Buying Stuff for $1 is the most important change in NZs media landscape since deregulation – why Government MUST support it
This. Is. Huge.
Stuff CEO Sinead Boucher buys the company, announces ‘great new era’
Stuff Ltd chief executive Sinead Boucher has bought the company from its Australian owners Nine Entertainment, ending months of speculation about a potential takeover.
The management buyout led by Boucher is understood to have been planned and executed very quickly, with the chief executive buying the company for a direct price of $1, and returning the company to New Zealand ownership. The sale is expected to be completed by May 31.
The major issue about bailing out Stuff was that the Government didn’t want to get caught in the politically embarrassing situation of having helped a foreign media owner who would then cut and run.
Sinead taking this enormously brave and courageous decision herself by buying the entire company is not only testament to her personal conviction to support NZ journalism but now must also radically reconstruct the role the State should play in protecting that NZ journalism.
We haven’t had an enormous media organisation fully owned by NZers outside of TVNZ and RNZ since the deregulation era so this is a precious democratic treasure that now must be supported by Government.
When Stuff was foreign owned, fuck ’em. Now it’s NZ owned, love, cherish and support them!
The fundamental problem is that the advertising market has been bled dry by Google and Facebook while being owned by vulture capitalists who are only interested in using profits to cover the debt they’ve used to buy the companies.
Labour are allergic when it comes to big ideas needed to combat neoliberalism and market failure but the hollowing out of journalism by the free market is a challenge that demands the same taxation on multinationals thinking that Australia is now considering…
1 – Public Funded Media in the nations interest
The RNZ-TVNZ merger should be occurring immediately with the following inclusions.
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- TV1 commercial free (so existing advertising can go to Mediaworks).
- RNZ launch a commercial free youth radio station.
- RNZ/TVNZ launch a 24 hour news station on one of their existing Freeview+ channels.
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2 – Tax Google & Facebook and ring fence that for direct funding of corporate journalism
Google & Facebook charged a percentage on all revenue from NZ, that money is specifically ring fenced to a contestable fund available to established Media to specifically provide Fourth Estate Journalism.
3 – NZ on Air ‘Read between the Flags’ Kiwi journalism
In a world of disinformation, we need journalism we can trust. We all get the ‘swim between the flag’ model of surf life saving, NZ on Air should be given extra funding for ‘Read between the flags’ Kiwi Journalism. This money is to break the current elite opinion NZ on Air circle jerk and provide revenue for smaller blogs and citizen journalism who become eligible if they agree to a set of Journalistic Principles. If you do agree and sign up, you are entitled to funding and must have a Kiwi Journalism flag on your site to show you are obliged to the Journalistic Principles Code of conduct. You would have an awareness campaign to urge NZers to ‘read between the flags’ for trusted information.
The NZ population has always been too small for advertiser funded journalism, it has ALWAYS needed State support, add a broken market where vulture capitalists use media profits to pay the interest on their debt and you have a hollowed out Fourth Estate that can’t be a watchdog to anything other than their self interest.
Stuff now being owned by NZers is a Fourth Estate worth supporting and defending.
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Yes I am very surprised Government didn’t buy it for a dollar as I would have given them the money.
Labour coalition now desperately need the only avaliable press platform now AS THE ‘MSM’ IS ALL LOVING NATIONAL TODAY.
So having a ‘press balance’ is crucial to the upcoming election today.
STUFF is the perfect solution to their failed chances to get control of the right wing RNZ/TVNZ platform now so STUFF is the answer for us all; and we hope you are to play a great part of the new “peoples voice” if Government gets a partnership with STUFF.
Please! Supporting big media is like supporting blacksmiths when car mechanics started replacing them.
If the current media are still relevant, then let the market decide, surely a host of small independent media will arise from the ashes of NZME, Fairfax etc?
Surely anything that seems right to me will arise sooner or later. I have been thinking that all my life and know one thing surely – that if you want anything good for good society and all people, you have to actively go for it. A hoist of small independent media may arise – focussing on their own individual pursuits – like the magazines that Bauer has just given up on. And what would you be doing to help this wonderful phalanx of phoenixes – if you know what that is?
Can the Labour Coalition pull its sticky plaster off and go cleanskin? Can it divest itself from the bandages that have wrapped it so long in neolib and freemarket shrouds and bear the pain?
Bandages soaked with old blood and pus and detritus have to be removed or the skin below gets re-infected from its covering. I have found, being a bit wary of pain, that just easing them off, having some clean scissors to snip off hairs stuck in the muck, and having some disinfectant dilution to hand, limits the pain and puts the wound onto a path for healing.
This process parallels what Labour will have to go through to advance NZ and limit its shame at being the innovators of wrong treatment for an ailing NZ, followed by neglect of the wound they created along with their bloody treasonable Treasury advisors.
*treason: the action of betraying someone or something.
“doubt is the ultimate treason against faith”
At present PM Jacinda is creating the fertile ground for growing a ‘decent society’, using Jim Bolger’s once-used term. So take the opportunity Government to start cleaning out whatever can be accomplished this year before the Election. Start with dealing to Immigration – the way that they treat people couldn’t be worse if the Department was bare except for machines running on algorithms. At present, the managers and policy setters there, are between a rock and a hard place, so get some strong sandpaper and smooth them down from their rough ways.
If Immigration gauleiters do not want to use their personal intelligence and make suitable and fair decisions on a human basis, there are precedents already in this country of being replaced with tech – computers could then do a better job (if appropriately provided with good programs and coding). The cries from people stuck under Covid-19 regs and nowhere to turn to, and unable to even contact necessary officialdom, are heart-wrenching to thinking humans. They are also between a rock and a hard place, so an Immigration brought nose-against its similar position, might at last understand the desirability of effective and compassionate response to their pleas.
Can the Labour Coalition pull its sticky plaster off and go cleanskin? Can it divest itself from the bandages that have wrapped it so long in neolib and freemarket shrouds and bear the pain?
Bandages soaked with old blood and pus and detritus have to be removed or the skin below gets re-infected from its covering. I have found, being a bit wary of pain, that just easing them off, having some clean scissors to snip off hairs stuck in the muck, and having some disinfectant dilution to hand, limits the pain and puts the wound onto a path for healing.
This process parallels what Labour will have to go through to advance NZ and limit its shame at being the innovators of wrong treatment for an ailing NZ, followed by neglect of the wound they created along with their bloody treasonable Treasury advisors.
*treason: the action of betraying someone or something.
“doubt is the ultimate treason against faith”
At present PM Jacinda is creating the fertile ground for growing a ‘decent society’, using Jim Bolger’s once-used term. So take the opportunity Government to start cleaning out whatever can be accomplished this year before the Election. Start with dealing to Immigration – the way that they treat people couldn’t be worse if the Department was bare except for machines running on algorithms. At present, the managers and policy setters there, are between a rock and a hard place, so get some strong sandpaper and smooth them down from their rough ways.
If Immigration gauleiters do not want to use their personal intelligence and make suitable and fair decisions on a human basis, there are precedents already in this country of being replaced with tech – computers could then do a better job (if appropriately provided with good programs and coding). The cries from people stuck under Covid-19 regs and nowhere to turn to, and unable to even contact necessary officialdom, are heart-wrenching to thinking humans. They are also between a rock and a hard place, so an Immigration brought nose-against its similar position, might at last understand the desirability of effective and compassionate response to their pleas.
Some good ideas. In particular,
2 – Tax Google & Facebook and ring fence that for direct funding of corporate journalism
Don’t agree with the merger with RNZ though. RNZ used to be a better read, sadly it has turned woke and bites the hand that reads it.
Will probably take down TVNZ if they merge. RNZ need to get back to news and real journalists, not the daily lobbying of a certain type of woke speak and articles that have zero contexts and are misleading aka anti NZ First campaigns ….
Also think NZ on Air should be focusing on Kiwi independent media like TDB – word of warning though, don’t let TDB go too woke, or like anywhere the woke go, they destroy and assimilate into one woke view, one woke world and then plummet viewership into a downward spiral.
Having a difference of opinion is what makes independent media and their viewership interesting, … don’t let TDB get derailed by influence…. it’s bad enough the Green Party may be destroyed by the wokesters, and quite a few longstanding movements have derailed from their original purpose in NZ to another one that co incidentally helps neoliberalism aka unite union stopping lobbying for local workers and now just lobby for more migrants and more benefits for migrants too… I really wonder who are the biggest beneficiaries from overloading the social systems of NZ into a low wage worker country of the income less, and creating massive competition for everything, while driving up pollution and asset sales, in a small country?
Bauer media staff should do the same thing as Stuff.
A glitch there – two lots of my warblings! If you can Martyn if you are hands-on – could you remove one of the two. I think there was a glitch and two of the same got through.
But the good news is that the Editor of stuff has shown she has … lots of pluck, and has a way with words plus ideas and vision. Good on you – a Guardian-type trust for this paper, and for other ventures altogether may be good for the country – a NZ-wide Family Trust to keep to us what is near and dear and our heritage. We are small and are getting our cherries picked off our tree by bigger birds with their beady eyes. If you read about famous very wealthy families, they hold onto what is theirs, not sell it off the first moment we can. And one of these families can make more with their investments and embedded businesses than the whole of us providing for our own needs with extra leftover for advancement and time for enjoyment. If we think of ourselves as a whole entity, not a bunch of simple-minded workers-mad-good plus the grifters, we will do more than survive, but find pride and pleasure in all of our doings and beings.
Yes SaveNZ Labour need a big win before the election and buying into Stuff is a perfect way to show they are part way to honoring that commitment to giving the public that media channel by firstly building up a platform that will cover all citizens issues because currently we all have no MSM coverage of our regional issues that ordinary citizens can get their voice heard and reported on and the social digital media like we have here are all we currently have.
Why help the foreign owned TV3?
There are two options extend On Air funding to print journalism and the one I prefer.
A state owned news agency – cadet reporters supply to other media free of charge. Local, regional and national news. Copy is supplied the other media who make it pubic – on-line or print.