooked or minimised. And especially when that organisation makes a habit of vilifying ordinary people who are obliged to support it through their taxes.
In one episode of Alice Snedden’s series Bad News — funded by $381,026
of public money — she assessed New Zealand as “racist as fuck” and opined: “Racism may be white people’s worst invention.”
Those who object to any aspect of transgender ideology and the denial of biological reality can expect to be accused of being “transphobic”. Indeed, when the new Chief Human Rights Commissioner, Stephen Rainbow, and Race Relations Commissioner Melissa Derby were appointed in August, The Spinoff’s editor, Madeleine Chapman, suggested they were both guilty of transphobia.
Needless to say, anyone who questions the current orthodoxy about the causes of climate change is automatically classed pejoratively by The Spinoff’s writers as a “climate-change denier”.
The public certainly didn’t hold back on social media last week when news of The Spinoff’s possible demise was broadcast. It became clear very quickly just how much people deeply resent being forced to pay for their own public vilification.
Independent journalist Chris Lynch, from Christchurch, made no secret of his disdain while taking part in The Platform’s Free Speech Fridays segment: “It’s just lovely to hear of The Spinoff’s downfall… I can’t wait for it to close.”
He said he had “nothing but contempt” for it, describing it as a “disgrace” that was “nasty”, “divisive” and “had done nothing for democracy”.
He particularly objected to what he saw as The Spinoff’s willingness to imply that ordinary New Zealanders — including himself — were somehow complicit in the mosque murders of 2019.
Amongst an avalanche of hostile reactions on social media, a common strand of objections centred on The Spinoff’s perceived role as a mouthpiece for the policies and values of the Ardern-Hipkins government — not least for enthusiastically supporting its heavy-handed management of Covid-19.
Greive told Plunket the accusation of left-wing bias was untrue but later made a revealing statement: “The government procures all kinds of things… and one of the things it procures is content it would like to see in the world.”
That sounds awfully like an inadvertent admission that The Spinoff was happy to accept millions of public money to further the Labour government’s policy aims.
Graham Adams is an Auckland-based freelance editor, journalist and columnist. This article was originally published by ThePlatform.kiwi and is published here with kind permission.
4 comments:
Their sense of entitlement knows no bounds. Nor does their absolute belief in their intellectual superiority compared with the average person. Two fatal flaws.
Let us hope that they are soon spinning off into the wider galaxy of blackness and that their biased view of the world will be lost to the dark matter of insignificance.
The tax payer will sigh a sigh of relief knowing they are no longer paying to be told how shite they are.
I doubt many will 'greive' (sic) for the SpinOff.....but I am sure someone stuffed alot of money into their account somewhere along the decade of its existence.
Great article.
Grieve made a comment at the beginning of his time at Spinoff that was that a journalist's job was no longer to inform. It was now their job to educate. Never visited the site after that.
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