It's been in the works at the company for years and years – news websites have been going for decades now, and they're still trying to figure out the best way to make money out of the fucking things. The NZ Herald has always been upfront about its plans for a premium content section that people have to pay for, but have long been shy about pulling the actual trigger.
The newspaper's fingers have already been burned by a failed paywall experiment more than a decade ago, when it discovered that nobody wanted to actually pay for opinion columns, because every arsehole has got an opinion, and there's no shortage of free ones. That didn't last very long, and the powers that be decided to chase the advertising dollar instead.
But it's not enough, not when overseas behemoths like Google and Facebook have been hoovering up all the ad money. So there has been a tonne of backroom work to set up a paywall on NZ's biggest newspaper, and it has been going on for a long time. The infrastructure was all in place as long as five years ago, before the NZME board got cold feet, and ramped up the policy of chasing audience numbers and getting them up by any means necessary, so the company would look better when they tried to sell it.
And now, with the money running out - there has been another devastating round of redundancies in recent months at NZME, with areas like the subbing and photography departments hit hard - they seem hell-bent on getting some dollars for their words. The Herald has been on a strong recruiting drive for good business reporting talent, and have an excellent editor in Media Scrum fave Miriyana Alexander involved in their premium content section.
But it's doomed, because they've fucked the brand. That drive to get the numbers up has done terrible damage to the masthead. Chief editor Shayne Currie, who has never let us forget that he's a 100% tabloid man at heart, has managed to push the venerable Herald in the trashiest of directions, shamelessly chasing anything that gets an audience, no matter how fucked up the situation gets.
If you trying to convince people to give you actual money, you can't feed them the same trash that everybody else has. The gutting of resources at the Granny Herald means there is going to be extraordinary pressure on the great reporters still working there to produce more and more content, because they won't be able to use the same stuff their rivals are serving up for free.
The Herald brand has become so tarnished, even with the great work going on there every day, because when you go to the website and see some more poor choices as lead stories, you can see they're never going to convince the smart set to come back for their meaty fix. They'll just go elsewhere.
The only way it could really work is if the Herald gave up on the populist bullshit altogether and went full paywall, with nothing but quality product beneath it. Its numbers would plummet and there would be widespread panic at the company, but if they could ride it out and stick to their guns, they might come out ahead in the long term
If the StuffMe merger had gone ahead, that would have helped a lot – Stuff could have been the populist all-the-shit-you-need-to-know, and the Herald could have been the high-brow version, with all the best journalism in the country in one place. But that's not going to happen.
(For the record, Media Scrum stands by its sincere belief that the StuffMe merger would have been catastrophic for local journalism, with a widespread loss of indispensable talent and an unacceptable hegemony in the country's media vision, but can still recognise that some places, like these schizophrenic websites, could have benefited)
But can't go half and half, people who love trash or worthy news don't like it, and people who hate trash or worthy news don't like it. But that's what the Herald is going for. There's still a chance they'll pull it off, especially with that level of editorial talent, but they're just as likely to get a load of piss in the face again.
- Ron Troupe
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