RNZ's Classic Blunder: The Sequel - Part 7

Radio New Zealand’s plan to defenestrate its Concert FM classical music network, stillborn and hastily withdrawn at the start of last year, was the surprisingly mute elephant in the middle of the select committee room when the public radio broadcaster’s chairman and chief executive turned up at Parliament for this year’s annual financial review.

Contained within the Trojan Horse of a new youth-oriented music strategy, the plan would have taken the concert programme off its dedicated national FM network and replaced it with a “brand” or “platform” targeted at 18-34-year-olds. It was met by angry protests from listeners, political intervention at the highest level and a petition to Parliament calling for the sacking of the broadcaster’s board and management.

The only reference to it in the annual review of Radio New Zealand’s performance at Parliament on Wednesday 3 March is on the Social Services and Community Select Committee’s web page. Among documents related to the review are the broadcaster’s answers to the committee’s 155 written questions. Question 12 asks: “What services, functions or outputs have been cut, reduced, or had funding reprioritised from in (sic) the last financial year? Describe the service or function concerned and estimate the cost saving.”

Radio New Zealand’s response was: “In February 2020 RNZ announced a proposal to make changes to the RNZ Concept (sic) programme. This plan did not proceed following consultation. No subsequent reallocation of resources to other services has occurred.”

And that was it — as at Tuesday 16 March. The questions about Concert that National’s broadcasting spokesperson, Melissa Lee, says she’s submitted have yet to be published. Last year’s review of Radio New Zealand, on Thursday 13 February 2020 by the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee, was followed by the publication five weeks later, on Thursday 19 March, of a further 29 questions, taking the total to 159. The failure to have this information available for MPs on the day of the hearing is one of two major weaknesses in the ability of select committees to fulfil their roles as so-called parliamentary watchdogs. The other is the tendency for MPs on committees to indulge their political party allegiances so that their inquiries deteriorate into petty point-scoring.

The answers to some of last year’s extra questions would have cleared up some of the mysteries surrounding the motivation of RNZ’s managers in planning to jettison half of Concert’s audience in order to add the station’s FM frequency to its multi-media platform designed for an internet-savvy generation with multiple devices.

What were they thinking? The answer comes in RNZ’s responses to Questions 130 and 131. Asked what market research had persuaded RNZ’s managers of the need “to establish a new youth-focussed station, and to move Concert FM to the AM frequency, and automate the programme”, Radio New Zealand replied: “The latest quarterly NZ radio industry survey carried out by GfK showed that 75% of young New Zealanders aged 18-34 years use their radios every week, so we know radio still plays a significant role in their media preferences.”

That answer would have interested the Treasury official who, according to a Ministry for Culture and Heritage report, asked:

“Given the youth audience is best able to access content via online platforms, which could include internet radio, why does RNZ need an FM frequency for the youth audience?”

Radio New Zealand, having been there and done that, could draw on recent experience for its answer to the next question, No 131: “What did RNZ learn about youth audiences from running The Wireless, and how has that been factored into planning for the new music station for a younger audience?”

(A website/online magazine aimed at 18-to-30-year-olds, The Wireless launched in 2013 and was hailed by Radio New Zealand’s new chief executive, Paul Thompson, as “the most exciting innovation from RNZ in recent years.” It was shut down in 2018 when the broadcaster reviewed its music strategy and, with fresh market research and a new manager from commercial radio, took another crack at wooing a younger audience.

Radio New Zealand’s explanation for The Wireless’s demise was revealing: “Building any kind of audience from a single stand-alone on-line channel is extremely difficult, especially for younger audiences.

“This cohort connect (sic) with many content channels daily. A new service needs to be available on multiple platforms, so its content is placed where the audiences are. The more platforms used to connect with younger audiences — radio, website, social, apps — the stronger the connection will be.”

In other words, the content has to be where the audiences are which is everywhere. In the realm of tautology, this ranks at 9.9 on the 10-point MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) scale. And, trying to follow the logic of someone who liked playing in a sandpit so much that he took his bucket and spade out into the desert, is not made any easier by talk of “platforms”, “audiences” and “content”.

There are no audiences on the internet because it lacks the tuning mechanism that enables radio listeners and television viewers to rendezvous with their favourite stations and channels. Railway stations also have platforms but passengers only use them one at a time. As radio and television programmes range from weather forecasts to Wagner, lumping them all under “content” is like a restaurant with “food” as the only item on its menu.

Thompson, a newspaper executive who embraced digital technology to cut the costs of wages, production and distribution for the Australian Fairfax company, came to Radio New Zealand without any experience in broadcasting and set about using the internet to reverse-engineer a chicken-and-egg situation, almost killing the bird and badly scrambling the egg. There’s no question which came first. Radio has been around for well over a century whereas the internet is barely 40 years old and continues to develop in ways that are still not fully understood. Thompson is not alone in failing to grasp that the internet is a completely new medium. But he differs from his colleagues in public broadcasting around the world in thinking of the internet as an alternative to conventional broadcasting and publishing.

Six months after taking over as chief executive from the Australian former ABC television executive, Peter Cavanagh, Thompson worked up a speech to the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association Conference in Glasgow on Monday 12 May 2014. The speech was structured around four sentences which, he said, had “consumed” his life over the short time he’d been in the job. He called them his “elevator pitch” — a call to arms he would use to galvanise Radio New Zealand’s staff “around a vision for the future.”

Starting on the ground floor, his elevator pitch began: “The evidence is clear that traditional media are in decline.

“Radio, television and newspapers are merging into digital devices that are always switched on.

“The future of content delivery is multi-media, multi-platform, personalised, mobile and social.

“To stay relevant and continue our mission of serving the public, and to maintain and grow our audience, we must become and are becoming a multi-media organisation.”

And there were three “troubling facts”.

“We are weak (almost irrelevant) on the web.

“As a radio broadcaster, we lack visual journalism, and digital story-telling skills.

“Our preferred method of content delivery - radio - is in long-term decline.”

Almost exactly five years later, Thompson was singing a different tune. “Radio continues to have significant audience support in all age groups in New Zealand,” he wrote on Wednesday 29 May 2019 in his letter to the Ministry for Culture and Heritage’s chief executive, Bernadette Cavanagh, inquiring about the possibility of using the vacant 102 FM network for the new youth-oriented music strategy.

“It is a cost-effective means of connecting with people across the motu, and is free at the point of consumption.

“Its immediacy creates a sense of occasion and provides shared experiences. Its intimacy supports strong and loyal relationships between broadcasters and audiences.”

“It is primarily aural, like music, and the two have gone together since radio was invented.”

Yet, possibly because he writes only what he thinks people want to hear, Thompson was prepared to jettison half of Concert FM’s listeners, breaking a “strong and loyal relationship” between a broadcaster and its audience that, he says, is the great strength of radio as a medium.

Of course, there were also politics and jobs involved. Stay tuned.

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