When Sinead Boucher started out in journalism her editors weren’t too bothered if she filed a story each day. Such was the number of journalists on the payroll at The Press in Christchurch, and such was the money fuelling the industry.
Fast-forward 28 years and the paper, like all other Stuff mastheads, teeters on the verge of viability, and the brand has been involved in an ugly buyout process, shedding regional staff, scaling back original content and homogenising under the brand name in an attempt to survive the print media crisis.
“Some of those times [during the buyout process] were probably some of the lowest times I have had during my career,” says Boucher, Stuff’s new chief executive.
“The worst thing is feeling powerless to influence your future or the outcome.”
Stuff is New Zealand’s biggest media website, prints many of the nation’s daily newspapers, and employs about 900 staff, including 400 journalists. Staff agreed to 15% pay cuts in April during the national coronavirus shutdown to curb the spread of Covid-19 after advertising revenue “fell off a cliff,” Boucher said. She took a 40% wage reduction, and despite the strain of the last few months remains staunchly upbeat.
“The thing I really love [about the industry] is despite everything, journalism is still really important. It has a sort of purpose behind it. It has an ability to to make people think and change how they see the world.”
‘Don’t mistake my positivity for being a Pollyanna’
It was in the charged environment of the coronavirus lockdown – with the government announcing a media rescue package and Bauer closing some of the country’s most respected and iconic magazines – that Boucher, 49, reached out to Australia’s Nine, offering to buy Stuff for NZ$1.
The announcement of her successful bid came the same day another New Zealand news outlet, Mediaworks, announced 130 staff would be made redundant.
“Don’t mistake my positivity for being a Pollyanna,” says Boucher, who exudes warmth and cheeriness, and whose staff have barely a breath of a bad word to say about her.
“My taking some action was better than taking no action. I thought well what if we buy the company for ourselves? It’s not going to do away with all those issues that media face but it gives us a much better chance of making a success of what we have and just giving it a go.’”
Boucher’s husband Mark – whom she met in Aoraki Journalism School in 1992 – was “hugely supportive”, as were her 2 children, aged 12 and 16, as well as the small phalanx of executive insiders she confided in as negotiations proceeded.
She now has plans for a staff ownership model and a charter for editorial independence, although she says she has not yet decided what the exact model would look like. Plans for a merger with another company or laying off staff are off the table.
A troubled industry
Becoming New Zealand’s newest corporate media mogul is unexpected for Boucher, who only took a left turn into the business side of journalism after joining Stuff in 2007.
Prior to that, she had worked on the frontlines, as a police reporter for The Press, as a digital journalist for the Financial Times, and as a correspondent for Reuters in London.
Though having been attracted to journalism for the opportunity to write (“I loved the classics”), it was the research and interviewing Boucher grew to love, and especially, in her day, the intimacy and access to power, pre “walls of comms people”.
“People talk about the glory days of journalism. But in so many ways I just think the newsroom is so much better than it was,” says Boucher.
“Back as a reporter we had all day to write our stories, there were screeds of people it probably didn’t matter if you filed anything or not. I think there is much better journalism happening across the board now, even if there’s not as much of it as there was back then.”
Today’s journalists are “hungry and sharp,” Boucher says, and do jobs that used to require the skills of four different people. It is Stuff’s journalists she would like, eventually, to have a stake in the company – a business model which while is “no silver-bullet”, has given Stuff staff some hope of a more stable future.
Alison Mau, a senior Stuff writer, told Stuff Boucher’s purchase was “great news” for the troubled industry.
“When I heard the news … I let out a bit of a scream and then laughed for quite a long time, which I think was a release of pent-up tension,” Mau said.
“I realise the future is still largely an unknown, but at its core this is a great move for New Zealand journalism.”
Dr Catherine Strong, senior journalism lecturer at Massey University in Wellington, said the move by Boucher was risky but “the alternative is closure”.
The New Zealand media industry was in a “precarious” position, she added, with advertisers spending up large on social media rather than in newspapers.
“We’ve got a lot of journalists still working, but a lot of them are working for peanuts,” she said. “Of course, five million people can only support so much of any industry.”
She added that Stuff’s primary competition was Radio New Zealand, an entirely state-funded outlet that would not face the same commercial pressures that Boucher’s organisation did. Most of Stuff’s rival commercial outlets had faced voluntary salary cuts or the prospect of job losses during 2020.
Tony Wall, a senior Stuff writer and contemporary of Boucher, was hopeful that the purchase was the start of an exciting new chapter for the company.
“My personal opinion is that at least we’re in control of our own destiny and we’re really all in this together now – we will rise or fall with Sinead.”
