Duncan Greive 
The Fold host Duncan Greive speaks to NZ On Air’s new chief executive Cameron Harland about his first six months in the job and the findings of the recent Where Are the Audiences? report. Cameron Harland started his new job as the chief executive of NZ On Air in March, the week before the country … Read more
It’s results season for many of New Zealand’s biggest corporates, which find themselves awkwardly announcing large profits, with the wage subsidy helping them get there. We’re now approaching six months since the dread of late March, when over the course of a few fearsome days New Zealand closed its borders, locked its population inside and … Read more
After years of losses and months of speculation, Three has finally been sold. We speak to the MediaWorks CEO, and its broadcast operations’ new owner Discovery, about their plans for the channel. This morning, the long-rumoured acquisition of MediaWorks’ broadcast operations (mainly Three, along with some extras) was formally announced, with US cable TV monster … Read more
In this edition of The Spinoff’s media podcast The Fold, Duncan Greive unpacks the most important data points from a seismic new report into audience behaviour. NZ on Air’s biannual Where are the Audiences? report is unique in the way it attempts to measure the behaviour of a diverse set of audiences across all media … Read more
New Zealand’s only comprehensive pan-media audience survey comes just once every two years – and the latest has just been released by NZ on Air. Duncan Greive picks out the 10 most interesting conclusions. Measuring what audiences really do is notoriously fraught. Most surveys are done on behalf of the client – ie the platform … Read more
After decades worrying about the ‘brain drain’, thousands of high-achieving New Zealanders are coming home at once. Duncan Greive looks at what they’re bringing with them – and the potential they have to help our imperilled economy. Originally published in August, this story has now become the five part podcast, Coming Home. In Coming Home, … Read more
The man behind The Spinoff’s popular morning newsletter joins Duncan Greive to reveal the secrets of how he manages to consume so much news. Most days Alex Braae starts work at approximately the same time as a dairy farmer. But instead of hopping on a quad bike to go and milk a shed full of … Read more
The rumour that electrified New Zealand over the weekend was largely spread through Facebook-owned platforms. Duncan Greive asks how the government can continue to pay the social media giants to clean up messes they create. Yesterday David Farrier’s Webworm newsletter ran an interview with the probable source of the vile rumours that infested the country … Read more
What the deputy leader of the opposition has been implying lately is more than ‘nonsense’ – it represents a threat to one of New Zealand’s most powerful and undervalued assets, writes Duncan Greive. Things started getting interesting last Friday. National’s deputy leader Gerry Brownlee appeared on RNZ’s Morning Report to discuss the new government mask … Read more
The Provincial Growth Fund is meant to fund… growth… in the provinces. So why is it building a huge new racetrack in one of New Zealand’s biggest cities? Because the racing industry seems to get whatever it wants, argues Duncan Greive. Yesterday morning saw a blazing RNZ report that the Provincial Growth Fund has allocated … Read more
Wendy Petrie, 49, has lost her job to Simon Dallow, 56. TVNZ’s cull is mystifying on multiple levels, writes Duncan Greive. There’s a genuinely moronic characterisation of newsreading which holds that it’s a low skill job that anyone can do. Just read off the autocue for an hour, collect your $500,000 a year-ish salary and … Read more
A new platform for Members means 100% of contributions go towards making Spinoff journalism happen. Plus: A merch store! Kia ora, This is the biggest announcement we’ve had since the launch of The Spinoff Members a year ago. For many months now we’ve been ferreting away at a big overhaul of the way members engage … Read more
A new EP from an unknown Auckland singer ignited a bidding war before she’d released a single. Today ‘Call You Out’ is released, with eerie parallels to Lorde’s rise. Duncan Greive meets the artist known as Deryk. Madeline Bradley wasn’t expecting a lot. She’d been to dozens of these meetings over the past four years … Read more
The associate editor of The Indian News joins host Duncan Greive to discuss his belief that New Zealand’s media ignores the quarter of our population not born here – and why both parties lose as a result. I first met Gaurav Sharma in the aftermath of March 15. New Zealand and the world has gone … Read more
Three’s new rugby-themed drama is both original and feels like it could have come from nowhere else, writes Duncan Greive. Over the past decade, New Zealand’s prestige (read: most well-funded) drama has established a trend of revisiting some of the country’s most celebrated characters and notorious incidents. Dear Murderer, Runaway Millionaires, Resolve, Jonah, Jean – … Read more
A new mall in downtown Auckland prizes food over shopping and public transport over private. Duncan Greive digests it all. Next year St Lukes, the venerable icon mall of Auckland’s inner west, will turn 50, showing the enduring power of the imported American shopping innovation. It arrived just eight years after New Zealand’s first, Lynnmall, … Read more
The Fold’s very first guest is back to tell Duncan Greive how she pulled off the media deal of the year. It will justifiably be lost in the tumult of Covid-19, but the chaotic couple of weeks which finally saw the end of the Stuff-NZME saga were riveting and strange, replete with stock exchange announcements, … Read more
Following a lengthy review, a government review of the Māori media sector has recommended news be centralised at Māori Television. Many in the sector are deeply troubled by the idea, writes Duncan Greive. A proposal to amalgamate all the diverse Māori news media into a single entity has drawn a furious reaction, with several industry … Read more
The Herald reported this morning that MediaWorks was on the verge of selling its TV assets to US TV giant Discovery – but an internal email and senior source suggest the story may have been premature. A senior MediaWorks source has emphatically denied a report in the NZ Herald that a sale of Three to … Read more
In 2014, Duncan Greive was invited to interview Dan Carter on the back of the All Black’s spokesmodelling gig for Jockey underwear – a meeting that would eventually lead to Greive co-writing Carter’s autobiography, My Story. To celebrate today’s big Dan Carter news, we republish that original Metro story here. In 2003, when Dan Carter … Read more
Todd Scott made millions as a sales genius, and bought New Zealand’s best-known business publication. Then he lost his house. Duncan Greive profiles the country’s most enigmatic owner, and hears some blunt criticisms from the old friend he bought the paper off, Barry Colman. When Sinead Boucher bought Stuff for $1 last week, it brought … Read more
The big media companies just want to get married. Duncan Greive makes the case for dozens of divorces instead. For the last few years, all the talk in New Zealand’s media has been of a need for consolidation. That our big for-profit media companies – TVNZ, Sky, MediaWorks, NZME and Stuff – all needed to … Read more
Duncan Greive assesses an extraordinary morning for New Zealand’s media. In the space of a tumultuous half hour New Zealand’s media landscape has been utterly transformed, with Stuff CEO Sinead Boucher completing an audacious management buyout from its Australian owners Nine, while hundreds of staff are about to be laid off at MediaWorks. The two … Read more
Budget 2020: The government has unveiled a massive $50bn spending package, including an eight week extension to the wage subsidy. Duncan Greive asks the business community: is it enough? The government this afternoon unveiled a massive new $50bn programme of spending – “much bigger than anyone expected”, according to Kiwibank senior economist Jeremy Couchman. The … Read more
Made by a single family sewing together bits of old shows, Leigh Hart’s Big Isolation Lockdown was the funniest and most oddly comforting television created in level four, writes Duncan Greive. It takes a special kind of ego to make what is functionally a career retrospective about yourself, with your family as extras and directors, … Read more
NZME asked the commerce commission for urgent approval to buy Stuff for $1. Minutes later, Stuff’s owner said it was no longer in talks with NZME. In the space of a chaotic few hours, the long-running courtship between print media giants NZME and Stuff dramatically escalated, as NZME informed the sharemarket that it was seeking … Read more
Jacinda Ardern, Ashley Bloomfield and thousands of anonymous comms workers just accomplished what we all would have thought impossible just weeks ago. Duncan Greive looks back at the historic lockdown, and how it was achieved. It came in the early evening of Wednesday March 25 – an angry, violent buzzing, all around the nation. The … Read more
He started as a journalist, became a producer, and is now one of NZ’s most successful TV creators. Bailey Mackey joins Duncan Greive on The Fold. This month’s episode of The Fold, The Spinoff’s media podcast, features host Duncan Greive in conversation with Bailey Mackey, a TV producer with one of the most interesting CVs … Read more
The weight of Covid-19 will be very unequally distributed. Duncan Greive writes about where it will land, and how those it hits might come out from under it. This is the second of a two part series – read the first here There’s a graph I keep thinking about which shows the potential strangeness of … Read more