In a surprise management buyout, Stuff chief executive Sinead Boucher bought the media business from its Australian owners in May, for $1.
It's one of the country's biggest media websites, printing 49 papers and employing about 900 people - including 400 journalists. But there's a tough road ahead navigating a turbulent media landscape.
The company has already rejected Facebook's advertising dollars, and has plans to introduce a collective ownership structure, with Stuff's journalists taking a stake in the business.
Saturday Morning's Kim Hill talked to Boucher about how the deal came about.
Sinead Boucher Photo: supplied
"I got a phone call one night from Hugh Marks, who's the chief executive [of Stuff's former owner Australian Nine Entertainment], to tell me he didn't think the deal with NZME was going to go anywhere, that the Nine board had been very clear to him they just wanted to be done with New Zealand. They'd been trying to sell us for over a year, and they'd probably be prepared to just wind up and walk away.
"I came off that call just feeling very depressed about what it might mean for all our titles and the jobs and all the work that people produce. And I talked to my CFO Ramesh Vedachalam, who's a confidant of mine, and we agreed that I could do it and he gave me some good advice.
"So I rang Hugh back and said, 'well rather than let that happen, why don't you sell me the company for $1, or the same sort of terms that you might have expected from NZME?' And he said 'yes, we will. Let's go'.
"So that prompted a couple of weeks of incredibly intense back and forth. I had to find some advisers and get a lawyer. And in some ways that intense period stopped me thinking too much about what would come afterwards and becoming consumed by the things that could possibly go wrong or the risk that we might be taking on. It was all about let's do this and try to make the most of this opportunity."
At the time the country was in lockdown. The media industry, like others, was taking a massive hit to its income, and a string of redundancies and closures were announced by New Zealand media organisations.
But Boucher says instead of scaring her off, the significance of the pandemic strengthened her resolve that the company should survive and thrive.
"We'd seen on one hand the incredible devastation of our advertising revenues when everything went into Level 4 and businesses shut up shop, but on the other side the demand for our journalism doubled overnight. It had sparked this reawakening in the public about the need and the value of journalism and more awareness of the risk that it was under because of the risk to its financial models.
"We went through a stage where as the chief executive I was managing the business day- by- day, looking at 'what cash do we have today?, what bookings do we have, what does it mean?'
"We'd come into this year - partly as a consequence of being a business up for sale for so long - having done all the restructuring and cost programmes, and things that perhaps some of the other companies had not. So we were in a position that we could hold where we were, and - we didn't know it at the beginning - but we could start to see that we had enough cashflow still coming through. And we got the wage subsidy, which really helped us to get through that really low period.
"I still had huge belief in the need for the products that we produce and the work of our journalists, and the confidence that we could continue to develop our business model and the revenue streams that come with it, to give it a blimming good crack. And the thing is when the alternative is a closure of the business - I thought even if you can only keep going for another year or two that's something we wouldn't have otherwise had (and I have confidence that we'll be able to keep going for much longer than that) - then the alternative was more unpalatable than taking on the risk."
Boucher trained as a journalist at Aoraki Polytechnic before working for The Press in Christchurch and then the Financial Times in London.
She says she has a deep love of the newsroom. And working in London in the later stages of the dotcom bubble at the turn of the millenium was an exciting introduction to digital media, and where the sector was headed.
"It definitely started to open my eyes more to the way that business worked."
So far, she says Stuff is doing it alone - without financial backers.
"I haven't brought on any financial backers yet, I haven't needed to. We came out of lockdown still cash positive, still turned a profit in the financial year just gone by, and up until this last week or so we could see this steady climb back in our advertising revenues, our subscriptions were holding really strong, and our digital contributions were doing really well.
"So we haven't needed to bring on any backers, we've been able to fund the things we want to do. But I want to take my time in thinking about what are the right things to do, so that if we do get to the point where we want to bring in someone else to invest or support us, that we're really clear on what the reasons for that are, and what they'd bring rather than just needing to jump into bed just to get some financial support.
"We're actually in a more comfortable position than we would have expected to be. I think one of the things that we've tried really hard to do after the last lockdown is try and prepare for another one, and to make sure we were like squirrels collecting acorns for winter, trying to squirrel some things away to help us ride through if things turned as bad again."
Stuff has so far resisted using paywalls to collect revenue from readers, but they haven't necessarily been forsworn forever, Boucher says.
"I think in the digital era, and especially with the disruption in the advertising market from the likes of the Googles and Facebooks etc... that has meant news media has had to look for a different business model. The one thing that's clear is that in one way or another your readers are going to be an important source of revenue.
"We've initially, and for the foreseeable, pursued a model where we ask readers to make a voluntary donation, either a one- off or a regular monthly, it's a model the likes of what The Guardian and some of those others have followed.
"If you value the journalism, please support it, and then that allows us to keep it open for those who might not be able to afford it. But we'll have to see how that progresses."
