Latest news with #SineadBoucher
Scoop
17-07-2025
- Business
- Scoop
Stuff Wins Media Business Of The Year
Stuff Group has won the prestigious Media Business of the Year at the Communications Council's Beacon Awards, being named as New Zealand's leading media organisation for its bold vision and strategy implemented for success. The Beacon Awards celebrate outstanding media thinking and execution in Aotearoa and the Business of the Year is celebrated for its proven success across financial performance, industry reputation and audience growth and engagement. In 2024, commentators noted that no media organisation had gone further or faster than Stuff as it leapt into growing video audiences and revenue on the country's largest news website through strategic investment into technology, talent and training. The Comms Council judges said that boldness and positivity underpinned Stuff's winning entry which was titled 'Lights, Camera, Traction'. '(Stuff made) moves that benefitted not just their own business but also the wider media ecosystem in Aotearoa. This business took risks . . . and in doing so demonstrated undeniable positivity and forward momentum.' Stuff Owner and Publisher Sinead Boucher said the award was brilliant recognition of a year in which the company made good on its promise to 'Follow No One', accelerating its shift into video, taking on ThreeNews for Warner Bros. Discovery and navigating challenging waters with a focus on the future. 'I am so proud of all of our teams as they have seized opportunities, created value for our partners and continued to grow the largest digital and print audiences in the country,' she says. 'Media is such a dynamic business and being acknowledged for both our strategy and delivery is a real testament to our people who are committed to driving Stuff forward.' Commercial Director Jaana Collins says receiving industry recognition at a time of immense change in media is particularly important and the Communications Council award is a real honour for the whole team. 'Stuff is an organisation that makes strong strategic moves and is always looking to connect our partners with audiences in new and exciting ways,' she says. 'Innovating together with our partners is a vital part of that strategy and critical to the next stage of Stuff's evolution. 'A huge thank you to all of the agencies, brands and customers we work with every day for their support of independent New Zealand journalism, to the Communications Council for their leadership and to the other finalists NZME, TVNZ, Sky and Are Media who are all great local competitors in a fast-changing industry.'
Newsroom
07-07-2025
- Business
- Newsroom
ThreeNews keeps on keeping on
Comment: Twelve months is a long time in the TV industry, and it must seem extra long for the small group of former Newshub reporters hired by Stuff to work on the new version of 3 News. While they were always going to be the backbone of Stuff's TV news operation they have ended up doing pretty much the whole thing – just with a lot less resources than they previously had. When Stuff took over 6pm, its chief executive Sinead Boucher promised TV3's owner, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) that it would benefit from Stuff's expertise. 'We have a proven track record of modernising, changing and being at the edge of what you can do with our own organisation, and we're hungry to bring some of that innovation and freshness to Warner Bros.' she said. A year on, the opposite seems to have happened. There is no discernible innovation or freshness (apart from some younger reporters) and the breadth of coverage once provided by Newshub has been diminished. Stuff has failed to harness its major advantage of having more reporters in more locations than any other local media company. With some exceptions – political reporter Glenn McConnell being one – Stuff reporters either haven't measured up or haven't been available to fill the holes left by the decision to recruit just a handful of Newshub reporters, producers, camera crews and editors. This is hardly a surprise to anyone in the media world, apart from possibly Stuff's management. In a multimedia environment, producing quality reports for a 6pm TV bulletin still demands a particular skill set. The small group of experienced Newshub reporters have responded valiantly by lengthening their reports. The duration of many items has increased, possibly even doubled, to fill the 6pm to 7pm hour. During the week the news team has still been able to produce a reasonable first break (the 12 to 15 minutes before the first commercial) but after that, the offering thins. Irrelevant international content often gets a run to fill space that would have previously been devoted to second-tier, but still important, local stories. The weekends are particularly weak. It seems only one or two TV reporters are rostered to cover the whole country. Recently, the Nelson/Tasman floods were covered remotely by the Auckland-based weekend reporter. He did a passable job with poor-quality footage (presumably from Stuff's Nelson Daily Mail) and some interviews done over Zoom. In this particular 6pm bulletin it appeared that not one ThreeNews reporter went to the actual scene of a story. Over time, this absence, this lack of firsthand observation by a reporter must erode trust in the brand. By contrast, 1News did have reporters on location in Nelson and other news events that weekend. When WBD decided to stem its mounting losses and contract out the 6pm bulletin to Stuff there was speculation TVNZ would take the opportunity to cut costs out of 1News given it was no longer facing the same competitive threat. It seems not to have done that – well, not to the extent it could have. Politically, that was probably a smart move. That fact it provides a full and comprehensive news service gives TVNZ a strong argument for remaining in public ownership. Act and lobby groups like the Taxpayers' Union periodically call for it to be sold, but Media Minister Paul Goldsmith, who often opines about retaining trust in news being one of his top priorities, is unlikely to be swayed while privately owned media continues to decline. 1News at Six has clearly benefited from WBD's decision to go with a cut-price Stuff product. While the number of people watching linear TV is steadily declining, the numbers watching 1News have increased over the past 12 months. Some of the increase must have come from defecting Newshub/ThreeNews viewers. The number of people streaming 1News has also jumped but remains small compared to the numbers still watching the broadcast every night. Some experienced journalists at ThreeNews privately express surprise that TVNZ hasn't gone after its audience more aggressively given its advantage in firepower. They take pride in the resilience shown by the ex Newshub staffers and their ability to operate on a low budget. On the other hand, TVNZ can afford to take its time. It knows that when a significant story, like a major natural disaster, happens it will have the numbers and the money to overwhelm ThreeNews. Next year's election will also be a test for ThreeNews/WBD/Stuff. Will they jointly mount a leaders' debate and other political debates? How will they cover election night? TVNZ will be desperate to show the Government, and all political parties, that it has a vital role to play in the country's democracy and ThreeNews will struggle to match it. Maybe then Stuff will bring out that innovation and freshness it promised a year ago.
RNZ News
14-06-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
More managed decline? Or settling on a sustainable structure?
Greg Hywood, chief executive of Fairfax Media and some of the company's top newspapers. CeBIT Australia (CC BY-SA 4.0) CeBIT Australia Photo: CeBIT Australia When Stuff announced it was merging its digital wing with Trade Me last week, things had gone full circle. New Zealand's biggest publisher of news had bought the online marketplace itself in 2006 for more than $700m. Back then it was called Fairfax Media NZ, a subsidiary of the giant Australian news publisher which parted with $1.2 billion to buy the The Press, Dominion Post and Sunday Star Times and others. By 2012, TradeMe was sold off in bits to ease debts and falling revenue. And six years later, Greg Hywood negotiated a merger of Fairfax Media and TV broadcaster Nine Network. It created an Australasian news titan but extinguished the Fairfax name. The email Fairfax staff received as the merger news broke. Photo: screenshot "The best outcome for our journalism, for our employees, our business and of course our shareholders," Greg Hywood said at the time. But the New Zealand publishing - now branded as Stuff - wasn't on the radar at the time. The 95-page merger document only mentioned Fairfax's New Zealand holdings once. And there was no sign of Stuff on a chart showing the logos of the new big beast called Nine Entertainment. Less than two years later, Nine Entertainment sold its apparently unwanted New Zealand branch for just $1 to its chief editor Sinead Boucher. Five years after that, sole owner Boucher is now selling half of Stuff's digital business back to Trade Me. In the same week her former boss in Australia, Greg Hywood, stepped down from his role as chairman of Free TV, the umbrella group for Free to Air TV broadcasting in Australia. Sydney-based Hywood became the ultimate boss of Stuff and its papers here when he rejoined Fairfax Media as CEO in 2010. "Editorially and in the day to day business sense, the organisation did what it needed to do - and frankly it was doing really quite well," Hywood told Mediawatch. "The New Zealand assets were important assets and we kept a close eye on them. They were managed very well. "I was surprised that it was given back for a dollar because I always thought. . the New Zealand business was probably in better shape than the regional business here, which was sold for A$120m by Nine. "Good luck to Sinead and the team with what they've subsequently done." But if Hywood and Boucher had had their way in 2016, the deal could never have happened. Both backed Fairfax Media NZ merging with its big New Zealand rival APN, the publishers of the New Zealand Herald (these days called NZME). They said it was essential for their survival. The plan was knocked back by the Commerce Commission who reckoned it would be too much of a monopoly here. And it would have created one single publisher of news instead of the two we have now - Stuff and NZME - with district editorial approaches offering readers choice. "In retrospect I'm still supportive of it. Ninety percent of the growth in advertising in both New Zealand and Australia goes to Google and Facebook - and traditional media are fighting over the other 10 percent," Hywood said. Fairfax and APN / NZME pursued the process in court for three fruitless years. "You really needed scale to be able to compete and it was a question about diversity or scale. While they have both survived, would they have been able to invest in journalism in the merged entities (more) than what's currently the case? Hywood said. "I can't answer that, but it was a very legitimate exercise to deal with the structural change going on in the industry and making sure that the journalism would survive." "By the time I got back to Fairfax in 2010 as CEO, the consequence of investing so heavily in newspapers had put the company in the position where we had to sell TradeMe to reduce the level of debt. The print revenue was dropping at 10 percent a year, which was $100 million a year," Hywood said. Former All Black captain Divid Kirk was the CEO who bought Trade Me for Fairfax in 2006. "That was a very good decision by David - to digitise the revenue streams of the business," Hywood said. Ads for jobs, homes and cars were the so-called 'rivers of gold' - practically a licence for newspapers to print money - as well as news - in the days before the Internet. Hywood said back in the 1970s Fairfax had its own garage and a staff of mechanics just to service the executives' cars. "Things were great, and were certainly fun... if you were fortunate enough to be a journalist in those days. But there's no point being what I might call an Anzac of the 70s." "As the years went by and we hit the Internet period, the role of the journalist was less certain. But the fundamental role of a journalist has always been the same - having a good crack at making sure you get to the kernel of the truth." Many still know Hywood in Australia as 'the man who swung the axe.' Nineteen hundred people got made redundant at Fairfax in basically a single day in 2012. "That is what we had to do. You don't feel great making decisions like that, but it's a bit like a surgeon with a dying patient on the operating table." "The direction the company meant the banks would have been knocking on the door and sold it off and broken it up. It was not going to survive in that form. You've got to do some radical things to save the patient's life." The closure of printing plants followed - and outsourcing of production to New Zealand. That prompted strikes and newspaper workers there holding signs like 'Not happy Bro' 'BAAAA-d move' against a backdrop of sheep. "We offshored the sub-editing process and focused on the local reporting because we had to have the journalism. That was our responsibility." The New Zealand Herald reports the news that its rival has gone into business with Trade Me. Photo: New Zealand Herald Fairfax in Australia established the property news and information platform Domain, recently the subject of a bid of NZ$3b from a US real estate firm. But the market leader across the ditch - - is currently valued around $30b. Is Stuff's partnership with TradeMe a smart move to secure its news and journalism? "I'm not close enough to the Stuff and TradeMe merger... but from a distance it looks like a pretty good idea. Well done to Sinead and the team," Hywood said. "The whole point of the Fairfax and Nine merger was really to get a media company of scale with a property marketing platform to enable it to compete. Domain is a distant number two, but... with the correct investment and the decisions, the ability to take on was always there. That hasn't occurred but the property marketing market is extremely lucrative." Companies like Fairfax Media and Stuff have been in the business of managing decline for the last 20 years. Have they now found a sustainable but smaller-scale model based on lucrative digital property platforms? "I don't think it will ever calm down. It's a bit like a raging river where you've got to hop from island to island. You can't just rely on content and advertising," Hywood said. "Also, government has always been slow to adapt to what's going on. And it's got to really deeply think about what the right regulatory environment is... to get New Zealand stories in New Zealand, Australian stories in Australia and the news and information that is required." "The private sector's got to get on its bike and build the businesses. And the government has to provide a fair, and sustainable regulatory environment so that everyone can get on with it." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
Kiwiblog
05-06-2025
- Business
- Kiwiblog
Will Stuff staff get their 10%?
Stuff owner Sinead Boucher has sold 50% of Stuff Digital to Trade Me, which in turn is 100% owned by Apax Partners, a British private equity firm with around US$77 billion in assets. Good on Boucher. I have no issue with foreign investment in media companies. The discipline they may bring to Stuff Digital could be very good for them. In 2021, Stuff reported: Stuff owner and chief executive Sinead Boucher is gifting a 10 per cent share of the media firm to the company's close to 900 staff. The stake in the company will be transferred to a trust controlled by employee representatives, rather than the shares being directly owned by staff members. The arrangement means staff would receive through the trust a share of any dividends Stuff pays out, and 10 per cent of the sale proceeds if Stuff was later sold or listed, she said. This never happened, as it was later modified to happening if any shares were sold or exited. Presumably this has happened, so we will see 10% of Stuff Digital transferred to a staff trust? Radio NZ report: After Boucher bought Stuff for $1 in 2020, she told staff that a 10 percent stake of the company would be put into a staff trust in the event that the business was sold or listed. A spokesperson said that, while there was still some time until the deal was to be completed, it was Boucher's expectation that a payment would be made into the staff trust. A payment? Would it be a payment equal to one fifth of what Trade Me paid? Shouldn't it be non-voting shares of 10% of Stuff Digital, rather than a payment? After all, that is what was promised?
NZ Herald
04-06-2025
- Business
- NZ Herald
Media Insider podcast: Stuff's Trade Me deal - will staff share in chief executive Sinead Boucher's lucrative payday?; New NZME chair Steven Joyce opens up in first major interview
Steven Joyce sits down for his first major interview since becoming the chair of NZ Herald and Newstalk ZB owner NZME, and we ask Stuff owner Sinead Boucher whether her staff will also share in the rewards of this week's Trade Me deal, as previously promised. Stuff boss Sinead Boucher
