BROADCASTS.com

While fully accepting these are difficult days for the media in this country, it is important to put the Newshub news into a little bit of context.\xa0

You can still be successful in this country, and to take one sad case and lump it in with everybody else is to fail to understand the nuance of the landscape.\xa0

For a start, this country, as Adrian Orr pointed out yesterday, has massive economic troubles.\xa0

The media, or the commercial, non-taxpayer funded media are at the sharp end of that, always have been.\xa0

Also worth remembering, the story is being played out all over the world at the moment, everyone from Time Magazine to Vogue to the LA Times is laying people off, and that's before you get to the Disneys and Paramount and BBCs.\xa0

The Newshub story of yesterday is, in many respects, the TV3 story of the past several decades.\xa0

They have never really been loved.\xa0

Owners have come and gone.\xa0

Owners have owned them for the wrong reasons.\xa0

Owners have tried to sell them unsuccessfully.\xa0

Ask yourself why. \xa0

The company was split recently after they couldn't sell it as a combined going concern, hence it became Discovery and MediaWorks, the radio arm, went their own way.\xa0

Discovery has issues or Warner Brothers Discovery has issues for themselves all over the world, see, a tiny player at the bottom of the Earth would not have been high on their old \u2018let's bail them out scale.\u2019\xa0

The politicians weighing in largely had it right, I thought, National said there was basically nothing they could do.\xa0

Hipkins was also right when he said it's problematic that the linear TV landscape now is solely, or the news division anyway, solely operated by TVNZ.\xa0

The last thing TVNZ needs, I can tell you, is the laziness that inevitably ensues when you have the place to yourself.\xa0

Which is why radio remains as robust as it ever has.\xa0

There's plenty of competition, and competition keeps you sharp.\xa0

If we're to be a little bit blunt, you might want to look at some of the decisions MediaWorks, TV3, Clear Channel, the equity companies, all the various owners have made over the years.\xa0

It's been a bumpy old ride, basically for three long decades.\xa0

TV3 news, in many respects, never really got a hold of the New Zealand psyche, it was never really that successful.\xa0

TV1 killed and kills them every night by some margin.\xa0

Yes, they did some innovative things, but at the end of the day, numbers count. Numbers in audience and numbers in revenue.\xa0

This company, for example, NZME is profitable, I'm told the years got off to a good start.\xa0

Sky TV is profitable, their results came out last week, they look more than solid.\xa0

TVNZ is losing money, and if Seymour gets his way, we'll have to pay some sort of dividend to level the field, that's no bad thing.\xa0

Lord knows what's happening to Stuff and what they're up to, if you've seen their new website, but they're private, so we don't know.\xa0

Minor players like the Spinoff and Newsroom still seem to keep their head above the water, magazines still seem to be available to read.\xa0

So, it's not the end of the world, and it's not the end of the media.\xa0

It's how you do it, that's clearly the difference.\xa0

\xa0

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.