Kiwis want kinder, gentler news … not the real Stuff

For Stuff, the hope must be that the swerve to a happier journalistic backbeat will pay off. Otherwise, alas, the operation could yet be stuffed.

Stuff chief executive Sinead Boucher. Picture: AFP

Stuff, the most widely read media outlet in New Zealand, says it’s shunning stories that sow “division” and going instead for a kinder, gentler approach.

The editorial shift comes in the wake of surveys and internal focus groups showing more and more Kiwis are opting for “news avoidance”.

The authoritative Trust in News survey, conducted by Auckland’s AUT University’s Centre for Journalism Media and Democracy, found that New Zealanders who go out of their way “to some extent” to avoid what passes for news accounts for around three-quarters of the population.

How did Stuff, which owns nine daily newspapers, claims 3.7 million monthly users across its digital and print operations, and employs more than 300 editorial staff, feel about the latest findings?

Pretty sick, one imagines.

Or rather, in the preferred new style, not feeling entirely chipper.

Speaking to a recent INMA World Congress of News Media in London, the company’s chief product officer, Ben Haywood, said Stuff’s news stories were now being tailored with “much less negative” angles and introductions.

The old inverted pyramid structure favoured by newsgatherers everywhere, for example, in which the most fundamental information appears at the top of a report or column, is being eschewed for allowing readers to delicately discover such potentially triggering details later.

But Stuff’s new-found mission “to help make New Zealand a better place” may necessarily entail putting the slip on its own historical shadow.

The company only fully returned to the New Zealand fold after the talented journalist turned businesswoman Sinead Boucher bought it four years ago from Nine Entertainment.

Boucher’s 2020 purchase from Nine marked the first time the operation had fully been in Kiwi hands since a brash young Adelaide investor named Rupert Murdoch bought 29,885 shares in what at the time was the Wellington Publishing Company back in 1964.

On Murdoch’s watch, the stable grew to more than 80 newspapers and magazine titles, later changing its name to INL.

The Stuff website, which now serves as the centrepiece of the enterprise, began life in 2000.

Three years after the website was established, Fairfax purchased all of the company’s assets for $NZ1.25bn, or nearly $NZ2bn ($2.18bn) when adjusted for inflation.

By the time Boucher bought the company back, the market value had dipped a bit – down to just one dollar.

The Australians had been keen to give the company away like “a set of steak knives”, she later remarked ruefully.

The purchase occurred during Covid, a period when display advertising was particularly dire. Newspaper sales, already in free fall, had also taken a wallop. Financially speaking, as successive rounds of lay-offs attested, the privately owned media ship was starting to look like a vessel made of driftwood.

Against earlier expectations, too, the website that had yet failed to turn a significant profit was still giving away most news content for free, even while the company’s major serious local rival, the New Zealand Herald, was signing up scores of thousands of new paying digital subscribers.

In the short-term, however, the timing was good. Covid-related wage subsidies were the order of the political day and obviously helped on the staffing front.

At the same time, the government of former prime minister Jacinda Ardern established a now-defunct $NZ55m journalism fund from which Stuff would receive millions of dollars in additional funding for specific projects.

The fund was established to help shield the industry against the familiar concerns about encroaching big tech, while also serving to promote the government’s own line that New Zealand’s ethnic past constituted “A Bad Thing”.

Among the newly acquired Stuff’s first branding exercises was the publication of a six-month-long “investigation” purporting to show centuries of racist reporting published by Stuff’s own mastheads.

As cultural editor Carmen Parahi explained, the rot stretched back to the 1800s and – coincidentally, perhaps – only really vanished from the scene after the 2020 purchase.

It was a fulsome front-page grovel, not only offered to local Maoris, Pahari later said, but to anyone else who ever felt “marginalised by such a singular way of looking at and reporting on the world”. Possibly that last group also contained former employees who felt bemused by the extravagant wokeness of it all.

Much of the recent coverage of ethnic affairs, matters of sexuality and the culture wars in general has struck a similarly baleful tone.

Or at least that’s been the case until the recent rash of poor public notices, which have appeared at a particularly sensitive moment when the company is pulling out the stops to improve subscriber-only digital sales and donations from readers who are now telling them to move on from the doomscrolling.

For Stuff, the hope must be that the swerve to a happier journalistic backbeat will deliver “a better relationship with the news”, as Haywood told the London meeting.

Otherwise, alas, the operation could yet be stuffed.

David Cohen is a Wellington-based author and journalist. He worked for several years as a staff newspaper reporter for INL.