Episode description
Episode description
Part 2: It's Newshub's final week on air, and reporter Adam Hollingworth looks back at its battle to beat TVNZ. Where it succeeded and where it failed.
As Newshub enters its final week, reporter Adam Hollingworth looks back at its battle to beat TVNZ. Where it succeeded and where it failed.
This is the second and final episode of The Detail's two-part podcast. Part one can be found here.
In 2013 things were going well for 3 News. It was performing strongly in the Auckland market, often beating TVNZ in the key 25 to 54 demographic.
There were signs that it was also making progress with audiences in Wellington and South Island. Then came a body blow.
A relatively new board at TV3 decided it had to do something to rid itself of expensive and onerous contracts with Hollywood studios. It decided to put the company into voluntary receivership which allowed it to exit the contracts.
Executives were tasked with renegotiating deals for programmes considered vital at the time, like Home and Away. The Aussie soap was in its most popular phase and was giving 3 News a stronger lead-in than One News had. Lead-in programmes were still seen as significant factors in the news battle and TV3 had suffered for years with multiple programmes failing to fire in the 5.30pm slot.
Unfortunately for TV3 Home and Away slipped through its fingers and into the hands of TVNZ.
3 News had lost its lead-in and the network had lost the most profitable programme in its history.
The then-Head of News at TV3 and now co-editor at Newsroom, Mark Jennings, says the loss of Home and Away was a huge shock and setback for the network.
"Unfortunately that was probably the start of many problems that led right up to today."
A short time later the board appointed a new CEO, Olympic swimmer and former boss of the NZX, Mark Weldon.
"Weldon was different, he was a McKinsey consultant, he was head of the NZX, our New Zealand stock exchange, he had no media experience," Jennings says.
According to Jennings, Weldon had good ideas but failed to, or didn't want to, understand editorial independence, and this put him on a collision course with the TV3's newsroom.
"He used to tell me he was a friend of John Key's, we had a board who had directors on it who were aligned with the National Party. In the end they did not like our current affairs journalists, they saw them almost as the enemy and Mark Weldon really wanted to bring change there," he explains.
A slew of executives, including Jennings, left TV3. Longform current affairs was abandoned and journalists laid off.
Melanie Reid was one of them, and she describes the Weldon era as 'odd'…