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Shareholders attempting to wrest control, restructures and redundancies, robots in charge of the website ... the New Zealand Herald is sailing some stormy seas
It's a grand old lady, 162 years old, and a proud tradition of being Auckland's - and the nation's - journal of record.
The New Zealand Herald has taken on advertising slumps, changes of ownership and all the same issues that have seen other media organisations collapse or shrink.
But now there are just about daily stories about what's going on behind the scenes with owner NZME; the robots are running the front page; and senior journalists have departed in the wake of a restructure.
Newsroom co-owner and former editor of the Herald, Tim Murphy, has been following developments and talks to The Detail about what it will mean for readers.
The first thing they might notice is that Artificial Intelligence is in charge of ordering the news site.
"AI - the robots, the machines - have taken over most of The New Zealand Herald website. They have recently put off about 15 online editors, people who would assess and process and curate on that website.
"So now ... in almost all but probably about three of the top positions on the website as you're reading, you're getting served to you what a machine, or the AI algorithm, anticipates that you will read and be interested in."
If you've completed a survey telling the paper what your own particular interests are, that will be refined even further. The dominant flow of content will be tailored to you.
"So the Herald will change per person reading it.
"I imagine their biggest [stories] they'll want to keep in position and everyone will see them, but yeah, it's going to be a slightly different experience. The argument is that it's better, that people respond more and engage more with content that they've previously wanted to see. The counter-argument is that a lot of people will be served up material they have clicked on but it might be a crash on the motorway, bad weather, celebrity news from here or overseas, court cases that are particularly gruesome or alluring ... that kind of thing.
"So it might not be as important, if you are judging that, but it's something that you have clicked on or flicked on, and it will come back to you. So it just starts to be a different experience soon. It's deliberate by NZME, they've set it in their financial reports to the market, this is what they're working on to, in their view, get more people reading more of the content they put there."
The downside of this is that it risks exactly what Facebook is criticised for, building little 'echo-boxes' for people who only see things they've seen in the past.
Headlines and stories will still be written by news journalists, but "it's how those things are then served, in the first instance - how they get from the journalist to your eyeballs - is what the intervention is".
Meanwhile, there's been a lot of talk about the moves by a wealthy Canadian (the jury is still out on whether he's a billionaire) living on Auckland's North Shore who wants a piece of the organisation.
Jim Grenon has bought 10 percent of NZME and assembled supporters that would add up to 47 percent of its board, although he now says some are back-peddling.
There's fear that Grenon wants to pull the tone of the Herald to the right, breaking the traditional barrier between business control and editorial.
He "has for some time had some concerns about the left-leaning New Zealand media, not just the Herald, since Covid days, and has been looking at a media move," says Murphy.
"He launched and supported a site called NZNE - News Essentials, and a newsletter called The Centrist to elevate some of the material that he and others thought needed to get out there and be non-left material if you like."
That includes vaccination and mandate policies after Covid, climate change, gender issues and Treaty issues - generally culture war issues that he believes need challenging.
The journalists' union, E tū, has expressed concern that he is one of a number of billionaires leveraging their wealth to amplify their world views, calling it "alarming for democracy".
The concern over his actions is so strong that NZME's annual shareholders' meeting has been delayed for more than a month, until early June.
But Murphy says while all these changes may see quite a different style of the Herald in the second half of this year, the Herald still holds a really strong place with New Zealanders, and is perceived as that national voice.
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