Context

News providers internationally and locally struggle getting as much engagement and revenue as they used to.

In 2023, I ran qualitative interviews for us to better understand New Zealand's news consumption behaviours, to be able to:

1.  compare them to international research to see if findings are transferrable

2. to be able to compare 1News.co.nz and 1News app users (group 1) with people who consume news from other providers only (group 2) to identify whether this would reveal opportunities for increasing engagement of group 2.

Challenge 

It was impossible to recruit participants that distinctly fell into group 1 or group 2. Many people were unaware of their own news consumption patterns and changed their description of their usage channels between the initial screener and the interview.

Outcome 

The difficulties in recruiting revealed challenges regarding the brand recognition. People could not differentiate our website and app from our news on TV which were at the front of their minds. This in itself was a telling finding.

It was still possible to identify opportunities regarding content types and presentation:

• For example, in order to balance out stressful disaster-focussed content that had some audience segments disengage with the news entirely (they called it "disaster porn"), we introduced Life, a lifestyle section with calmer content.
• Shorter content items were preferred over long-form. 
• Weekends were more sport and family focussed. 

Content and presentation were adjusted accordingly with small engagement wins for the app and website. 

Major Strategy Change

Ultimately, the leadership team decided to focus and extend TVNZ+ news offerings, while reducing the lesser known and lesser visited website and app offerings, which sadly aligns with my findings that I shared with them regarding a lack of 1News website and app brand recognition. 

For the TVNZ+ news presentation I ran another big research project at the beginning of 2024 to explore which concepts showed most promising. The transition team used the results as input for their major strategy change.