Report shows broadcast funding agency NZ On Air is belatedly taking tentative steps to measure the audiences that will consume the public interest journalism it will be funding to the tune of $55 million
Most organisations and companies don’t relish taking a long hard look at themselves. Management can never be sure what a rigorous investigation will reveal.
But back in 2017, when it launched the New Zealand Media Fund, NZ On Air boldly committed itself to a review of the fund after three years of operation. The result is now in and much of the report is likely to be an uncomfortable read for the agency.
A wide range of programming including the likes of Country Calendar, Westside and Newsroom Investigates receive money from the fund. Last year $180 million was doled out to producers making content for TV, radio and digital platforms.
Previously, there had been a number of specific funds for drama, documentaries, comedy, and more. Putting all the money into one fund allowed NZ On Air to be more flexible and to also increase the funding of public interest journalism on platforms such as Stuff, Newsroom and The Spinoff.
Finding someone to do the report, who had the requisite knowledge but not a vested interest in the small, interconnected media sector, wouldn’t have been easy. That job fell to Hal Crawford, the former news boss at MediaWorks and now a media consultant based in Australia.
His 95-page report recommends the agency shakes up the way it does business. Crawford’s investigation of the Media Fund quickly expanded into an investigation of NZ On Air itself, because as the author puts it, "everything that NZ On Air does touches on the New Zealand Media Fund in one way or another”.
“To not have engagement data readily available and unified with other project data is harming NZ On Air’s ability to analyse and assess the effectiveness of funding,”
– Hal Crawford
His strongest criticism is of NZ On Air's failure to collect and centralise audience data on the content it has funded.
For the casual observer of the domestic media industry that’s a strikingly large omission.
“To not have engagement data readily available and unified with other project data is harming NZ On Air’s ability to analyse and assess the effectiveness of funding,” Crawford says.
In recent years, concern for having New Zealand eyes view New Zealand content has grown with the media industry upheaval. Free-to-air TV audiences have dropped by 30 percent in less than a decade. YouTube is our most popular channel, TVNZ1 sits second, followed by Netflix, Facebook, and Spotify.
News outlets have struggled. Reporter numbers have plummeted and the call for quality journalism, in an era of disinformation, remains strong.
“An interview with an insightful NZ On Air staff member suggested that the failure to systematically collect and analyse audience engagement data may have in part been driven by desire to avoid being ‘held hostage to the numbers’."
– Hal Crawford
Part of the thinking behind the Media Fund was that it would make it easier for NZ On Air to shift the government-funded content as audiences migrated from old TV platforms to digital media.
“There is a critical piece of the puzzle missing: how many people has the funded content reached, and how much have they enjoyed it? NZ On Air cannot fulfil its mission to reflect New Zealand if New Zealand refuses to look into its mirror, and we cannot fulfil our role of assessing the New Zealand Media Fund without audience data,” Crawford says in his review.
Clearly tasked to evaluate the success or otherwise of NZ On Air content, Crawford appeared frustrated by the absence of audience measurements, especially for digital engagement. “There is absolutely no audience engagement data within the project spreadsheets.”
Avoiding being 'hostage to the numbers'
NZ On Air can access Nielsen TV Ratings, but it doesn’t unite TV ratings and digital analytics, along with any other data collected by the content producers. Nor does NZ On Air collate the information.
Why not ?
“An interview with an insightful NZ On Air staff member suggested that the failure to systematically collect and analyse audience engagement data may have in part been driven by desire to avoid being ‘held hostage to the numbers’.
It seems NZ On Air is worried that audience data would become the key driver on what programming it should fund. And it has been happy to not follow through.
Crawford points out that NZ On Air does require producers of funded programmes to fill in a Statistics Reporting Template on video views, unique reach, and time spent viewing on primary and secondary platforms. “But many of the reporting templates were either missing, have never been returned, or are incomplete,” says his report.
Having such audience data is meant to be a factor in NZ On Air funding decisions.
As Crawford points out, NZ On Air’s stated position is that funding decisions “should be proportionate to the potential audience size but currently there is no readily available data to undertake an assessment of actual audience/funding proportionality.”
He does not tolerate excuses that audience data collection is one for the “too hard basket” because audience metrics can be skewed or be misleading.
“This is put forward in the first instance by those who believe measuring audience performance of the funded content is 'too hard'. The attitude is only correct if we are stuck with analysts whose aim is to obfuscate or mislead," he says. "Where a true desire exists, good data can be found."
Backing niche content
In one sense, it’s not surprising that NZ On Air is reluctant to collect data.
After all, its role has been to fund niche content which commercial broadcasters were reluctant to back. Niche content doesn’t usually generate big audiences.
Yet a complete absence of any audience engagement data by NZ On Air is a serious omission. Poor transparency and poor metrics are fatal to understanding taxpayers’ spend on content.
It’s why Crawford places so much emphasis on audience engagement. Tracking where content is viewed – be it on television, websites or social media – should be a factor for funding decisions.
And this is the crux of the problem. Where is the audience that has switched away from linear to digital, how large is it, and what content is cutting through?
“What may surprise many people is the extent to which the contestable parts of the New Zealand Media Fund are dedicated to TVNZ, and to a lesser extent Mediaworks."
– Hal Crawford
Though Crawford hasn’t been able to cut and dice the audience data of the Media Fund because there was none to offer, it is relatively easy for him to paint the big picture.
The distribution of funding still favours the older platforms – by a wide margin.
“The biggest buckets of funding distribution have changed little under the New Zealand Media Fund. The top-three funded broadcasters, the top-three funded channels and two of the top-three funded producers remain the same," he says.
“What may surprise many people is the extent to which the contestable parts of the New Zealand Media Fund are dedicated to TVNZ, and to a lesser extent Three. The majority of all contestable funding goes to projects commissioned by TVNZ,” he said.
He also makes an educated calculation that to achieve a fair proportionality for the emerging platforms, NZ On Air would have to shave $56 million off what it spends on terrestrial TV (over three years) and double to over $100 million on what it spends on digital first productions.
While Crawford makes the point on the scale of the imbalance, there is an acknowledgement that for NZ On Air to immediately push that swing would be akin to initiating a civil war in the media industry.
And before there can be too much angst about the fairness of the funding distribution, there is a practical roadblock – the availability of other platforms to run commissioned content.
The relatively new players such as Newsroom and The Spinoff are still minnows next to the long term players such as TVNZ, and only have a limited amount of capacity.
Crawford does conclude (somewhat lukewarmly) that the Media Fund is working because it’s headed in the right direction.
But his report feels like a polite pass mark which is heavily caveated. Crawford says the way the Media Fund currently operates should be regarded as only a warm-up and it will need to face uncomfortable change.
NZ On Air is taking tentative steps.
It has recruited an audience and media strategist to work with its funding analyst. They will develop aggregated audience measurement across linear and online.
Chief executive Cameron Harland also says the agency is developing new performance measures for funded content that take into account various factors such as cultural impact and critical acclaim, alongside audience reach and engagement.
Just precisely how “cultural impact and critical acclaim” is weighted against “audience reach and engagement” will provoke plenty of debate in the media industry.
