Is Radio NZ National still relevant?
And why on Earth am I still on Substack?
Radio New Zealand is doing some soul-searching following a hard-hitting review. As Colin Peacock reports: in 2019, over 616,000 people a week were tuning in to RNZ National; this year it’s down below below 470,000.
Mike Hosking of Newstalk ZB wasn’t hiding his schadenfreude: even in Wellington, the listeners could be “fleeing from boredom”, he chirped.
To turn this around, two key aims for RNZ National are reported to be: shift the balance from Wellington (the centre of political gravity) to Auckland (the centre of demographic growth) and target 50-69 year-olds.
Readers who live in neither Wellington nor Auckland may be unimpressed, and I’ll come back to regional “news deserts” below.
But apparently I’m a symptom of RNZ’s problem: an Aucklander in the target age range who’s stopped listening. I just read their website, as I value peace and quiet above ill-tempered interviews – even though I can’t hide the fact that I sometimes contribute to their on-air content. My newsletters often link to RNZ because their reporting is good, and there are no commercials, nor pay-walls.
It sounds like they want to get a better handle on the culture of a politically diverse and changing country and they understand that people are listening to different things in different ways now, such as podcasts. Their new podcast The Context with Guyon Espiner and Corin Dann could be a constructive response to that. Guyon’s interview with ChatGPT in ep. 2 is remarkable!
I used to treat Morning Report as the daily agenda-setter, and it’s possible for RNZ to retain that role and to win back listeners. I may even switch it back on one day.
In their 2024 World Press Freedom Index, Reporters Without Borders rated New Zealand 16th out of 180 countries, but warned that job losses in media outlets and newspaper closures threatened “to turn certain regions of the country into media deserts”.
A media or news desert occurs when a community lacks credible local news and information, normally because local newspapers or similar news outlets have either closed or reduced their coverage. Financial viability and the shortage of advertising revenue is normally cited as the main reason. This is a problem that’s recognised internationally and in New Zealand. It’s driven by the likes of Meta, Google and X that deliver headlines to passive consumers and siphon off advertisers’ dollars – and will only get worse with AI. The lack of local news may be contributing to the decline in awareness of and participation in local government elections. RNZ’s Local Democracy Reporting is a helpful response.
Given the closure of Newshub and other job losses, a similar depletion may be occurring at the national level, however. Has anything been done about this?
The Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill was introduced in August 2023 but got stalled after the select committee reported back in May 2024. The aim of the bill was to create conditions for digital platforms to enter into news content arrangements with New Zealand media outlets to contribute to the production of New Zealand news content – rather than just rake it up for free and serve it back to Kiwis as hyper-linked headlines while grabbing the advertising income. The bill proposed a good-faith bargaining and arbitration system of some complexity, looking as if it had been drafted by employment lawyers.
Google replied by threatening to stop promoting New Zealand news content and stop deals with local newsrooms if the bill went ahead. Google viewed the proposed arrangement as a “link tax” and warned that it would backfire. They’d be “forced to stop linking to news content on Google Search, Google News, or Discover surfaces in New Zealand and discontinue our current commercial agreements and ecosystem support with New Zealand news publishers”, according to Google NZ (quoted by Lillian Hanly for Radio NZ, 4 October 2024).
The Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill was an impractical way to address a rapidly changing, globally interconnected set of issues. But what does it look like to the consumer? Is the country getting sufficient news coverage of locally and nationally significant issues and in-depth analysis of public policy? This is not a criticism of journalists, but a question as to whether the industry can adequately serve the public – locally or nationally – given the commercial realities of the digital era. (A column by Bryce Edwards in the ODT in December 2024 cited a decline in numbers of professional journalists.) A part of the problem may be that audience attention is distracted by what’s going in other countries, especially the very noisy United States and the headline-grabbing Mr Trump.
Why am I still on Substack?
Back in January 2024, Casey Newton of Platformer gave a well argued case for deciding to leave Substack. Other high-profile writers emigrated too, including some notable New Zealanders (as reported by Emma Gleason on The Spinoff). A common reason offered is that Substack hosts and tolerates some neo-Nazi ideology, great replacement doctrine, and so on. The income that Substack gains through paid subscriptions in part must contribute to their ability to host free content that many paying readers would find objectionable – if they saw it. (I don’t provide links to material that causes offense.)
But some prominent creators who’ve dumped Substack report that “they are receiving a higher share of subscription revenue after making the switch to rival newsletter services”. Switching platforms may be motivated by higher political principles and also by higher incomes. And at least one of the Kiwi writers who’s left that platform had initially been offered a deal by Substack’s co-founder that “allowed her to dedicate herself to writing full-time” (as reported on RNZ in 2022). Making a living from writing is a legitimate motive for writers, and any aversion to sharing a space with extreme content needs to be viewed alongside that material factor.
I joined Substack in January 2023, seeing it as a platform (for journalists, academics, hobbyists and whoever) that offers more scope for longer, thoughtful and informative content – and it does provide that. Naturally, that also means diversity and contestation of ideas, and I’ve tried to include views from across the political spectrum. An ideological echo-chamber is not where I want to be.
Substack’s Notes has turned into something resembling X, however, with a lot of one-eyed or thoughtless rants and memes, from right and left, besides the extreme content mentioned above – and the usual pet videos.
The economic incentive for platforms like this one is to loosen moderation policies and practices to a degree that permits content (often as rage-bait) that’s outside of the Overton Window for credible political comment and dialogue. Meta and X face similar accusations about extreme or harmful content. This ignites the usual hate speech/free speech debate, which I’ve addressed before:
Substack hosts some unsubstantiated attention-grabbing content that does more harm than good. But migrating to an alternative space may be quixotic:
The same downward spiral in the quality of reasoned debate may occur on the alternative too, as owners (especially American owners subject to the First Amendment and to Trump 2.0) find it politically and financially convenient to loosen moderation policies.
Or the alternative platform is so carefully moderated and curated that it lacks vibrancy and contestation of ideas.
Admittedly, there’s also an element of path dependency: the cost of change gets higher the more we’ve invested in something.
Here’s a question, then, for those of us still on Facebook: did you consider leaving that platform when it became a vehicle for hate speech and incitement to violence and mass killing in Myanmar in 2017? (In case you don’t believe me, see the very well researched and documented report by Amnesty International exposing Facebook’s negligence and complicity.)
If you did think critically about being on Facebook at that time, then you could make a case against Substack too. If you didn’t, then note that, as far as I know, Substack hasn’t been accused of complicity in mass killing or ethnic cleansing. It does host some nasty stuff though. I'll be monitoring the situation, but not, for time being, migrating elsewhere.
On the other hand, my sympathies if you’ve been inappropriately banned by Meta, rather than you leaving their toxic platforms voluntarily. RNZ’s report about Meta enforcing “community standards” on innocent users suggests perhaps an AI-controlled system going awry.
Disclosure: no one has offered me any financial incentive or inducement to choose this platform over any other, or vice versa.
Image AI-generated on Gencraft.
Like you, I have not, of recent times, been an avid, "daily agenda-setter" listener of RNZ as I once was. That said, I still value the outlet above all others and know Kiwis offshore who are regular listeners.
Regarding your tuning into their website, I would like to know if the listenership figures were combined with their online following (as you are) to determine their actual audience size in this fragmented media environment.
Having come from a media-centric industry in which the mantra was "content is king", or whatever tag one prefers, it would be an interesting research exercise to determine news sources based on variables such as demographics, online/offline, levels of engagement, relevance, entertainment vs information, perceived credibility, content, presentation, scope of content, relevance, etc.
For online feeds, while one may be focused on geopolitics, if you watch an elephant befriend a penguin clip once, that's what you will be served ad infinitum. I can understand why national news such as RNZ has less traction, as the fluff often supersedes the substance, further exacerbating the fact that local news is struggling.
Maybe, just maybe, the overt denigration and demise of the arts and media literacy throughout the NZ education system could suggest that it's the audience rather than the media outlet that is suffering from a disconnect for relevant and objective information, which impacts their lives.
That said, a free-to-air, public broadcasting service on any media platform (free from financial, private lobbying, and political restraints) is, in my view, an essential component of a healthy and developing democracy, and it is better for those who live within it.