Welcome home, Stuff

The acquisition of Stuff for $1 by CEO Sinead Boucher is arguably the best possible outcome for the company, and potentially a good one for the country. 

Crucially, it places a major media player, albeit a terribly weakened one, back in the hands of a New Zealand owner with a solid grounding in journalism – one that I hope will be reflected in a renewed commitment to traditional journalistic values.

I’ve been critical of Stuff’s strategy in dealing with the enormous challenges of the digital era. In particular I felt the company made the mistake of allowing itself to be mesmerised by the false promise of digital at the expense of its traditional print product, which generated most of its revenue. But it’s hardly the only media company to have made such mistakes.

In the process of switching its primary focus to the internet, and in the carnage that followed as papers were downsized, rationalised or closed, Stuff alienated many of its core readers and dispensed with some of its most capable and experienced staff, which I found hard to forgive.

But now we have the prospect of a fresh start, and I wish Sinead and her 700 employees, many of whom I have worked with (indeed, still do), nothing but the best. They now have a basis on which to plan for the future. Few things would give me greater pleasure than to see a revival of a vigorous and profitable New Zealand-owned print media.

One lesson to emerge from all this, as I’ve written before (and as former New Zealand Herald editor-in-chief Gavin Ellis emphasised in a recent blog post) is that we should never again allow major media outlets to fall into the hands of foreign owners with no real commitment to New Zealand and no emotional stake in our affairs. As both an expression and a reflection of national identity, with a crucial role to play in helping to shape and sustain an informed democracy, the New Zealand news media are far too important to fall under the control of outsiders interested in this country only as long as they can extract profits.

German-owned Bauer Media showed the depth of their commitment when they callously and needlessly destroyed much of the value of their long-established magazine titles by shutting them down without warning, meaning that anyone who now buys them must try to rebuild them from scratch rather than take them over as going concerns. At least Stuff’s former owners, Australia’s Nine TV network, handed over a company still in working order.

Ironically, the one foreign media owner who did right by his New Zealand interests – at least for the several decades that he controlled Independent Newspapers Limited, which Sydney-based Fairfax acquired in 2003 – was the much-reviled Rupert Murdoch. In hindsight, he looks positively benevolent.

Disclosure: I spent much of my newspaper career with what was then INL, including more than two years as a not terribly distinguished editor of The Dominion, one of the two Wellington papers that merged in 2001 to become The Dominion Post. I continue to provide regular columns to that paper and to other Stuff titles, although how long that will continue – as with everything in an industry where the ground is constantly shifting – remains to be seen.