Where are they now?
With reports of a proposed closure last week, RNZ’s youth brand Tahi may join the long list of loved-and-lost brands, platforms and channels from our big media companies that have tried to connect with young audiences. Touting younger-than-usual employees, irreverent attitudes and platform innovation, some lasted decades, others burned brief and bright, but all of them were trying to do the unthinkable: find young people and make them care about stuff. Duncan Greive unpacked the genre and its challenges at length in 2023, but with a rapidly changing industry, let’s take a look back at the category’s alumni wall.
The Video Dispatch: 1980-1990
A cult hit that’s still warmly remembered, this show was groundbreaking, influential and ahead of its time. During the mid-1980s New Zealand had only two channels and, if you had a television, it was in the lounge for everyone to share. Having a show dedicated to explaining the news “in a way that a 12-year-old could understand” was a bold idea, and it took them seriously. The Video Dispatch would “examine and explain in clear, straightforward terms major issues and events which children hear about but rarely get a chance to understand,” reported The Post on its debut. TVNZ’s long-running series was fronted by presenters like Lloyd Scott, Kerre Woodham (now at Newstalk ZB) and Michele A’Court and worked with newsrooms around the country. Episodes covered news and social issues like politics, trash on Mount Everest, the political history of North and South Korea, and 1995’s “booming gaming business”; a Christmas episode in 1983 included seasonal salutations in English, te reo Māori and Samoan.
The show’s 10-year run puts The Video Dispatch up there with our longer-life youth platforms, and at times it outrated adult current affairs shows and even broke scoops. It was temporarily axed by a cost-cutting TVNZ in 1987, before ending a few years later.
Michele A’Court on Video Dispatch. Image: TVNZ
Ice TV: 1995 – 2001
Rebellious and radical, considering it came from a mainstream station, TV3’s youth-television programme kicked off Petra Bagust’s career, and Nathan Rarere and Jon Bridges too. How did they hook the young? With Hanson and Outward Bound, as well as skits and satirical humour that earned them a comedy gong at the TV awards in 1999. “It was pure play, and in the late 90s, there wasn’t YouTube, there weren’t cameras everywhere. Nathan, Jon and I would drive around the city with camcorders,” Petra told The Spinoff earlier this year. “We threw stuff off a building in Off A Building.” This flavour of programming preempted the kind of fare that would captivate younger audiences a decade later.
Channel Z: 1996 – 2005
A cool, alternative station – not quite student radio but not commercial either – and breeding ground for a new generation of talent (Jane Yee! Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie!) and controversial on-air stunts, Channel Z started in Wellington and spread nationwide, “ruling the airwaves” around the turn of the millennium. It boasted cultural cachet and nationwide awareness, but expansion to an Auckland studio caused difficulties (the two stations operated independently). Owned by Mediaworks by 2003, it was moved from its 94.2 frequency to make way for The Edge, and by 2005 Channel Z had been replaced by Kiwi FM, which was itself shut down in 2015.
Space: 2000 – 2003
Young people like to stay up late, so TV2 aired this live music show at 10.30pm, where night owls could find Jaquie Brown, Hugh Sundae, Francesca Rudkin, Matt Heath and more familiar faces cutting their teeth (including a pre-Crusader, very young Scribe). It was the dawn of the new millennium, the future felt positive and the fittingly named show, produced by Satellite Pictures, was cool. Brown and Sundae left voluntarily in 2002. They were replaced by Jo Tuapawa and Phil Bostwick, the set was refreshed and so was the format, but the show soon folded.
Flipside: 2002 – 2004
Yet another show that wanted to make current affairs appealing to young audiences, TV2’s “brave” alternative-news show was helmed by a young Mike Puru, and targeted an audience that would usually be watching The Simpsons. Producer Jude Anaru was tasked with reimagining the format and, with programming across television screens and a website, hoped Flipside would “evolve into a revolution in news storytelling“. This included ahead-of-its-time elements that anticipated the participatory media era we live in now, like airing txts from viewers on screen. But it wasn’t enough to hook viewers, with the show only lasting a couple of years.
Mike Puru and Evie Ashton on Flipside.
C4: 2003 – 2014
The hugely influential music channel burst onto our screens in 2003 with youthful energy and the kind of unbridled opportunities that could only exist in a post-internet, pre-recession media landscape (even if the actual launch ran on the “smell of an oily rag”). It was a breeding ground for now-household-name talent: Clarke Gayford, Dai Henwood, Teuila Blakely, Jaquie Brown (again), DJ Sir-Vere and Jono Pryor all stepped into that stark white studio. And record labels competed for airtime and publicity on C4, which had a “stronghold on music culture” in Aotearoa.
But it wasn’t just music – C4 also aired TV shows that teenagers actually liked watching, such as avant-garde properties like Southpark, Jackass and Laguna Beach. It was enough to make teenagers want to stay in, and they had lots to choose from, with Juice TV, MTV NZ and Alt TV too. Things got crowded with the emergence of social media, Youtube and Spotify, and the landscape was changing. C4 couldn’t last; it was stripped down and streamlined to a “stale whiff of what it once was”. The final broadcast was in 2014, and it’s since been the subject of a lengthy Spinoff retrospective.
U Live: 2011 – 2013
One of our shortest-lived youth ventures, though it only had a brief life, this raw TVNZ show can boast an “outrageous roster of young comedic talent” including Rose Matafeo, Guy Montgomery and Eli Mathewson. The flagship series for the short-lived channel, it aired from 4pm-7pm, competing with new platforms (Twitter and Instagram) in a crowded attention space by being the “most chaotic youth channel of all time”. Low budget but big on ideas and energy (there were also innovations like a world-first interactive app with Facebook) it launched during a period of profound change for local television. The decision to axe it was “a numbers game” (TVNZ had a new direction) and the final show was fittingly rebellious.
The Wireless: 2013 – 2018
Another RNZ venture, supported by NZ On Air, billed as an “online magazine” and described by Stoppress as an attempt to “get down with the multimedia kids”, The Wireless was launched in 2013 with an editor and editorial team, targeted at the 18-30 demographic with a mobile-first site and the weight of RNZ behind it. Among its 296 contributors were Elle Hunt, Tayi Tibble, Max Towle, Mava Moayyed, Tess McClure as well as Toby Manhire and Toby Morris. Under editor Marcus Stickley – who said it “was set up to be free of what RNZ had come to be” – the platform won awards, including top website, at the 2016 Canon Media Awards, but it wasn’t enough, and by mid 2018 RNZ changed tack; it pulled funding and “quietly folded” the standalone site (Stickley left) and brought it under the main RNZ.co.nz site, where archives from the vertical can still be read.
The Wireless website as of November 2013.
Re: News: 2017 –
Slimmed down but still going, TVNZ’s youth-focused digital platform fell victim to the highly publicised cuts in 2024, losing some critical staff (going from 10 to six). It’s currently a “a small team with big dreams” and influence – its 99,900 followers on Instagram are just under a third of TVNZ’s total, 330,000 and rival RNZ’s 134,000 – and continues to publish stories with a focus on video content. Its most recent series is Dadolescence, which looks at what it’s like to be a teenage father in Aotearoa now.
RNZ ‘youth radio’: 2020 – ???
The national broadcaster’s 2020 suggestion to shift its RNZ Concert to an AM frequency, replacing it on FM with a “youth station” caused an outcry. Blasted as a “complete travesty” by one former Concert presenter, the proposal even drew the ire of Helen Clark. The criticism was largely aimed at the proposed redundancy of 18 Concert producers and presenters in favour of “automated” music programming, rather than the hypothetical youth channel itself. Concert stayed put, and RNZ ended up pursuing another FM frequency – the government offering up the “old, unused” 102FM channel, “set aside” for youth broadcasting for “decades” – before “dropping the idea” to focus on the broadcaster’s “obligations as a lifeline utility” during the pandemic. (Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture & Heritage confirmed to The Spinoff that the government still has the 102 frequency, still earmarked and still unused.)
Tahi: 2021 – ???
Targeting rangatahi, the platform was quietly launched in 2021 as a “more modest effort” to serve a youth audience. “We just wanted to make something cool for young people,” Megan Whelan, RNZ’s head of content, said at the time. It debuted with website, tahi.fm, that streamed music 24/7 (programmed by Harrison Pali, 40% of it was local), a twice-weekly podcast hosted by So’omalo Iteni Schwalger and Janay Harding, and multiple social platforms, including Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube – where it’s published several video series, including This is Wheel Life, A Place Called Te Awamutu and The Barber Shop. However, the future of Tahi may be in doubt; this week the Herald’s Media Insider column reported RNZ was looking to “ditch” Tahi, amidst a raft of proposed changes.
Kick: 2021 – 2022
A little-known initiative from NZME, this “youth-focused digital audio network” kicked off in 2021, created by seven New Zealand Broadcasting School graduates interning at the company. Launched on iHeartRadio, there was a Couch Concerts series (in partnership with Samsung), podcasts, and a mission to play alternative local music. The experiment resulted in a less than positive outcome in 2022, with NZME Radio reaching a settlement with Clarke Gayford, apologising and agreeing to pay out a “confidential sum” after “damaging” rumours were aired on a podcast and Kick’s Facebook. That social media account has disappeared, and so have the Instagram and YouTube pages, though the Kick Podcast Network is still up on Amazon Music and Spotify, with the last upload dated November 2022.
ICYMI: 2022 – 2023
With so brief an existence that you might have missed it entirely, this award-winning, NZ-On-Air-funded podcast series from RNZ (in partnership with TVNZ) was “news made for kids, not their parents or people over 30”. Hosted by Tāne Rolfe, across two seasons ICYMI unpacked everything from cryptocurrency and the Metaverse (remember that?) to the wood wide web; even, ambitiously, big topics like “war” and “ego”.
What the Actual?!: 2023 – ???
Existing primarily on social media (where the young people are) NZME’s video-first news service was a byproduct of the PIJF-funded partnership between four media outlets (including NZME), Te Rito Cadetship Journalism Project – another youth-focused initiative that appears to be over. Critically, What the Actual?! wasn’t just produced for Gen Z, but was made by young people – Mihingarangi Satele and Kahumako Rameka, who joined the company after a year of cadetship in the newsroom – and focused on where they already were: social media. The last post on Instagram, where the series page has 24,5000 followers, was 33 weeks ago.
Newsable: 2023 – ???
While not explicitly tagged as youth media, Newsable was Stuff’s entry in the make-news-appealing-for-short-attention-spans (AKA young people) era. Launched in 2023 as a “fast, informative and entertaining” daily podcast and likened to “great chat around the water cooler”, the daily podcast was co-hosted by Imogen Wells and Emile Donovan (now hosting RNZ nights). By 2024 the show had picked up a prize at the International News Media Association, and shifted from releasing daily episodes to “focusing on the biggest news stories of the moment”. Is it still? The most recent podcast episode is dated May 7, and Newsable’s Instagram account (which has 1,012 followers) hasn’t posted anything in 91 weeks.