A confidential review helps explain why. RNZ has “no shared understanding” of its audience. Many staff even believed live radio was in long-term decline — a self-fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one. Mike Hosking commands a 20.5 percent breakfast share. Meanwhile, RNZ’s Morning Report has embraced “a patchwork quilt of taupe.”
The review’s prescription reads like a consultant's guide to the blindingly obvious: audit presenters (“some people shouldn’t be on air”), hire one high-profile voice “to signal ambition,” target people aged 50 to 69, shift Morning Report to Auckland and introduce shorter bulletins.
Most of this is self-evident – though perhaps not to a broadcaster that has built its identity in the Wellington beltway. Audiences prefer presenters worth listening to.
The review does not use the word bias, but RNZ needs to confront it. Polls show most journalists lean left, and RNZ is no exception. They approach centre-right ideas – that markets work, that success should be celebrated, that wealth creates jobs – as if they are a foreign language.
Anecdotes are not evidence. But a personal experience sums up RNZ’s problem well. A few years back, an RNZ business reporter interviewed me about “whether billionaires were good for New Zealand.” Really? We scaled it down to a corner dairy: jobs, taxes, community contributions. Billionaires, I suggested, were dairies grown large. “Fascinating,” she said, “could we get that on tape?” As if the thought that wealth might be socially useful had never previously occurred to her.
RNZ can relocate to Auckland, refresh its line-up and even import a star. But what it has not confronted is that audiences left not just because the sound is tired, but because it is narrow.
For a broadcaster devoted to “diverse voices,” RNZ has mastered only one kind of diversity: diverse ways of agreeing. The town square became an echo chamber with expensive acoustics.
Still, the review’s irony is cruel. After years of preaching to the converted, RNZ must now win back the conservative-leaning over-fifties who tuned out long ago.
The real lesson from the review is simple: if you don’t have anything relevant to say, people switch off.
Roger Partridge is chairman and a co-founder of The New Zealand Initiative and is a senior member of its research team. He led law firm Bell Gully as executive chairman from 2007 to 2014. This article was sourced HERE
The review’s prescription reads like a consultant's guide to the blindingly obvious: audit presenters (“some people shouldn’t be on air”), hire one high-profile voice “to signal ambition,” target people aged 50 to 69, shift Morning Report to Auckland and introduce shorter bulletins.
Most of this is self-evident – though perhaps not to a broadcaster that has built its identity in the Wellington beltway. Audiences prefer presenters worth listening to.
The review does not use the word bias, but RNZ needs to confront it. Polls show most journalists lean left, and RNZ is no exception. They approach centre-right ideas – that markets work, that success should be celebrated, that wealth creates jobs – as if they are a foreign language.
Anecdotes are not evidence. But a personal experience sums up RNZ’s problem well. A few years back, an RNZ business reporter interviewed me about “whether billionaires were good for New Zealand.” Really? We scaled it down to a corner dairy: jobs, taxes, community contributions. Billionaires, I suggested, were dairies grown large. “Fascinating,” she said, “could we get that on tape?” As if the thought that wealth might be socially useful had never previously occurred to her.
RNZ can relocate to Auckland, refresh its line-up and even import a star. But what it has not confronted is that audiences left not just because the sound is tired, but because it is narrow.
For a broadcaster devoted to “diverse voices,” RNZ has mastered only one kind of diversity: diverse ways of agreeing. The town square became an echo chamber with expensive acoustics.
Still, the review’s irony is cruel. After years of preaching to the converted, RNZ must now win back the conservative-leaning over-fifties who tuned out long ago.
The real lesson from the review is simple: if you don’t have anything relevant to say, people switch off.
Roger Partridge is chairman and a co-founder of The New Zealand Initiative and is a senior member of its research team. He led law firm Bell Gully as executive chairman from 2007 to 2014. This article was sourced HERE
2 comments:
Move to Auckland? If they want to turn RNZ to a radio about celebrity gossip, fashion, yachts or what the bros are up to on Papatoetoe. But that won't get more listeners either. It makes sense to remain in Wellington where the government is based, but if they want to report on politics they need to be less biased and more reliable. Whether we should change the capital is another question.
Should Radio NZ be called Radio Albania, as Partridge suggests, then his own NZ Initiative (which has captured the Nats) should be called The Oligarch's Initiative. I suggest Roger, who was a Bell Gully partner, meet with Finance Minister Nic Willis' old man, who was also a Bell Gully partner, to discuss this re-branding matter - together with Nic - who herself was on the Initiative Board. Maybe include Foodstuff's chair, who's on that Board as well. One things for sure - and mate's mate Roger gets this right - regular Kiwis are now sandwiched between Radio Albania and the Oligarch Initiative. Which means cost-of-living crisis level prices, fat cats running rampant, and a media calling for a government overthrow to install Chloe Swarbrick as supreme commander-in-chief in coalition joint with Te Pati Maori.
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