How do you re-transform a legacy media business that united its journalists behind digital-first a decade ago? Stuff Group, New Zealand’s largest digital and print media business, set out to do just that — with quite remarkable results.

Digital-first was the mantra for Stuff Group’s journalists for more than a decade after it became the first of New Zealand’s big media companies to fully embrace 24/7 publishing. It was delivering news as it happens on the country’s largest digital news site, stuff.co.nz, before its large legacy network of mastheads went into production for the next day’s newspaper.

Marrying powerful print newsrooms around the country with its digital upstart colleagues was not always been easy in the beginning. But by the early 2020s, the marriage was comfortably settled.

Then powerful external forces disrupted the industry again: news avoidance, crippling overheads, a cost of living crisis, and the emergence of GenAI loomed.

How could an organisation of almost 400 journalists in 19 newsrooms adapt again for the future?

When two became one

Marrying subscriber digital and print mastheads with a mass and free news Web site had created content and audience at scale, but at a cost of ubiquity across the products. For reader revenue to thrive, and for digital-only platforms to innovate at speed, they needed to carve their own path.

“If we started today, what would we do?” Stuff’s new leadership team, under owner Sinead Boucher, asked itself. Then, it audited all the products in the business to find out what was driving scale and what was driving subscriptions.

The answer became clear: After 10 mostly happy years together, a conscious uncoupling was needed. And so the separation began.

Consciously uncoupling

Two managing directors were appointed, each with separate businesses and operations and separate editorial teams. Each business was tasked with its own revenue targets and news drivers, news agendas, and products to deliver.

At Stuff Digital with its flagship stuff.co.nz, the country’s most-read and most-visited news Web site, and the large social network Neighbourly, the relentless focus was on innovating fast, driving first-person data, growing audio and video, and delivering revenue from its deep understanding of New Zealanders.

Over at Stuff Masthead Publishing, newsrooms pivoted to deliver on their legacy mastheads’ promises — beautifully told New Zealand stories with writers, visual storytellers, podcasters, and subscription experts driven by content that would deliver deep engagement, loyalty, and ARPU. Digital subscription mastheads were launched for newspapers 160 years in the making.

It was live and lively at Stuff Digital and loved and loyal at Masthead Publishing.

The results

The creation of two discrete profitable businesses, both with trusted journalism at the core of their newsrooms, created innovative ripples that immediately paid benefits. Stuff Digital and Masthead Publishing formed their teams around standalone balance sheets with transparent cost attribution and overheads.

Despite a reduction in dedicated staff and daily content, stuff.co.nz further grew its No. 1 position as the country’s largest news Web site, adding 328,000 unique views to its 2.5 million monthly unique audience — all in a country with just 5.5 million people.

Masthead Publishing almost doubled the reach of its three masthead — The Post, The Press, and the Waikato Times — by launching its new subscriber Web sites, becoming one of the fastest-growing news brands in New Zealand, and growing ARPU plus incremental audience for the Stuff Group.

New products were launched, AI-led print automation was introduced, and major sports partnerships were formed with FIFA and the Rugby World Cup. Uncoupled and unshackled but united as a family, the separated newsrooms have developed unique voices, business models, and strategies. 

Stuff Group’s ethos is to Follow No One. The counterintuitive move to separate its newsrooms again was bold. It was a business transformation strategy that required its teams to be courageous and deeply understand their audiences and commercial partners. And it was a success, earning INMA’s Global Media Award for newsroom transformation in 2024.

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