Dr Gavin Ellis (pictured above), our Koi Tū honorary research fellow and media researcher, gave a talk at this year’s Raising the Bar event in Auckland. 

He says people do not seem to understand – or care about – the precarious state in which news media find themselves in 2024. Few of us give any thought to what the world would be like without reporters, a place where there are no independent means of holding the powerful to account and where ‘news’ is nothing more than public relations releases or social media rumour. 

You can also read Gavin’s recent discussion paper “If not journalists, then who?“. 

The day the news dies – Dr Gavin Ellis

This little book The Piano Player in the Brothel by celebrated Spanish editor Juan Luis Cebrián takes its title from a popular saying: “Don’t tell my mother I’m a journalist. She thinks I play piano in the whorehouse”.

It’s an association that goes back some way. The 19th-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill – himself a sometime journalist – wrote: “Journalism is the vilest and most degrading of all trades because more affectation and hypocrisy, and more subservience to the baser feelings of others, are necessary for carrying it on than for any other trade from that of brothel-keeper upwards.” I’m not sure whether that is more an indictment of human beings than of journalists but it’s journalism that sustains the reputational damage.

So, if it’s held in such low regard – apologies to any brothel-keepers present – why should we worry if it dies? I hope that by the end of this talk you will not only know the answer but be as worried by the prospect of its demise as I am.

Cebrián and I are roughly the same age. He began his career in the repressive regime of Francisco Franco when the press was regulated by an ‘emergency’ law created during the Spanish Civil War and in force until Franco’s death in 1975. It opened with the statement: “The institution of the periodical press will be organised, supervised, and controlled by the State”. In Franco’s dotage the grip slipped and Cebrián was one of the founders of what became a Spanish democratic institution, the newspaper El Pais.

I began my career in New Zealand of the ‘swinging sixties’ when we had competing morning and evening newspapers that made good money – classified advertising columns were referred to as “the rivers of gold”. The state maintained a tight grip on the ownership of broadcasting, but the press was largely left to get on with it.

And get on with it we did. There were large newsrooms. Coverage of all the courts and councils was routine. We spoke directly to people in positions of responsibility without hitting impervious ramparts patrolled by ‘comms people’.

The day I started work as a cadet reporter at the Auckland Star ­– an evening paper that closed in 1991 – my mother gave me a small object. It was the three wise monkeys – see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Yes, they were brass monkeys but it was early February so that didn’t matter.

What did matter was that, far from preferring to see me tinkling the ivories in a house of ill repute, my mother was very proud of the fact that her son had chosen journalism as a career. In. fact, for much of my early career she kept a scrapbook of all my stories.

When I meet up with my former colleagues of similar vintage we talk of “the golden days of journalism”. That doesn’t mean we think we were better than those that preceded or followed us. In fact, there has never been a Perfect Age of Journalism. It has always had faults and shortcomings. The ‘golden days’ means simply that we had the resources, money, access, and trust that has since been in increasingly short supply.

Let me put that ‘short supply’ in some perspective. I don’t need to go back all that far.

The number of journalists employed in New Zealand has fallen from more than 4000 in 2006 to fewer than 1500 today (that is 200 fewer than the number of journalists currently employed by the New York Times). This year we saw a 15% fall through the loss of Newshub and cuts at TVNZ.

In 2006 the combined advertising revenue of New Zealand print and broadcast media was a shade under $2 billion. Last year it was not much more than half that figure. In 2006 digital advertising revenue in this country earned about $65 million. Last year digital advertising earned more than $2.1 billion. The vast majority of that digital revenue heads overseas, most of it in corporate charges that avoid tax. So, not only have our traditional media – the sources of our journalism – seen none of the growth, they have also lost significant market revenue share.

When we look at individual media the numbers are even more revealing: Since 2006, newspaper revenue has declined from more than $800 million to less than $300 million. Television revenue has dropped by more than $100 million over that time and radio is flatlining.

The same sort of picture is painted elsewhere. The Washington Post lost $US 77 million over the past year. Earlier this month Warner Bros Discovery (which owns TV3) reported a massive $US9 billion write-off, made up largely of the declining value of its traditional tv assets. In Britain the publisher of the Daily Mail reported a 16 per cent year-on-year decline in print advertising. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp reported earlier this month that its news media earnings for the year were down 38 per cent.

A closer look at News Corp shows why the focus will inevitably move away from news media – particularly after (I was tempted to say ‘if’) the patriarch passes this mortal coil. In the year to June, News Corp made four times as much profit from digital real estate services and Dow Jones financial services respectively than it did from news media. Even its book publishing returned more than twice as much. And news media are a significant cost centre. Although the segment drew the second highest level of revenue for News Corp, it produced the lowest return.

We must never lose sight of the fact that these are businesses. Their over-riding responsibility is to provide a return to investors. That leaves little room for what – to people seeking to maximise their return on capital – looks increasingly like bad business.

Of course, news media ownership in the past was not only about making money but also about power. Eric Beecher’s new book, The Men Who Killed the News, is essentially about the exercise of that power, or more precisely, media moguls’ abuse of power: Moguls such as Murdoch and, before him, William Randolph Hearst and Lord Beaverbrook. How powerful were they? It may be apocryphal but there’s a story that Hearst sent artist Frederick Remington to Cuba to cover an insurrection. Remington cabled him that there was no war to cover. Hearst allegedly replied with: “You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.”

Beecher recounts a story about Rupert Murdoch’s father, Keith Murdoch, in the 1930s when someone entered the newspaper proprietor’s office to see the Prime Minister of Australia, Joseph Lyons, standing at Murdoch’s desk uttering the words “Yes, Sir”.

The tales that Beecher recounts are hair-raising. I doubt that there has been a New Zealand equivalent. Julius Vogel certainly parlayed his ownership and editorship of the Otago Daily Times into political power but not the excesses of Beecher’s villains. Even Murdoch, when he owned a large part of the company that published the Dominion and the Press, did not impose his political will here.                            

Since then, of course, foreign owners have played merry hell with financial strategies in our media but that’s not the same thing. Beecher maintains that decades of mogul power have played a pivotal role in the debasing of journalism’s reputation, and I think he is right. And I fear that our journalism has been tarred with the international brush. The rhetoric we hear around the more strident views of our media is peppered with the same tropes we hear in the United States and elsewhere.

That is not to say our news media are faultless and blameless. Far from it. In many ways they are the authors of their own misfortune. But they are not guilty of the gross excesses set out in Beecher’s book.

In that book, the 21^st century incarnations of the media mogul are Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk but these digital demagogues are different to their predecessors in a striking – and strikingly significant – way: They do not see journalism as the source of their power.

They have plundered news media without compensation and destroyed journalism’s business model. Along the way their social media platforms have been allowed to trash social norms and democratic values, and their actions have fostered a disdain of sovereign authority. Now they are walking away from the news. Why? Partly the reason is that they don’t need it, but it is also because they see it as a failing sector.                             

News audiences are falling. I’m not just talking about audiences for traditional media like newspapers and television’s nightly news bulletins. Fewer people across the board are engaging with the news. The reasons are complex and inter-twined.

One factor is lack of trust.

Trust in news media is an issue internationally and this country ranks alongside Britain at the lower end of the scale. Only a third of us trust the news we see. That compares with a trust level approaching 70 per cent in Finland. Even Australia has a higher level of trust and that was the birthplace of the Dirty Digger, Rupert Murdoch. Why we should perform so badly is difficult to accurately determine. In part it is due to low levels of institutional trust generally. Some of that can be seen to flow from the pandemic and, in no small part, from the disinformation that whirled around it. Part of it is international cross-fertilisation.

New Zealand journalism has always been strongly influenced by what happens elsewhere. Before the introduction of the international telegraph, our foreign news was quite literally clipped from the columns of Australian newspapers. Newspapers on both sides of the Tasman were strongly influenced by the British newspaper tradition and throughout the 20^th century there was a regular interchange of journalists between the three countries. And, of course, the United States exerted an increasing influence, particularly as the power of broadcasting grew.

There is one particular American influence that I believe has, in the past decade in particular, had a highly detrimental effect.

There is a theory ­– one to which I subscribe – that the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine signalled a sea change. Under the doctrine, US broadcasters’ licences required them to exhibit “a basic standard of fairness” and that mandated covering both sides of an issue and presenting unbiassed coverage. Ronald Reagan abolished most of its provisions in 1987 and the remainder went in 2011. The move away from mandated fairness in broadcasting was followed by the rise of the unregulated Internet, awash with bias and strident commentary.

I believe journalists here and elsewhere adopted an if-you-can’t-beat-‘em-join-‘em approach and, with the active encouragement of editors, began to suffuse their reporting with comment and opinion. As a result, we have seen shifts in journalistic values, shifts that are driven by the digital landscape and, I daresay, by a sense of desperation at the financial state of the industry.    

I do not believe, in spite of the anti-media slogans and abuse directed toward journalists at the occupation of Parliament Grounds, that our media sit on the left side of Karl Marx. Perceptions of bias are determined by the political leanings of the accuser. Nonetheless, I do believe that the widespread mixing of fact and opinion in news stories has been an open invitation to make such claims. Hence, there has been a material impact on trust.

 Nothing, of course, warrants the death threats that I saw on some anti-media placards in parliament Grounds. Nor the accusations that media had been bought by the Public Interest Journalism Fund. I found that deeply offensive.

However, the fact remains that our news media is in a parlous state in the trust stakes. On the Acumen Adelman Trust Barometer, trust in New Zealand media sits below that of government, business, and NGOs and has declined significantly in the past year.

There is a further factor in the decline of news. It is, perhaps, an even more frightening factor: Not only do we not bother with the news, we avoid it. New Zealand has an alarming level of news avoidance. Internationally, four in ten actively avoid the news sometimes or often, according to the latest Reuter’s Institute Digital News Report. In New Zealand, that number is closer to six in 10. Close to three-quarters qualify as news avoiders to one degree or another. It seems no country is immune. In Finland, with that higher level of trust, there are still more than 20 per cent who avoid the news.

The JMaD Trust in News report from AUT earlier this year found that avoidance was due to one of two factors: The news was seen as too negative and, hence, a source of anxiety. Let me put some perspective on that. I log the lead stories in each of our metropolitan dailies each day. Between 2021 and 2023 almost 700 of those leads were about crime or serious accidents. 2024 is on track to be another bumper crime and death year. I think the nadir is leading a major newspaper with the driveway death of a toddler.

The JMaD report’s survey also found our content is perceived as biased and too opinionated. That accords with an international study, set out in the book “Avoiding the News”, which found a complex cocktail of reasons why there are consistent news avoiders – everything from Trumpian “fake news” and perceived bias, to the very real belief that news (invariably bad) created unacceptable levels of anxiety.

So, it’s little wonder that earlier this year The Atlantic magazine asked whether journalism was headed toward an “Extinction level event”.

Let me answer the question: Yes, it is…if we allow the current metrics and influences to play out.

In May Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures published a position paper on New Zealand media. One of the co-authors, Peter Bale, is here tonight. Let me read out how we viewed that extinction event.

‘News media and the provision of reliable news to citizens in Aotearoa New Zealand are suffering a form of ecosystem collapse. A combination of predation, changes to the media, destructive behaviour, and adaptive limitations are pushing the environments in which journalism is produced to the point where their effective extinction may be measured in years rather than decades.                                              

‘Like any ecological loss, this extinction will have consequences that extend beyond the disappearance of the interacting organisms that form the news ecosystem. Just as the disappearance of Amazonian rainforests affects world climate, the loss of professional, institutional journalism has profound implications for democracy and social cohesion.’

Let’s not kid ourselves that this just another manifestation of Schumpeter’s creative destruction in which something much better will replace our current concept of journalism if we let nature take its course. Extinction is just that: It is terminal.

We went on to say that news media in New Zealand (in common with their overseas counterparts) are in the midst of a perfect storm due in no small measure to collective failures to deal effectively with what we described as “the greatest techno-economic paradigm shift since the invention of the motor car”.

The failures lie at the feet of both media organisations and successive governments. So, too, do potential ways of stemming the ecological tide.

In times of adversity, we hear the phrase Too Big To Fail (TBTF) and it is invariably applied to banking and finance. Perhaps it is time to re-purpose the theory for sectors that are Too Vital To Fail. If failure of major financial institutions is deemed to have unacceptable effects on the greater economic system of a nation, the same can be said of sectors whose failure would have an unacceptable effect on the country’s social and political structures.

We suggest that the stakes are too high to allow our news media sector to fail. However, it will not survive without substantial change.

Few of those changes have yet to see the light of day. We do know that the government has acquiesced to pleas by some of the biggest media players to resurrect a bill that will open the day to negotiation with the transnationals like Google and Meta. Well, good luck with that. And work is being done on ‘modernising’ the Broadcasting Act. Much, much, much more needs to be done. As we set out in the position paper: Government and the media themselves have to address everything from regulation, media law and institutional change to cultural protection and technological paradigm shifts including a raft of artificial intelligence impacts.

They also need to address the way they do their journalism and return to some of the basic precepts that have governed accountability journalism for decades. That includes the clear separation of fact and comment and editors disabusing themselves of the notion that audiences are more interested in a journalist’s opinion than the facts.

The real elephant in the room, however, will be the question over what replaces the business model that sustained journalism for the past century or more. Can it remain a business? Or will it need to reside in new structures that are purposed for a public good? The answers will depend fundamentally on how much value we place on journalism and how that value should be measured.

How will it play out?  Some changes to media will be inevitable. Newspapers will cease to be printed – either when the price of production and distribution becomes unsustainable (and I believe the Herald is about to increase the price for home delivery) or when the presses can no longer be economically maintained.                                                         

We may see an end to seven-day-a-week publishing before either of those eventualities. As I have said, revenue from news operations has been declining for years. At the same time, alternative enterprises started by publishers have advanced – in areas such as real estate and employment. News based digital advertising has never achieved the same yield as the print equivalent. Nowhere near it. Unless you’re the New York Times, the complete replacement of print sales with digital will not sustain newsrooms at even credible minimums. And even the New York Times still has print revenue…for now.

Within the next two years we will see both Warner Bros Discovery and Television New Zealand move from broadcast television to digital streaming. This will have profound effects. Scheduled broadcasting is already under major pressure. How many of you sit down to the six o’clock news? Some still do, more in fact than you may think. More than a million Kiwis still tune in for news at 6pm at least once a week. And many of them watch the entire news hour (including commercial breaks). However, that is far from what we had in the heyday of television.

NZ on Air released the results of its 2024 audience survey today. It confirms the continuing decline of linear tv audiences with less than half the population accessing it.  In 2018 that figure was close to three-quarters of the population. TV1 overall now reaching just under a third of the population and TV3 17 per cent. TVNZ+ has continued to grow – pointing to the state broadcaster’s continuing its inexorable move to digital distribution. The biggest daily audience is for global video sharing platforms (used by almost two-thirds). Newspapers, incidentally, attract the attention of only 18 per cent.

However, the way the news is delivered will require a rethink in a move to digital distribution. Does that 6 pm destination viewing remain? If not, how much value will attach to the news? Will Discovery persist with Stuff’s news bulletin? What news services will TVNZ be able to afford? It will also raise challenges to accessibility. Tina from Turners may think online is everywhere, but a proportion of the population do not have access to it due to age, finances, or remoteness. They do have access to broadcasting. And, if Discovery and TVNZ quit broadcast transmission, what does that do to the economics of the transmission system run on commercial lines by Kordia.                                                     

And what is the future for Whakaata Māori (Mãori Television)? Rural whanau in particular may rely on broadcast to access it. The airwaves are free. Broadband is not.

Inevitably radio will follow television into a digital future although its timeframe is likely to be more attenuated. Those broadcasters received a bit of a lift in the latest radio ratings which saw small lifts in audience, but one swallow won’t make a summer.                        

MediaWorks was forced to take an $86 million impairment hit this year because of lower than expected growth in the business. And news is no longer one of its primary drivers.

NZME released its half-yearly results today. And the news was quite good on the revenue front. They showed revenue up by $5 million, although net profit after tax is down slightly. Its star performer is OneRoof, the property listing platform that increased listings 63 per cent year on year. Digital audio and digital subscriptions are also up. However, there is a graph in its presentation that shows the dilemma facing our news media. Although there is consistent growth in digital revenue, it still represents less than a third of total income. The rest is from traditional print and broadcasting which, since 2019 has dropped by 22 per cent ($142m to $111m).

So far, I have concentrated on commercial media but what about our non-commercial news provider? Radio New Zealand continues to operate substantial news services, although its broadcast audiences has shown recent declines. It is government funded and also receives additional funding through NZ on Air to administer the Local Democracy Reporting scheme for local government coverage.                

To its credit RNZ also provides its news to 60 news outlets including NZME and Stuff. While I applaud its efforts, we should not see RNZ as the saviour of New Zealand journalism. It is inherently dangerous to have high levels of reliance on a single news service that ultimately relies on government for its funding.                                              

There is no evidence of government interference in RNZ news today and there are statutory safeguards. However, I apply a what-if filter. I call it the Trump filter. What if we had a government the likes of which we have not contemplated and arguably do not even want to think about? If we are to have legitimate accountability journalism, we need to be absolutely certain that the system cannot be suborned. That means both plurality and multiple sources of funding.

If you didn’t just come for the beer – and my ego requires me to think it wasn’t just that – you probably have some concern for the future of journalism. You are in an alarming minority. Far too few give any thought to the consequences of allowing journalism at scale to die.       

I need to explain that phrase “at scale”. I have no doubt there will always be inquisitive individuals and small groups that seek out information. Individually, however, they do not have the critical mass to consistently speak truth to power. To serve that function requires an organisation with sufficient reach – and audience numbers – to ensure the powerful ignore it at their peril. The analogy I use may be a deeply unfashionable one. I’m a child of the Cold War, was scared rigid by the Cuban missile crisis, and remember when duck-and-cover was supposed to protect you from nuclear bombs rather than earthquakes. So forgive me for a nuclear reference.

The power of a missile is judged by its throw weight – how big a warhead yield can it deliver over what range? To be effective, journalism requires a lot of throw weight. So, journalism doesn’t die when the last reporter signs off. It dies when we no longer have organisations with sufficient newsroom resources to deliver very loud messages.

Note that I said organisations – plural. If you only have one organisation delivering the news you call it something like Pravda or Xinhua. Plurality is vital and in a democratic, multi-cultural society like New Zealand that need is all the greater. Journalism’s throw weight is also measured by its ability to serve diverse beliefs and to do so in ways that are socially cohesive.

Yet if it is not commercially sustainable, how will it be financed? The first step will be to redefine public interest journalism – in law and the public consciousness – as a democratic necessity, a public good, not a business. That opens the way for new institutional structures, new forms of support, and constitutional safeguards.

Juan Luis Crebrián had a pessimistic outlook for newspapers when he wrote that little book but an optimistic one for journalism in a digital future. That was 12 years ago. Eric Beecher’s view in 2024 is that it will take “a new and different kind of media power to counter the forces that are lining up to kill the news: The power to demonstrate through performance, that respectable, professional civic journalism, despite its imperfections, is a prerequisite for a decent society.” He’s right, of course.

Nowhere have I seen a persuasive argument that we do not need journalism in order to have a healthy participatory democracy.

For that reason, I too, must remain optimistic. That is why our position paper set out a raft of options and recommendations that aim to achieve the following:

1. Overcome gross distortions caused by the dominance of the market by unregulated transnational digital platforms.
2. Find sustainable – and publicly and politically acceptable – ways of supporting pluralistic media at national, regional, local and hyper-local levels.
3. Ensure New Zealand is prepared for (a) an orderly transition from linear to digital delivery of media services and (b) the impact of artificial intelligence.
4. Reform anachronistic regulatory systems and laws/regulations, recognising the impacts of social media.
5. Provide the means by which media at all levels can operate under structures and conditions that recognise their contributions to the community. 
6. Consolidate the multiplicity of agencies, organisations, and lines of authority that have grown around governance of the sector.                                   

Some of this we will not need to address alone. The policy impact of AI is a whole of government project, indeed a whole of world project, one in which sovereignty – not least our unique cultural sovereignty in te ao Māori – must be recognised. Sovereignty is also implicit in bringing multinational platforms to heel. I have high expectations for an OECD initiative called the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting Project or BEPS that will provide the framework for nations to properly tax the giants at source.   […The object]

The object is to stop multinationals using a global money-go-round to place profits in low-tax or no-tax environments – which is exactly what thgey do now. In New Zealand the amounts of tax they pay is risible. It has far, far greater chances of success than a Fair Bargaining Bill and, Mr Zuckerberg, it’s coming to a store near you. That tax could sustain our journalism for decades to come.                                            

However, none of this will happen unless there is a public will to ensure journalism survives, a political will to provide the means for that survival, and the professional will for journalists and media organisations to live up to the civic expectations that is at the core of their being.

However, we are left with a couple of dilemmas: Can the news media persuade the public of their critical worth before they die? Can the public wake up in time to ensure that death is avoided?

I fear Jodi Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi is restarting its engine: Society won’t know what it’s got till its gone…unless people are shocked into realising what you get if you pave paradise.

The most persuasive way to demonstrate journalism’s worth would be a day without news. Blanket 24-hour non-coverage. No newspapers, no radio or television bulletins, no updates to digital platforms. Just an avalanche of something and everything on social media’s Tower of Babel. It would be a portent of things to come and that that would make the point. Unfortunately, we’re unlikely to see such a demonstration. It may sound strange for someone who lived and breathed the news to suggest pulling the plug…however temporarily. Sadly, I think it will take that sort of cathartic moment to shake many out of mindless complacency.     

So let me set you a small mental exercise as a foretaste of life in a parking lot. Ask yourself if you could find the information contained in the first six stories of today’s newspaper, news website, or broadcast news bulletin. And if so, how? Remember that in a post-journalistic world there are no news stories on the matter that you – or an AI Large Language Model – can access. Now calculate how long it would take you to gather the information. Now figure out how you are going to test its accuracy.                                    

Now determine what else you need to get a full picture of the subject and where you are going to find it. Now compile it into a coherent form so it all makes sense. Oh, ask yourself how you would know to go looking for any of it in the first place. And if, by chance, you have found something for which someone needs to be held accountable, how will you do that?

That should give you enough to think about but I want to end by quoting again from the position paper:

“…individuals all too often lack the time – and the skills – to establish veracity for themselves. The result is growth in the ranks of the ill-informed, mis-informed, and dis-informed. For now, individuals may still check their perceptions against curated and tested information in news media, where they are also able to ‘triangulate’ information across multiple news outlets. However, the notion of a network of gatekeepers to tell the public things that have been established or proven is breaking down.  If it reaches the point where the ecosystem has collapsed, society will still be left with a need for trusted curation and verification of matters that are in the public interest. The need to hold power to account will be undiminished. We will be left with the consequences of a simple (unanswered) question: If not journalists, then who?”

That seemed a fitting title for the paper. It sums up what’s at stake.