Those passionate about news and Newshub hope a white knight will appear on the horizon, but more realistic commentators say that horse has bolted
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Staff leaving Newshub after their bombshell meeting on February 28 Photo: RNZ/Nick Monro
In the early days of TV3 there wasn't enough money for a sound proof booth to record voice-overs so reporters would wrap themselves in a curtain.
Former reporter turned weather presenter Rose Daly says budgets were tight at the new tv channel compared with the "buckets of money" at the state broadcaster.
But it made people creative, "hungry, fired up" with a passion that was crucial to its survival, Daly says of the trailblazing TV3, the first broadcaster to introduce "Kia ora" to the evening news.
She also remembers, presenting the weather heavily pregnant, the day her producers decided she needed a "novelty pointer" to the weather map and encouraged viewers to send them in. "We started with a celery stick."
Of the competition with TV1 Daly says, "We took it to them. We did really well." And it made both channels' news programmes better.
One reason why it can't be allowed to fail, she says.
"It's just ridiculous to think that all 35 years of really hard work and innovative stuff and culturally changing stuff, I can't believe that it's just going to go," she tells The Detail.
On Wednesday morning, the American owner's local bosses called staff to an emergency meeting to tell them it was axing all Newshub's news operations and closing its newsroom on June 30 and 300 jobs would go.
WBD also owns eden, Rush, HGTV and Bravo and says it will no longer commission content where the company funds the full cost. However it will work with government funders and other partners to co-fund local content which will continue to run on local platforms.
It says there was no single trigger for the newsroom closure but a combination of negative events locally and internationally, and the economic bounce back had not materialised as expected.
Like Rose Daly, others suggest Newshub could find a new buyer as it has in the past, but former long time TV3 news boss now co-founder of newsroom, Mark Jennings, says no one can rescue it except the current owner Warner Bros Discovery.
"Who is going to come in and take over a company that is losing $30 million a year with no real clear pathway out of that," he says.
"You would be very brave to come in and buy a lossmaker."
He outlines how Newshub staff could fight to keep the newsroom alive with a cost-cutting plan that includes paring the 6pm news hour to 30 minutes and axing foreign correspondents.
"And I would also ask the government to waive the transmission fees that Kordia charges. I think they would do that because its not a big, philosophical thing to do. Suddenly you've probably got your news budget down to originally what it was."
Jennings reckons advertisers would respond positively because they don't want to see TV news whittled down to one channel. They know that without competition, TVNZ's advertising rate card would go up.
He describes the political response as shambolic, calling it a symptom of the lack of any media policy or understanding of what New Zealanders want the media to look like and its role in society.
"If you look at most European democracies, they support their media, they support it through a variety of means. It can be tax breaks, it can be direct support, it can be other facilitation. They recognise its role in democracy of having a diverse media sector.
"I don't think there's a recognition of that in New Zealand but maybe this event will jerk a few people into thinking about it and maybe even doing something."
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