Journalists at one of New Zealand’s biggest news websites spent Wednesday in a meeting nobody wants to be called into. Stuff Digital has begun consulting its editorial staff on a restructuring proposal that the company says would result in a maximum net reduction of eight roles, and the union representing the staff says the change on the ground is considerably bigger than that headline figure suggests.
The proposal was put to the live news and commissioning teams at a meeting attended by Stuff human resources staff, editor in chief Keith Lynch and a representative of the E tu union. About 30 people sit inside the part of the newsroom directly affected. In a statement, the company said it had started consultation on “a simplified structure across our national newsrooms which, if it proceeds, may result in a maximum net reduction of eight staff, from a total Stuff Group editorial headcount of more than 300”.
Stuff has framed the change as a reallocation rather than a straight cut. The company said the plan is to invest in new roles in its in depth journalism team and in its specialist content areas, meaning some of the money saved at the fast end of the newsroom would be spent at the slower, more considered end. It also stressed that nothing has been decided. Staff were told the purpose of the meeting was only to present a proposal for their consideration and feedback, and that no decisions would be made until affected staff had been consulted and all feedback carefully considered.
E tu does not accept that eight is the number that matters. The union says the proposal would take the Stuff Digital editorial team from 75 roles down to 65, consolidate 19 journalist and reporter positions into 11, and reduce six editor roles to three, along with removing four platform editor roles, a multimedia content producer role and the chief daily editor role. Read that way, the eight figure is a net one that counts the new in depth and specialist positions being created against the larger number of existing jobs being disestablished. Whether those new roles go to the same people, and whether they carry the same pay, is exactly the sort of question consultation is meant to answer.
E tu director Mat Danaher said the loss of experienced staff would be felt by readers rather than just by the people leaving. “Having a properly resourced team of journalists and editors is the best guarantee of accurate, distinctive and high-quality news,” he said. He added that “fewer journalists and editors inevitably means less capacity to cover stories, scrutinise those in power and produce the journalism New Zealanders rely on”.
The distinction between Stuff Digital and the rest of the Stuff Group matters here, and it is one most readers would not be aware of. Stuff was bought from Australian owner Nine Entertainment by chief executive Sinead Boucher in 2020 for a single dollar, an arrangement that at the time looked either heroic or foolhardy depending on who was describing it. In 2024 the business was split, with the newspapers including The Post, The Press and the Sunday Star Times moving into a separate arm called Masthead Publishing, and the stuff.co.nz website sitting in Stuff Digital. In 2025 Trade Me bought a half share of Stuff Digital. The 300 plus editorial headcount the company quotes covers the whole group. The restructure lands on the smaller digital newsroom.
None of this is happening in isolation. New Zealand newsrooms have shed staff steadily for three years. Newshub closed entirely, taking 294 jobs with it. TVNZ cut about 68 roles in 2024. Whakaata Maori cut 27 at the end of that year. NZME removed close to 40 roles across the NZ Herald, BusinessDesk and Newstalk ZB in early 2025, and RNZ sought voluntary redundancies after its funding was trimmed. Against that run of losses, a proposal affecting eight net roles is modest. Against the size of the team carrying it, it is not.
Former NZ Herald editor in chief Gavin Ellis, who has watched most of these rounds, told RNZ that a newsroom of this size cannot absorb losses invisibly. “You cannot take people out of an organisation as small as that, without it having an impact,” he said. He described the loss of institutional knowledge as a setback while acknowledging it was the reality of media today. The Spinoff founder Duncan Grieve, quoted in the same report, called the cuts very unpleasant while noting they reflect pressures bearing down on newsrooms worldwide.
The logic Stuff is applying is one plenty of publishers have reached for. Rolling live coverage of daily news is the most commoditised thing a newsroom produces, endlessly duplicated across every outlet and increasingly scraped and repackaged by search engines and chatbots before a reader ever arrives. Investigations and specialist rounds are harder to copy and easier to sell subscriptions against. Moving resource from the first towards the second is a defensible bet. The risk is that the daily coverage which brings readers in the door in the first place gets thin enough that they stop turning up.
Consultation is under way and no final decisions have been made. Staff have been asked for feedback on the proposal before anything is confirmed.
What do you make of the trade off between fast daily news and deeper investigative work? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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