Broadcasting and Media Minister Kris Faafoi has been putting the blow-torch on RNZ to perform better just as the state broadcaster is experiencing a ratings slump.
Documents obtained by Newsroom under the Official Information Act reveal the minister nudged RNZ to set itself more challenging audience targets. It did, and now finds itself short of about 80,000 listeners a week to meet the Government’s expectations.
RNZ revised its audience targets upwards after Faafoi wrote in his Letter of Expectation to the Board in March that the broadcaster’s targets needed to be sufficiently challenging.
The OIA documents reveal that as a result, RNZ increased its cumulative weekly live radio audience target for the year from 650,000 to 680,000 people and increased the average monthly website user target from 3.25 million to 3.8 million people;
Those targets may have seemed reachable a few months ago but now look especially challenging.
The latest radio audience figures show RNZ is rapidly losing listeners to levels it was at several years ago.
The second 2021 rating survey from GfK, released last week, shows RNZ National dropping almost 100,000 listeners across a week from a peak of 703,000 10 months ago to 602,000.
The flagship Morning Report programme has lost all its audience growth of the previous year. It has an average of 412,000 across a week now, compared with 433,000 in November 2019 and the peak of 531,000 in September 2020.
The beneficiaries of the audience shift have been the commercial media radio market, particularly Newstalk ZB.
It’s bad timing for Radio New Zealand as it seeks to win a controlling influence in the Government’s Strong Public Media project – which aims to combine RNZ and TVNZ into a new public media service.
And, pertinent to the future of government-owned media, the briefing documents reveal government officials expressing unease to the minister about how RNZ measures its performance.
In a briefing to the minister on setting expectations for RNZ, Treasury and Ministry of Culture and Heritage officials were not convinced good accountability yardsticks were in place at the broadcaster.
The officials say while RNZ has a new objective around extending its audience reach and a new strategy for reaching under-served audiences, the state broadcaster needs to consider ways to measure the success of the programme.
The officials point out most of RNZ’s performance indicators have not changed since the previous year and some targets do not extend previous years’ performance levels, but only maintain current levels.
For that reason, “we remain concerned that some of the performance indicators … do not effectively tell a performance story.”
For example, the officials lambast RNZ’s fourth key focus area of “Making our services available and accessible where, when, and how New Zealanders want” because it appears to “simply describe where services are currently available but do not communicate targets, an improvement over time or links to audience need.”
The officials also point out RNZ’s performance indicators for its broadcast services are focused only on the number of broadcast hours achieved and they say additional objectives and targets relating to the quality for each service would provide a more complete picture.
Ministry and Treasury officials accept RNZ may be distracted by the Stronger Public Media project but fire a warning shot that “we would expect to see more proactive and timely engagement with officials on performance measurement in the coming year”.
While the government has set a firm expectation for what overall audience it expects the state broadcaster to achieve, it’s not without reason given how much money has been pumped in.
Since 2019 the RNZ baseline budget has been increased by $7.5 million per annum. There have also been ancillary projects such as the Local Democracy Project which have been of value to the broadcaster.
Assuming the Government backs a new public media entity structure of RNZ and TVNZ, with potentially even more funding, the desire for scrutiny and better performance is only likely to exponentially grow.
