Mediawatch: TVNZ's latest losses signal likely cuts to come. But it's the slump in income for the broadcaster that dominates free-to-air TV which will worry the entire media industry.

Mediawatch: TVNZ's latest losses signal likely cuts to come. But it's the slump in income for the broadcaster that dominates free-to-air TV which will worry the entire media industry.

Jo Moore - a spin doctor for Tony Blair's UK government - earned lasting notoriety in 2001 when she emailed colleagues soon after the 9/11 attacks telling them it would be "a good day to bury bad news".

But sometimes bad news following other bad news actually amplifies it.

TVNZ's annual results revealing its latest losses are not as drastic as the ones that prompted global media giant Warner Bros. Discovery this week to propose the complete closure of Newshub to cut their losses.

But they point to the same crisis affecting all commercial media - declines in advertising revenue across the board - and TVNZ cannot absorb losses like this without cutting the services its viewers and online audiences expect.

The state-owned broadcaster had previously forecast a $15.6 million loss for this financial year, citing commercial clients' reduced spending on advertising.

In September last year TVNZ responded with planned cuts to content production, programmes and operational spending.

"There have been some really tough calls to make here, but we need to live within our means," acting chief executive Brent McAnulty told staff at the time.

Future high-cost projects were all "under review" and pay rises for executives and top-earning staff were scrapped.

Those cuts will not be reflected in results until the following financial year, but today TVNZ reported a net loss of $16.8 million for just the last six months of 2023.

Twelve months earlier, TVNZ made a profit of $4.8m and revenue of $180.3 million in the same period.

But the stand-out stat in TVNZ's interim financial results is total revenue falling 13.5 percent.

That is the sort of year-on-year decline that newspaper publishers have endured in the internet era and which have undercut their business models and prompted compounding rounds of cutbacks and job losses.

Given the fact TVNZ continued to dominate the free-to-air TV market in 2023 - and it attracted a much larger audience than its stricken main TV rival Warner Bros Discovery - that is a worry for the entire media industry.

TVNZ chief executive Jodi O'Donnell said today that TVNZ will have to cut costs further "to navigate through this uncertainty"…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details