It looks like Stuff, the media conglomerate that owns our biggest news website, nine daily newspapers, over thirty community papers and three magazines will be adding the operations of Newshub to its empire. Stuff, in turn, has one beneficial owner: former CEO Sinead Boucher.
If information is power, that’s a lot of power in the hands of one person.
It’s certainly more influence than axed MagicTalk host Sean Plunket's platform, the ummm Platform. Compared to Stuff, the Platform is a minnow. North Norfolk Digital vs the BBC. And yet because it took a contrary editorial stance to New Zealand’s overall media scene, there was a lot of interest in what Plunket was doing.
Now, setting up a media organisation is expensive. No matter how generous Plunket’s severance pay from MagicTalk was, it wouldn’t be enough the finance a media operation like The Platform. Plunket was, initially, the only shareholder - but somebody had to be bankrolling him.
And yet Plunket made no immediate disclosure of its backers. This secrecy did not sit well with many, including media watcher Duncan Greive of The Spinoff, who argued that such opacity could undermine the platform’s claims to independence. Eventually, it was revealed that the Wright family from Tauranga were the primary financiers, a revelation that spawned a series of further pieces about their motivations and the implications of their funding.
Which all stands in pretty stark contrast with Stuff. Formerly owned by Australian interests, it was sold to CEO Sinead Boucher for a nominal sum of $1.00 in 2020 following merger attempts with NZME. This looks unusual but is possibly explainable.
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