Economics 101 explains why Newshub Bankrupted — it was the fault of its own journalists who should recognise they were the architects of their own demise.
A thousand books and papers in economics and business strategy are about the topic of product differentiation — ensuring that what you sell is different from others in order to build your own customer base you can make money from.
On that note, David Farrar at Kiwiblog did a survey to work out how right- or left-leaning are our major media outlets. Over 2,500 people ranked the outlets on a -100 to +100 scale that went from “strongly left-” to “strongly right-leaning” (0 is “neutral”).
The weighted average for each media outlet is:
Radio New Zealand -80 (most left)
The Spinoff -78
Stuff -72
One News -62
NZ Herald -59
Newshub -51
Scoop -46
Newsroom -46
NewstalkZB +16 (most right)
In other words, our community of leftist journalists has managed to try out-competing each other for the attention of those members of the public who are left-wing.
Amazingly, Newshub, Stuff, One News, Radio NZ and the NZ Herald all have scores veering toward “strongly left wing” — that is, from -51 to -80. They are all competing for the same market, together with a whole bunch of smaller leftist outfits like The Spinoff, Scoop and Newsroom.
Given we have a National-ACT-NZ First coalition, only a minority of Kiwis even voted “left” at the last election. So we have five major news outlets — and three less significant smaller ones — all competing like mad for that minority.
If the journalists working at Stuff, Newshub and The Herald think they’re smart by writing and doing shows with ever-more leftist slants and insults to Luxon, Peters and Seymour, and thought they were clever trying to fix the last election by smearing the new coalition, well they just went and bankrupted their own companies by doing so.
I mean, how dumb can you get?
Don’t go blaming social media and Google for not paying for your low quality “content”. Go take a look at the man or woman in the mirror.
By the way, have you worked out that Mike Hosking must be loving you for it? He practically has the whole right-wing market to himself.
Sources:
https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2020/06/which_media_are_seen_as_most_left_and_right_leaning.html
This article originally appeared on Point of Order on March 2, 2024.
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