James Frankham (centre, in white) and his colleagues at NZ Geographic. Photo: Richard Robinson
Mediawatch - There was bad news this week for people who like getting the mail most days a week.
The government is proposing NZ Post need only deliver two days a week in urban areas and three times a week rurally.
"The proposed changes ... are intended to allow NZ Post sufficient flexibility to achieve commercial sustainability," the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment said.
Consultation on the proposal is open until mid-December - and Paul Goldsmith, who is also media and communications minister, is in charge of the change.
This week's Farmers Weekly pointed out it was also a problem for our media.
"A lot of city folk don't realise the rural delivery service ... is also vital in ensuring newspapers reach far-flung places around the country," reporter Craig Page said.
Similar points were made when NZ Post stopped newspaper and parcel deliveries to rural addresses on Saturdays from July.
The Saturday paper was traditionally the biggest and the most important - and some subscribers now have to wait longer for their big weekend read.
"Yet another financial hit to our media companies," the News Publishers Association said at the time, warning that small regional papers might cease printing altogether.
On its own, a further shriveling of postal delivery each week won't hurt the award-winning magazine New Zealand Geographic, which comes out six times a year.
But while the frequency of rural delivery is slowing down, the cost has been going up - while the price of printing has gone through the roof too.
This week, New Zealand Geographic publisher James Frankham sounded the alarm about the future of his 35-year-old title in an email to subscribers and supporters - and an article on the NZGeo website.
"People used to ask me cheerfully: ''So how's it all going at NZGeo?' Recently my mates tend to wince as they ask me, like they're enquiring about the health of a grandmother."
Flybuys winding up at Christmas was another blow. Frankham said it was the source of 15 percent of NZ Geographic's subscriptions. (Just this week RNZ reported subscriptions to Cuisine magazine was the top Flybuys seller in Otago.)
Traffic from online search and social services continued to plummet, he said.
"It feels like we've had tech giants holding our heads under water for the last 10 years," Frankham told a Parliamentary committee earlier this year that pondered legislation to compel tech platforms to pay local producers of journalism.
And it didn't help that the media sector was now "forecasting its own death", Frankham told supporters in the email.
But he also said subscriptions were at pre-Covid levels, and NZ Geographic had loyal long-term subscribers, both online and in print.
Why is he so worried now?
"In the last financial year, we made a profit. We've done that for the last few years - and not every media outlet could say that," Frankham told Mediawatch.
"So this is not about our immediate sustainability. It is about what happens next year and the year after that and the year after that. We can see change happening really, really rapidly in the media sector."
A recent Nielsen audit found the magazine had 387,000 readers, making it the nation's fourth most-read magazine on sale. But impressive reader numbers don't necessarily mean more revenue.
Photo: supplied
"It's also one of the most stolen magazines in New Zealand apparently," Franhkam told Mediawatch.
"I'm actually quite proud of the fact that it gets a really high pass-on rate. It goes to schools and libraries and institutions. It gets picked up in dental offices. That's how your circulation becomes your readership - and it's very much aimed at a general audience, so anybody can pick it up and read it.
"But we only have a certain number of subscribers, and our subscribers are split across print and digital," he said.
Eight years ago, NZ Geographic and Natural History New Zealand launched an online service with digital subscriptions for content from the archives.
"We probably wouldn't be here today if we hadn't done that. We have about 1500 digital subscribers - and another 1500 or so that subscribe to both the print and the digital product," Frankham told Mediawatch.
"We basically built a streaming television station out of Natural History New Zealand content. We have produced VR content in association with Blake Trust - and we do some scientific research - so we've been innovating.
"But the digital proposition is actually commercially more difficult for us today than the print proposition. That 'just innovate and go digital' idea only works when you're working in a free market.
"Any digital publisher will tell you that today we do not operate in a free or fair market, because we have tech giants like Google and Meta that have a massive influence.
"When Facebook changes their algorithm ... that means that they remove links that take people off platforms like New Zealand Geographic. Our business is journalism and we do that on our website. We publish links to Facebook, and when Facebook deprecates those links or removes them or doesn't distribute them, we either have to pay Meta to put those on there, or our traffic from Facebook just slips away entirely.
"Same on Google. They bring in their AI search component, which will give you the answer at the top, which is very useful as a user. Then they have a dozen sponsored links, and the organic links fall right at the bottom of the page. Unless you pay to be a sponsored link you're a long way down the track.
"We're getting less and less traffic from search and social - so that notion that we can transition to a digital future is simply not true.
"The printed (magazine) still makes more money than the digital product for us, and costs are going up enormously for the print product. Our postal rates have tripled in the last 10 years. Our print price has gone up 50 percent in the last three or four years. So the walls are starting to close in.
"What really rattles me today is that the core business, which is journalism, made about $60,000 last year and in terms of profit before tax, and that is not a lot of money when you're running a $1.7m (a year) company. That is wafer-thin in terms of margin."
Frankham said he needed to "create more revenue that goes towards our core business of journalism".
"We're taking an approach of radical transparency, and for the first time will be opening our books-which may be an unprecedented move in New Zealand media," he told supporters in his email.
Next week he'll make public NZ Geographic's revenue, advertising rates and subscribers - sensitive commercial details that publishers not listed on the stock exchange rarely disclose.
How will that help?
"It's more than just a subscription drive. I'm revealing our figures because subscribers are stakeholders in our future. They pay in advance for our journalism. They need to know that I can make good on this in a couple of years' time," Frankham said.
"You can see we're not hiding money under the mattress. You can see what we're spending it on. You can see that our costs are not under our control.
"Let's get to know each other. It's a very different relationship, based more on trust and transparency than on a commercial transaction.
"So far, we've had hundreds of responses by email. We've had hundreds of people subscribe. It's heading in the right direction.
"Next week, we'll be releasing a survey asking readers about their opinions on what the shape of the magazine should be like. We need to know what New Zealanders think, and if they want this enterprise to survive, then it's in their hands."