NZME proposes newsroom and digital job cuts as all three big news employers shrink before the election
NZME is proposing to cut newsroom jobs in Auckland, along with several roles in the team that runs its digital platforms, and has left a newsroom job in Gisborne vacant. The report comes from a Media Insider column in the New Zealand Herald, which NZME owns.
The column is by the Herald's editor-at-large, Shayne Currie. Currie has held senior editorial roles at the company and declares a small shareholding in it.
According to Currie, a senior production role and a podcast role in the Auckland newsroom are among the jobs proposed to go. "Multiple" roles are understood to be affected in the product and development team, which is responsible for how the company's digital platforms perform. NZME has also been saving money by leaving vacancies unfilled in recent months. The latest, the column says, was a newsroom job in Gisborne.
No total has been given.
NZME's statement, quoted in the Herald, confirms the cuts without giving details: "Like all businesses, NZME is continually looking at how we can operate more efficiently and manage our costs in a tough economic environment. We have a number of changes underway that affect roles across the business. We know this is an unsettling time for the people involved and, out of respect for them, we won't be commenting further."
The company owns the Herald, BusinessDesk, Newstalk ZB, OneRoof and a group of entertainment radio stations and regional news brands. It employs around 1,100 people.
The Herald said it had approached E tū, the union that represents journalists, for comment. The piece carries no response from the union.
RNZ plans to cut 25 to 30 roles, about 10% of its staff, over the next 10 months, the Herald reports. Stuff is proposing 18 job cuts, most of them in regional and small-town newsrooms. The locations on the Herald's list include New Plymouth, Palmerston North, Nelson, Timaru and Invercargill. So the country's three largest news employers are all cutting at once, less than three weeks before the 7 November election. RNZ will soon be led by someone from NZME: Jason Winstanley, NZME's chief audio officer, is leaving to become RNZ's chief executive.
The industry was already small before this round. A 2024 survey by The Spinoff, carried out after the TVNZ cuts and the closure of Newshub, estimated New Zealand had 1,439 journalism roles, down from 3,381 in 2018. The Herald says the number has probably fallen further since.
NZME's five-year, multimillion-dollar content-licensing deal with Google runs out at the end of 2026. Chief executive Michael Boggs confirmed NZME is in talks with AI companies, Google among them. Asked about tech firms scraping news websites to train AI models, he said: "You use the word scraping, we say they are breaching our copyright."
That argument came up at a Better Public Media election debate in Wellington on Sunday night, the Herald reports. Labour's media and communications spokesman, Reuben Davidson, repeated that his party would introduce the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, which has been stuck in Parliament. He also promised to update copyright law so New Zealand creators have more control over whether their work is used to train AI.
Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith said the bill had stalled for lack of agreement within the coalition: "we haven't had broad support across the coalition for that this term." He called it "the potential of legislation in our back pocket", and cited the trade risks of taking on global tech companies.
"We're a small trading nation, and trade is in a state of agitation at the moment," Goldsmith said. "I think it's right and appropriate for us to be cautious."