It is a fact that New Zealand’s news market is rapidly shrinking if measured by the number of players.

The number of publicly accessible news Web sites is dropping: In April this year, Warner Bros. Discovery announced the closure of Newshub — a commercial television channel — resulting in hundreds of job losses. With the closure, a dedicated online news hub, newshub.co.nz, also vanished from the news cycle.

Now, the publicly owned, commercially funded broadcaster TVNZ is tightening its belt, trying to find NZ$30 million in savings. As a part of the package, it is planning to close its news channel, 1 News, and its related news Web site.

The broadcaster is pursuing a new kind of future — one that would make it resemble streaming services rather than a traditional, publicly owned broadcaster. According to Newsroom editor Mark Jennings, TVNZ is planning to produce only news video content on its digital-first TVNZ+ platform.

The potential abolishment of 1 News’ news Web sites is happening at a pivotal time. Google is currently threatening to stop linking to New Zealand news content on its services and “discontinue our current commercial agreements and ecosystem support with New Zealand news publishers.”

This threat relates to the New Zealand government’s plan to introduce the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, which would mandate tech companies to pay publishers for their content.

According to SimilarWeb, before its closure, newshub.co.nz had 4.3 million total visits per month.

From July to September this year, 1News.co.nz had 6.3 million total visits. Compared to most prominent Web sites, these two are far behind others in Web site traffic numbers. In July to September this year, stuff.co.nz had 72.1 million total visits, nzherald.co.nz 69.8 million, and rnz.co.nz 33.6 million total visits.

Some hope the closure of two news sites will boost the visitor numbers of other sites, but no one can guarantee this will happen. We don’t know where this audience will disperse.

However, it seems that, after the closure of newshub.co.nz, a number of New Zealanders pivoted to the RNZ Web site as its audience numbers have increased. RNZ is the only public interest broadcaster in New Zealand, and its Web site, rnz.co.nz, is publicly available to all.

For TVNZ, scraping its public-facing news Web site sounds like an odd decision. As Jennings said, “it is risky, and it is hard to see how it won’t diminish the profile and power of the 1News brand.”

If the plan is to pivot completely to video, one has to wonder what happens, for example, to TVNZ’s live blogging. Recently, TVNZ revealed its live blogs “consistently ranked among the top-performing content on its news site, 1News.co.nz, significantly boosting Web site traffic.” It also noted “the format encourages repeated visits as audiences return for the latest updates.”

I don’t know if any other broadcaster has similar plans to TVNZ, but this move does seem drastic. Some other broadcasters have decided to deliver news differently. In a recent INMA blog post, Finnish public broadcaster Yle noted it is offering its audiences “liquid content” as people are watching video, reading video, or listening to text.

People may not just read the news content, but if the audiences are offered multiple points of entry or ways to consume the news, they are more likely to return to the news Web site.

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