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Newsroom
3 days ago
- Business
- Newsroom
NZME declares peace, Stuff and TradeMe declare war
The battle to control NZ Herald owner NZME ended on Tuesday with shareholders endorsing a peace deal – just as major rivals Stuff and TradeMe joined forces to form an audacious new competitor. NZME shareholders voted former National cabinet minister Steven Joyce onto its board, replacing outgoing chair Barbara Chapman, and approved corporate raider Jim Grenon as another new face. Incumbent director Sussan Turner won re-election and re-joined two continuing, existing directors. By agreement Joyce will be made chair, and a sixth director, digital commerce expert Bowen Pan will be appointed. The votes ended three months of a power struggle, initiated by Canadian-NZ private equity investor Grenon for what he promised to be better financial results and improved journalism at NZME's New Zealand Herald site and newspaper. Grenon's campaign started by seeking appointment of himself plus three more of his nominees and the removal of all incumbents. But it ends with his sole accession to the board, three incumbents continuing, and Joyce as a peacemaking chair. Chapman and director David Gibson were the fall guys. Grenon is now a 13 percent shareholder but his first push for control has been partly stymied. Curiously, he won the fewest votes for his appointment (86 percent) and most against (14 percent) of the four resolutions put to the meeting. Joyce won the backing of 93 percent of votes cast. The new board members received a sobering trading update from chief executive Michael Boggs at the annual shareholders meeting. Boggs' forecast for the balance of NZME's financial year was subdued, compared with relatively upbeat words as late as a results briefing in February, when he confirmed a 2024 net profit of $12m but overall loss, after write-downs on the value of newspapers, of -$16m. 'Unfortunately, the market remains volatile and economic commentators have softened their outlook from what was expected earlier in the year.' Later, he noted: 'The market is not improving as much as we originally expected – it remains volatile and therefore we are taking a cautious yet optimistic approach.' The business had done better in the first four months this year than last and remained 'well placed' to deliver improved full year results, but he emphasised downturns in the latest business and consumer confidence surveys. He said NZME had made the equivalent of $12m in annualised savings already this year, including $4m saved from a round of 30 redundancies in its editorial departments. Boggs noted a delay expected in a recovery in house prices – 'again, later than predicted' – which could be crucial to forecasts for NZME's OneRoof real estate listings portal. In February, NZME announced a strategic review of OneRoof, possibly seeking investment, a part sale or separation in advance of a market listing. It suggested shareholders would be updated at this annual meeting, but outgoing chair Chapman said an update would now be made at the half-year results in August. The silence on the future of OneRoof spoke particularly loudly on Tuesday because the number one property site in the market, TradeMe, chose that very morning to announce it had bought half of Stuff Digital, the nation's biggest news site. As OneRoof has used its partnership to promote housing and real estate content and link to its homes for sale, TradeMe will now take over Stuff's property section and leverage what is bound to be more real estate content on that site. The deal, which is subject to standard conditions being met, will therefore pit the Herald-One Roof combo against Stuff-TradeMe. The latter partnership starts as number one in each of its component online markets. TradeMe's investment will also be a big boost to Stuff, which while profitable according to owner Sinead Boucher, would have been pressured over the past two years in the same vein as declining print and digital ad revenues suffered by NZME. Stuff also took on the added cost of producing 3News nightly for Warner Bros Discovery following Newshub's demise – a multimillion dollar outlay likely to have sustained reduced initially forecast margins, possibly into the red. The sum paid by TradeMe has not been disclosed and both businesses are private companies. But for Boucher and Stuff a substantial inflow of capital right now will greatly improve prospects for the company she bought from Nine Entertainment five years ago for $1. 'This is the first time since the management buyout of Stuff five years ago that I have accepted an equity partner into the business,' she said. 'It was important to me that we found the right partner at the right time in our growth strategy, protecting our fiercely independent media business which is loved and trusted by millions of New Zealanders.' The Stuff mastheads division, covering its newspapers, subscriber news sites The Post, The Press and Waikato Times, plus the Neighbourly and Events businesses, remain fully owned by Boucher. For NZME, its rivals' marriage will not have been a surprise, having been publicly mooted since at least March. But it will be no less challenging, particularly if the NZME strategic review being conducted by Jarden recommends seeking separation and outside investment. The review's objective of realising OneRoof's 'full potential' just got harder. TradeMe chief executive Anders Skoe said the Stuff deal would enable house vendors and agents 'reach an even wider pool of prospective buyers' and 'generate the highest quality property market insights.' Stuff has an audience of 2.3m unique readers a month, 400,000 higher than in the Nielsen online ratings for April, and One Roof, according to the Herald, trailed TradeMe by, 32,000 – 747,000 to 779,000. While Chapman's final speech as chair saluted OneRoof for going 'from strength to strength, delivering significant year-on-year growth', at least one new board member has not always been so convinced. New NZME board member Jim Grenon. Photo: NZME presentation New director Grenon, in a war of words conducted by letter during his contest for board places, threw doubt on OneRoof's actual success over the past four years, saying it had achieved just 40 percent of its targets. In a letter from March 6, Grenon said OneRoof 'missed the most relevant ebitda margin target by a significant degree' as late as the 2024 financial year. 'OneRoof's 2024 financial performance is a recent example of management over promising and ebitda confusion,' he noted, coming in at just half what he calculated should have been $4.8m in operating profit. He questioned, too, how costs for OneRoof had been allocated in NZME's books. He joins the board now with the main competitors gearing up to push back against OneRoof. The new NZME board is also expected to create an editorial advisory board, with blogger and lawyer Phillip Crump nominated as its first member and possible chair, to help improve the Herald's journalism. Grenon and Crump are both of the centre right, Crump a favoured appointee by the coalition Government to both the NZ on Air board and Waitangi Tribunal.
Newsroom
20-05-2025
- Business
- Newsroom
NZME agitator wants Herald's ‘political leaning' measured, maybe by AI
Comment: The Canadian-NZ investor who tried but failed to take board control of media firm NZME still believes its New Zealand Herald needs to 'measure its articles for political leaning' and suggests artificial intelligence can help. Jim Grenon, who previously formed the right-leaning Centrist site and newsletter, will likely win just his own seat on the NZME board when shareholders vote in a fortnight, rather than the chair plus three others he had sought. Instead, his board agitation will see former National Cabinet Minister Steven Joyce supported to become a director and take the chair, with three incumbent directors surviving and a new digital expert to be appointed. But Grenon, who outlined his financial and editorial concerns about the Herald in two letters to the board in March and April, is clearly not letting his focus on the paper's journalism fade as he prepares to join that board. In information posted to the NZX website on Friday for shareholders before the meeting he outlines his business background in Canada, acknowledges he might not 'on the surface … have a lot of directly relevant experience that will be helpful for NZME' and then returns to his editorial standards theme. He said his involvement with the Centrist – which platforms fringe and alternative content on climate change, social and gender issues and the Treaty of Waitangi – had exposed him in detail to the Herald's journalism. 'One of the things Centrist does is carefully follow what the other NZ news organisations are doing so I have had a thorough immersion into the journalism produced by NZME,' Grenon tells shareholders. 'I believe it is important for the Herald to be a broad church. To ensure it is on course it needs to be able to measure its articles for political leaning, overall. This is now much easier with AI. The same can be said about measuring the quality of the journalism.' Grenon has been critical of the Herald and Stuff as long ago as during the pandemic, and the Centrist has said publicly that the Herald's journalism problems were among the reasons for the site/newsletter's launch. 'The NZ Herald also seems to sometimes accept, without questioning, what we see as blatantly misleading government narrative. This includes 3 Waters and the IRD high net worth project. The Herald, BusinessDesk and other major media sources in New Zealand, inspired us to launch NE and the Centrist.' The right-tinged Free Speech Union has also publicly declared it first sparked Grenon's interest in NZME by alerting him to its refusals to publish certain political advocacy advertisements. Quite how Grenon would expect the Herald newsroom or the creation of an editorial advisory board that he promoted in his campaign to measure 'political leaning' in its journalism is unclear. What is also unclear is whether he would expect the Herald to make that measurement of leaning public to readers and customers. In the early weeks of his attempt to turn his 9.97 percent holding in NZME into sweeping aside the existing board, taking the chair and appointing his own nominees, Grenon told NZME he would not be a standard chair. 'I do not propose to act as an average, passive board chair. I propose to be very active at the management level, leading a board and team that will delve into the operational details so as to be able to challenge management. Some other board members may also assist with the technical work. This approach to governance is the only realistic way to ensure NZME gets a fresh set of eyes questioning every aspect of operational effectiveness and shareholder value creation.' Steven Joyce is chair in waiting for NZME. Photo: Lynn Grieveson As a lone director he will now need to make that case to his colleagues around the board table. His previous letters to the board – including one advising directors to forget a futile defence against his raid – listed the company's poor financial performance, insufficient transparency, bloated management and staffing costs and a need for better journalism. One letter said Grenon expected NZME staff to get with the programme once he took over: 'We expect to find significant cost reduction in the high-cost employees and executive ranks. It is easy to understand why existing management has been resistant in this area. We also hope to find many in the existing NZME staff that can work and thrive in the new paradigm, which will provide opportunities for some to advance.' Whether he will be permitted by Joyce and the board to be actively involved in changing the executive ranks and spending can only emerge once the shareholders have had their say on June 3. Grenon has lived in New Zealand for 12 years. He still owns and works with TOM Capital, a private equity business based in Calgary, Canada, that has had financial success investing in energy and manufacturing firms. He lists his board experience at various listed firms over 25 years. His most recent note to shareholders says he and his TOM Capital colleagues have been poring over NZME's financial affairs for a year. 'I think it is noteworthy that, many times in the past I have acquired significant investments based only on publicly available knowledge but they have almost always worked very well once I was in a position on the inside. These calculated risks, based on some, but incomplete, knowledge and experience, are part of private equity investing.' A Grenon associate and at one stage nominee for the NZME board, lawyer and blogger Philip Crump, is set to join the new editorial advisory board at NZME, perhaps as chair. Crump worked within NZME for nine months establishing the ZB Plus centre-right website which was abandoned. He became a favourite of the coalition Government, winning appointments to the board of NZ on Air (the broadcasting and digital content funding agency) and the Waitangi Tribunal. Once appointed to the NZME editorial advisory board, Crump's position on NZ on Air's board would have to be under examination for any appearances of conflict of interest. Stuff up again The latest online audience numbers are out, with Stuff again dominant. Stuff's online ad after winning 11 Voyager Media Awards, including best digital platform. The winner for the second year in a row of best digital news platform at the Voyager Media Awards, Stuff has 2.3 million unique readers in the Nielsen online ratings for April. That is a substantial 417,000 ahead of the nzherald site on just under 1.9m, with RNZ on 1.5m and 1News now a distant fourth on 743,000. RNZ's continued strength follows the demise last July of the Newshub website. Nielsen's April release appears more straightforward than its issuing, then retraction, of March figures after concern over errors. Amended March figures now show Stuff (initially listed as having 2.34m unique readers) was actually 2.2m, and nzherald (initially set at 1.82m) was revised up to 1.89m. Using the latest figures for March, Stuff lifted its audience by 126,000 in April and nzherald was up 9000.
Newsroom
06-05-2025
- Business
- Newsroom
Joyce called on to smother ‘Grenonade' in bitter board battle at Herald owner
Comment: The fight to preserve the New Zealand Herald's editorial independence from an agitating Canadian-NZ investor has leapt out of the fire and into the frying pan with the likely appointment of former National minister Steven Joyce to chair its owner NZME. Joyce, who had played no public role so far in the attempted boardroom coup at NZME in which 10 percent shareholder Jim Grenon wanted to clean house, install himself as chair and actively run NZME like 'an owner operator', is now being nominated by none other than current chair Barbara Chapman's husband as a compromise candidate and her replacement. NZME told the NZX this morning that Chapman would stand aside after a transition period if Joyce was elected to the board. The incumbent board's latest solution to the crisis forced by Grenon is for Joyce and two existing directors Guy Horrocks and Carol Campbell to form part of the directors' elected. Former MediaWorks' chief executive Sussan Turner remains up for re-election at the meeting. And the NZME board wants to appoint tech and marketplace expert Bowen Pan, who has worked at TradeMe, Facebook and Stripe, to its board post annual meeting. Grenon, for all his sweeping demands, is likely to end up as one director with perhaps a handpicked colleague, with Joyce overseeing that pairing, incumbents plus another shareholder's nominee. It is another move backwards for Grenon, the Canadian who wanted to evict all but one of the incumbents and complained NZME's transparency and performance had been severely lacking. He had already been forced by unimpressed influential shareholders to compromise more than once on his proposed board takeover, acquiescing to appointing the chief executive Michael Boggs to the board and dropping or demoting some of the revolutionaries. While the Herald's journalists and their representative union E Tū might feel they have helped push back against Grenon's chairmanship and board clearout – over fears of his strong rightward social and political views – they now face the rare prospect for New Zealand media of a political partisan being appointed to chair their parent company's board. Joyce had personal business success building an independent chain of commercial radio stations, which he sold into what became MediaWorks radio. But he has a long record of political success as first National's campaign strategist and then mastermind alongside John Key of three electoral victories. He was economic development and later finance minister, before seeking the party leadership unsuccessfully and then retiring after National had lost power in 2017 to the Winston Peters-Jacinda Ardern deal. As a politician, Joyce was a dominant figure within National, media-savvy and convinced of the rightness of his thinking. For an independent news media company – NZME also owns Newstalk ZB, music radio stations, the One Roof real estate site and a chain of regional newspapers – to be led by a former politician is not unprecedented. Former Australian treasurer Peter Costello was chair of Nine Entertainment, the television and newspaper company, before pushing over a News Corporation camera operator at an airport and being forced out. But in New Zealand it is not a scenario experienced in modern times. (More than a century ago, the Herald appointed as editor William Lane, a former radical union leader and founder of a 'utopian socialist' commune in Paraguay, turned militarist and pusher of eugenics). The Herald journalists' quest to preserve their independence from board members advancing the interests of themselves, friends or the business over the interests of the public becomes more of a known-known now. Joyce, who has written columns for the Herald frequently since retiring from politics, would be a more varnished and sophisticated operator than Grenon and his blunt and inelegant demands. Grenon has backed a news site and newsletter that promoted right wing causes, challenging orthodoxies over the Treaty of Waitangi, the pandemic response, identity politics and climate change. He had been agitating for change to the 'left's' media assets in New Zealand on and off since 2020 and the Covid crisis, with talk at one point of being willing to part with up to $30m to force change in the media landscape. Joyce carries a career of political partisanship and will have been seen by the existing board as sufficiently centre-right to accommodate the Grenon camp's pressure to move the Herald's 'balance' more towards their worldview. For Chapman, the realisation that an 'alternative board composition' was needed ahead of the delayed June 3 annual meeting with Joyce taking her seat must have been a blow. She has been the face of a board at times caught in the headlights of Grenon's full press of criticism and condemnation. Already one director, David Gibson, had walked away in the heat of battle. But the NZME statement to the NZX makes clear that Chapman and the board has engineered the possible Joyce solution. Her husband, shareholder Stephen Donoghue-Cox, lodged the nomination for Joyce. 'The NZME Board believes that the alternative board composition proposal is in the best interests of the company and its shareholders. However, the ability of the current NZME board to implement the alternative board composition proposal will ultimately depend on the outcome of the shareholder voting,' the company statement to the NZX says. Whether Grenon retains his desired status as a director working actively within the business to turn up the numbers he desires and to 'improve' the Herald's journalism, could now depend on chairman Joyce, who will have his own strong views on what can be done. A new name among the Grenon board nominees released today alongside lawyer and blogger Philip Crump and investment house director Des Gittings is Henri Eliot, who is notably a professional 'mediator' and Institute of Directors' member. NZME has already commissioned investment firm Jarden & Co to look at a possible separation and listing for OneRoof. Grenon wants deep cost-cuts, including to senior management, and a stronger focus on 'quality' journalism leading to greater subscriptions. The fate of a strategic investment in video journalism, which is currently underway, could also be in doubt. Turning around NZME's financial performance – it reported a $16m loss after a writedown for 2024 – in a media market being smothered by ongoing domestic economic stagnation will be a monumental undertaking. Grenon has said in the past he has made good money from investing in 'dying' sectors but believes there could yet be a lucrative tail in the media here. His campaign for change, which NBR termed a 'Grenonade' has had some successes – it has already seen Gibson go, now Chapman if Joyce is elected, plus the non-replacement of a senior, departing NZME executive member and most lately the re-elevation of the Herald editor to the NZME executive team. Joyce is putting his reputation on the line. He was one of the ministers who presided over NZ's so-called 'rockstar economy'. NZME needs a promoter, lead singer and set list that will convince New Zealanders it deserves ongoing support.
