Remember what the R in RNZ is for

The new report making the case for big changes

If RNZ wanted a warts and all report on its failings and reasons for the catastrophic audience decline in the last five years it certainly received one this week.

The former Head of News for the organisation – a man who’s also had senior or supervisory roles in newsrooms at Newstalk ZB, TVNZ and Newshub – delivered a withering assessment of the state owned broadcaster.

Richard Sutherland found a culture of “blame shifting, low ambition and a belief that radio is in terminal decline” and then something that will send a shiver down the spine of anyone who’s ever opened their mouth in front of a microphone: “some people shouldn’t be on air.”

The figures are stark. RNZ National (we’ll put Concert FM aside for now) has lost audience at an annual rate of six percent since 2020. That means the cumulative weekly audience has dropped from 703,000 in the winter of 2020 - the early months of the Covid era - to 467,000 in the first months of this year.

I’ll make a few disclaimers. I worked at RNZ around thirty years ago when it was called Radio New Zealand and it owned commercial stations too. I presented the Morning Report 7.35am sports news for a few years. But I haven’t been a listener of any sort for some time because frankly I found it boring, not particularly balanced and the quality of the presenters underwhelming.

For the purposes of this article I gave Morning Report half an hour of my life this morning. My mind hasn’t changed.

What I have noticed is that RNZ is the source of most non-local stories in my local paper, the Otago Daily Times and that the so called national broadcaster appears to have morphed into a de facto national news agency. In other words its core function of broadcasting has been replaced by long form written reporting, which is then distributed - hopefully for a profit – to the Stuff, NZME and Allied Press publications and websites.

That suggests RNZ have taken their eye off the ball. If we’re paying for the outfit as taxpayers I’d prefer they remember what the R in their name stands for.

As the country’s most successful media outlet Newstalk ZB proves on a daily basis, radio is far from a sunset industry. There is a place for entertaining and slickly presented audio broadcasting, and it doesn’t matter where it originates from.

One thing I disagree with Richard Sutherland on is that Morning Report should be Auckland based just because a third of the population lives there. Ingrid Hipkiss made a point in her trailer just before 8am that she was in Auckland. As someone who lives in the South Island I don’t care. Radio is a sound where the origin doesn’t matter. It’s the content and the quality of the presentation that counts.

Now here’s my critique of 30 minutes of Morning Report on Friday August 15.

The 7.30 news was, as has been the case for years, read dispassionately and efficiently by Nicola Wright. She’s the best radio newsreader in the country and so much better than the Newstalk ZB lady who often gets her word emphasis wrong and has a speech defect – for instance, she can’t say “building” properly.

The business report was ponderous and badly ad-libbed. Such a segment should be scripted and presented in a much more energetic way. It also needs an introductory audio sting to improve its presence rather than just Corin Dann doing a perfunctory throw to the business reporter.

The sports segment was weird. Instead of it being a bulletin of sports news with a really good new angle about the world pole vault record holder, it was a kind of two-way interview with Ingrid Hipkiss. Again, a ponderous and inefficient use of air time.

The traffic report, as all traffic reports are, was unnecessary and useless. If you’re not driving it’s of no relevance and if you are the information is highly unlikely to be of any assistance. In half a century of broadcasting I always thought traffic reports were the most wasteful segments of all because they concentrate on motorways which are always clogged and never suggest good shortcuts or alternate back roads!

Then came a nonsense piece on something called the Burger Olympics in Wellington. The less said the better. If RNZ National is to find success by concentrating on an older audience they should know that older people don’t like burgers much and will not be impressed by the subject at 7.50 am!

Next up was another example of RNZ’s fixation on greenhouse gas emissions. Their “climate” reporter Eloise Gibson was lamenting that three of the country’s biggest GHG emitters now don’t have to reveal how much “planet heating” gas they produce. The story was presented as another two-way interview between presenter and reporter and included references to “climate pollution” – presumably meaning CO2, which as every real scientist will tell you is essential for life on earth. I wonder when RNZ last ran a story questioning the “GHGs are bad” narrative? I suspect it wasn’t this millennium!

To complete the half hour came another light touch, a feature story about a building not far down the road from me called Earnscleugh Castle. It’s been a local cause célèbres for years so it’s nice to have some nationwide coverage of the restoration. What bothered me was that Corin Dann was either not advised or didn’t bother to ask how to pronounce the name of the place in the intro, calling it Earns-CLAW instead of Earns-CLEW. Then the reporter, introduced as the Otago-Southland reporter (there’s only one ??) pronounced the word “enAmoured” as “enARmoured.” Do senior producers not check the finished recordings before these pieces go to air ? That was pretty basic stuff which to me stood out like the proverbial.

And that was the half hour. It was standard fare presented, frankly, in a pretty drab way. There as no pizzaz or energy in the show and the presenters just don’t have a commanding audio presence the way Hosking or Du Plessis-Allan do on ZB.

If that half hour of Morning Report is typical of the RNZ schedule through the day then I’m not surprised it’s losing listeners.

For what it’s worth, a few suggestions: Break up the show with punchy promotions for other programmes and RNZ initiatives, use audio stings to introduce segments like business and sport and ensure the presenters of those segments fully script their information in such a way as to not need ad-libs.

Then there is the matter of the anchor presenters. I know Corin Dann because we were colleagues on TVNZ Breakfast fifteen years ago. He’s OK at what he does but he will never be a Hosking beater the way that Geoff Robinson and Sean Plunket were in the Morning Report heyday. I don’t know Ingrid Hipkiss but she was a perfectly competent presenter and reporter in her Newshub days. Together they strike me as being a not especially dynamic pairing compared to some of their predecessors of the last half century.

If I’m paying for RNZ, and I don’t especially want to, I expect the flagship radio station to be just that. I don’t care about its news agency role or its website or its long form written reporting. I want an entertaining and listenable radio station with a variety of political viewpoints with some, just some, presenters who lean politically centre-right.

Earlier this year I was called by a parliamentary staff member of a government political party at his wits end with the treatment his party was receiving at the hands of RNZ. He was asking for suggestions about how to change things. Off the top of my head I suggested they make some significant changes around the board table and the installation of a many-viewpoints editorial board to provide a more balanced approach to the world.

I still think those are worthwhile suggestions. In the meantime the current RNZ Board and management have some big calls to make.

Will they?