MEDIAWATCH: TV3s genuinely first interesting programming decision since destroying Campbell Live and why RNZ and wider NZ media are panicking

Ryan Bridge to replace The Project with new 7pm show

AM host Ryan Bridge is set to host a new 7pm current affairs show on Three replacing The Project.

The new show will be interview-based and mostly live in an attempt by Discovery to return to a harder style of current affairs in the primetime spot, Shayne Currie’s Media Insider column in the NZ Herald is reporting.

“I will be leaving AM … next Friday is my last day on the show,” Bridge told viewers on Friday morning.

“Thankfully I still have a job. I will be going to the 7pm slot on TV3, so that’s from early next year.”

Newshub political reporter Lloyd Burr will replace Bridge on AM, alongside Melissa Chan-Green, it was announced on AM on Friday morning.

The name of the new show has yet to be announced, but Bridge will be the sole host, Currie reported.

This is the genuinely first interesting programming decision by TV3 since destroying Campbell Live!

Ryan is one of the most dangerous live interviewers in the game. He is a unique talent who can listen to an answer mid interview and is smart enough to ask a follow up question based on the answer.

He was always more hard news than the pap how did on breakfast, but since TVNZ screwed up the Breakfast team and removed John Campbell, viewers have fled the forever mourning of the TVNZ Breakfast Show for the far quicker paced TV3 and The AM Show has jumped in the ratings.

Discovery would have looked at how much they were paying royalties to Rove for the very limp Project and asked ‘why can’t we do this in house for far cheaper’.

I would have thought Paddy has issues might have been spread into 5 weekly shows or maybe the long suffering and brilliant Rebecca Wright on Newshub Nation might finally get a break, but studio based keeps it cheap as chips and Ryan as a talent can hold the 30minutes.

I was never a fan of The Project.

We are a more stupid people with a weaker democracy because the 7pm Current Affairs slot has been so bastardised by both networks..

When TV3 killed Campbell Live, the rumour was a dumbed down jokey Ben and Jonno was going to replace it to target the advertising Shortland Street takes. The rumour was quashed because the backlash against real current affairs was so intense and TV3 produced a half way house with Story hosted by Heather du Plessis-Allen and Duncan Garner.

When the short-lived  Story sank in the ratings low enough to resurrect the desire for a 7pm vehicle that could take Shortland Street advertising, Rove’s The Project was licensed as a proper way to do jokey current affairs.

The problem was that the Australian Project was hosted by rebels and smart funny hosts who had no problems ‘going there’ where as the NZ version had weak joke writers from 7 Days for a safe scripted banality that helped dumb down the 7pm timeslot to levels even worse than Seven Sharp.

NZ is desperate for a hard news TV show and live TV is the most powerful tool TV has left. Seven Sharp is as braindead as The Project was, Ryan has a clear run to try something far more fourth estate ferocious and he is good at attacking the Left and the Right.

His interviews with Luxon are some of the best on TV.

Meanwhile RNZ is expanding into an audience they had previously left to the other commercial operators in a move that has Shane Currie clutching his pearls in shock…

Leaked document shows RNZ planning ‘new digital experience’ for younger audience

Radio New Zealand is planning a new digital experience to sit “somewhere between Facebook and Stuff”, despite previously saying it would not plough funds from a multimillion-dollar boost in public money into areas where media was already strong.

A strategy document leaked to the New Zealand Herald and outlined in Shayne Currie’s Media Insider column for the publication said the digital experience would include a mobile app with a new brand name and an extension of its existing website.

The document said the experience was intended to sit “somewhere between Facebook … and Stuff,” Currie reported.

…he’s clutching in shock because commercial media was under the impression that they had exclusive rights to all the juiciest audience bands just for themselves, and see State sponsored competition as an unfair advantage.

The reality is that RNZ is a public broadcaster and has a responsibility to cater to the entire audience, and seeing as RNZ hates white males 30-49 and serve this audience only by blaming everything on them, they have to lift their game which will probably be a new  podcast hosted by the usual suspects and have it only slightly viewed more times than their feminist podcasts.

The new media environment is desperate.

MediaWorks has received a lot of media attention lately regarding the new media environment struggles, but at least they have a plan for turning things around.

Radio, Newspaper and TV ‘audiences’ were always a mismatch of diary readership surveys and polling.

Generating these audience numbers was always more an art than science with clients believing a million eyeballs saw their advert or a million ears heard their advert.

The brutality of online viewing stats however alongside the inflated numbers social media sold as ‘impressions’ robbed radio and newspaper of their audience numbers.

Online is all that matters now and the stats they generate provide more than the old school radio and newspaper surveys.

RNZ missed their recent audience targets, TVNZ is haemorrhaging cash, NZME is asking The Platform for insight and a recent copy of the Dom Post had no adverts in it!

Social media has not only stolen the advertising, they have trashed the previous measurement system Radio, Newspapers and TV used to generate the audience numbers.

With tighter budgets, advertisers need to show their clients enormous social media numbers and that online data breaks the Radio and Newspaper models.

Those media companies that can transition to the new online rules are the only ones that will survive.

This all matters because social media has killed the Fourth Estate and mutated citizens into conspiracy theorists!

By suppressing real journalism for mutated conspiracies, the social media networks are undermining our shared sense of reality for addictive clickbait fuelled by hate algorithms.

This Hard Right Government has turned us from New Zealand into Q Zealand because the feral antivaxx movement are deeply entrenched within NZ First and have pushed crazy conspiracies to the forefront of our national policy platform.

The conspiracy theory against the WHO, the conspiracy that the media were bribed, and the conspiracy that Jacinda knew about the Christchurch terror attack before it happened all lead back to QAnon conspiracy that a shadowy one world child molesting Satanic Cabal is promoting the vaccinations to weaken us using 5G technology.

These people also think crystals can cure cancer.

The rabbit hole conspiracies we are losing so many good people to continues to act as a Black Hole of self-enforcing extremism algorithmically set to conflict.

The woke haven’t helped with their early cancel culture Lynch mobs, but the far right have adopted all those new norms and tactics and used the culture war ammunition we generated to twist the narrative and enthral desperate frightened lonely people.

Hilariously the Public Interest Journalism Fund was set up to try and provide that and it’s now been spun into a conspiracy that was a ‘bribe’ to carry Jacinda’s ‘vaccination propaganda’.

We need a complete rethink about what public broadcasting journalism is and should be and how we use it to keep a clear distinction between actual journalism and inflammatory click bait.

Social media is still so new, I feel like it could turn out to have as many negative health effects as tobacco.

I look forward to watching Ryan at 7pm.

 

 

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