Reaching 3.5 million of the country’s 5 million people every month, Stuff owns around 50 newspapers and magazines. The company also runs a hyperlocal social network called Neighbourly, which has 900,000 members. 

Sinead Boucher (CEO & Owner, Stuff Ltd, New Zealand) joined WAN-IFRA’s recent Virtual World News Media Congress to talk about how the company is navigating the pandemic and how embracing a few challenges before it began helped Stuff quickly adapt to the new normal. Boucher is also on the executive and supervisory board of WAN-IFRA.

For example, a few years before the pandemic, wanting to lessen its reliance on revenue from advertising, the company began exploring how it could use scale and reach to build successful businesses and diversified revenue sources.

This move worked well for them until 2019 when Nine Entertainment bought Stuff’s parent company, Fairfax Media. This acquisition left Stuff divested of all its newly diversified businesses, taking it back to square one by the time the pandemic hit. 

However, in May 2020, the silver lining for Stuff presented itself in a management buyout, which resulted in the platform returning to New Zealand ownership, a crucial decision for the company’s sustainable future. 

Redefining company aspirations

The management buyout proved to be an excellent opportunity for Stuff to reset its business.

“For the first time ever, we were masters of our own destiny,” Boucher said. “With the pandemic hitting us, we thought hard about the kind of business we wanted to build, and what we wanted to mean and to be for New Zelanders.”

The first step in redefining the business was to form a new charter and formally adopt the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, the founding document of New Zealand, between the indigenous Māori people and the British settlers. 

“This step gave us pointed responsibilities of partnership, protection and participation of the Māori people in New Zealand. It led to forming a new vision and mission for Stuff, which ended up becoming a North Star for the company,” she said.

Vision and mission

Stuff’s vision is to become the most trusted organisation in New Zealand. In rebuilding the company from scratch, Stuff decided to explore new areas outside traditional media interests and sought to harness trust and scale. 

The company identified the following areas it needed to excel in:

Supercharging data to help customers win and help Stuff win customers.

“With the reach we have in New Zealand, we feel nobody should know our citizens more than us,” Boucher said. “We see our knowledge of New Zealanders and the data we have as a real competitive advantage; one that gives us the potential to build a strong new data business that does not only serve us with insights but allows us to take on other businesses that are making money from data.”

Stuff is focussed on creating high value products that harness its scale and trust. The company is also focussed on revolutionising its enterprise with modern technology to do different things in smarter ways.

Forming strategic partnerships to help create significant value. “We take a broad view of partnerships but first and foremost of those is to figure out ways of partnering, in particular, with the Māori people to help build products and businesses that are of value in New Zealand,” she said.

Stuff as a platform

One of the biggest changes Stuff has made is to set up businesses to look at opportunities in addition to the core media business.

“In a country of 5 million, we need more than one revenue source to sustain journalism. Where do we sit in relation to Google and Facebook? Our focus on trust and commitment to having a positive impact not only sets us in the opposite corner from these platforms but has also led us to think about ourselves as a platform for New Zealanders,” Boucher said.

Working off these thoughts, Stuff’s strategy has transitioned from a traditional approach to media, to a future that is about rebuilding the company into a platform business for New Zealand creators and consumers. 

Stuff is eight months into working on its platform strategy and plans to have the first iteration of it go live this May.

The company has begun investing heavily in technology that can be used to build capabilities for both users and the company itself, rather than building features merely to put out to an audience. What this essentially means is that Stuff is building a tech stack where each block is a different technological capability ranging from CMS to payments to customer identity. 

“This is allowing us to build a platform business, which we think is an important alternative for New Zealanders to transact on, communicate on, find customers in, and to converse on, besides the international platforms,” Boucher said.

The two-sided model allows creators to provide value to the network through the content, products, services, and data they contribute. The consumers can provide value back through data sharing advocacy, buying and consuming.

This model allows Stuff to focus on capabilities rather than features. It unlocks a program of new potential growth initiatives for the company with different parts of the business. Partners outside the business can look at those capabilities to use them best to reach their customers or to achieve their own ends.

Making NZ a better place

According to Boucher, since Stuff now owns its own businesses, it can make decisions based on building trust, rather than on how much profit it can drive to shareholders. 

“We do want to be profitable since that is what helps sustain a business, but we have been able to chart our own direction,” she said.

In May 2020, after conducting an internal investigation, Stuff issued an apology to the Māori people of New Zealand for its problematic coverage of the community, and a promise to better represent the people of Aotearoa (The Māori name for New Zealand) in its reportage. 

“Now, we are focused on what role we can play in helping communities to be active around issues that are important to them. We are trying to figure out how a newsroom that’s been around for 160 years finds new ways to be relevant and offer a platform for its communities,” she said.

Stuff has also started a $1 million fund that invests in start-ups that are committed to addressing key issues around sustainability and climate. The company looked at how it could use its assets, scale, marketing, and trust to help amplify businesses that are built to have a powerful impact on the world.

Listen to Sinead Boucher from 06.17