New Zealand is a long way from the United States, and much of the rest of the world, both geographically and in terms of the scale of its media market. But its remote location and compact size may be precisely what makes it worth watching.

Although it only has a population of just over five million (about that of the Boston metro area), New Zealand’s media companies are wrestling with the same forces reshaping publishing globally: declining legacy revenues, changing audience habits, low levels of trust and news avoidance, competition from platforms and creators, the opportunities and challenges of AI, and persuading consumers to pay for content.

Lacking the scale, deeper pockets and access to capital enjoyed by many international counterparts has forced New Zealand publishers to experiment. After spending a month here in 2025, and a similar length of time this year, I’ve been struck by the range of tactics being tested across membership and subscriptions, first-party data, AI, new products, partnerships and monetization.

There is no silver bullet, and not every experiment will work. Yet the strategies being enacted in New Zealand offer lessons that publishers elsewhere can learn from.

Here are six approaches worth noting:

1. Know thy audience

New Zealand has an advantage many media markets lack: a long-running, independently commissioned study showing where audiences spend their time.

NZ On Air’s Where Are The Audiences? research has tracked media behavior for over a decade. Its 2026 findings, released last month, surveyed 1,701 New Zealanders aged 15 and above.

Headlines typically focused on how the death of legacy media may have been overstated, manifest in the resilience of local linear television and broadcaster video-on-demand services. Perhaps more interestingly, it suggests the rapid shifts in media consumption seen between 2016 and 2022 have stabilized.

The lesson isn’t that linear television is suddenly back in vogue. It’s that media habits rarely follow a tidy, linear, trajectory. That’s a useful reminder for publishers not to build strategies around where you think audiences are going, and what will be the next “big thing.” Instead, ground strategy in evidence of what they are actually doing.

Digging deeper, for the first time NZ On Air produced separate reports examining Māori, Pacific, Asian and youth audiences, highlighting differences that aggregate figures can obscure. Even in smaller markets, audiences are far from homogenous.

Takeaway: Invest in first-party and independent audience intelligence rather than relying solely on platform-provided analytics. And always interrogate consolidated data. Your audience will likely be multiple sets of consumers requiring different products, formats and distribution strategies. New Zealand may be a small market. But that doesn’t make its audiences simple or singular. Yours won’t be either.

2. Double down on distinctiveness, not scale

Another NZ On Air finding deserves attention: 81% of New Zealanders say they like seeing New Zealand faces and places on television. That’s a broadcasting statistic with an underlying message. New Zealand publishers can’t win a battle based on scale. Their advantage lies in rooting their work in particular places, communities, cultures and areas of expertise.

In an era of abundant content, increasingly aided and abetted by generative AI, generic information is becoming cheaper and easier to produce. This makes distinctiveness more important than ever.

You can see that in organizations as different as The Spinoff, regional publishers, Whakaata Māori and Pacific Media Network. Their value doesn’t necessarily come from producing more content. It comes from producing something that isn’t easily replicated elsewhere.

This is evident across Aotearoa’s Indigenous and community-media ecosystem. These outlets aren’t just producing content for different demographic groups. They draw on language, cultural knowledge, representation and community relationships that mainstream or global media cannot easily reproduce, and all too often overlook.

Research from NZ On Air and Te Māngai Pāho notes the success of this strategy, by highlighting how Māori audiences value local content precisely because it is relatable. That principle resonates far beyond New Zealand. As information becomes more abundant, scarcity in the form of editorial expertise, access, cultural fluency, lived experience and trusted community relationships, become more valuable.

Takeaway: Publishers should identify what content they produce that would be difficult for platforms, competitors or AI programs to replicate. That’s your competitive advantage.

3. Own the relationship and the full subscription funnel

Knowing where audiences are is one thing. Knowing who they are is another.

Like The Guardian, The Spinoff decided not to put its journalism behind a paywall. Instead, they ask readers to become members while keeping its journalism freely available. When commercial revenues dropped sharply in late 2024, they appealed directly to its audience. More than 4,000 people joined, taking membership from around 9,000 to more than 13,000. In May, Spinoff CEO Amber Easby set a target of another 5,000 members; 1,000 signed up in the first month.

Alongside this membership drive, through a Google News Initiative-supported project, The Spinoff built its own audience-data platform. This enables them to better understand the gap between anonymous visitors and paying members, by creating a new middle tier of registered – but non-paying – users.

Stuff took a different approach, keeping its flagship site free, preserving broad reach, while implementing digital paywalls for heritage publications: The Post, The Press and Waikato Times. Those subscriber sites have subsequently recorded substantial growth.

Stuff offers a further lesson when it comes to conversion. The company reported that subscriptions made via the Google Play Store increased approximately 628% year-on-year after it streamlined the subscription process through Subscribe with Google. A year later, Stuff reported a further 290% increase via this route.

Publishers often expend considerable energy asking what people will pay for. They need to spend just as much effort on asking what happens once somebody decides to pay, and how to retain them.

Takeaway: Audit your subscription funnel regularly. Make it as streamlined as possible, and ensure that registration, onboarding, payment, renewal and retention are core sources of investment. These are part of your core product, not just back-office functions or your tech stack.

4. Diversify around your strengths, not for diversification’s sake

Publishers have long recognized the need for revenue diversification. This has them leaning into reader revenues and strategies such as events, memberships and licensing.

New Zealand offers another interpretation of diversification: finding new ways to monetize capabilities publishers already possess, and combining them with assets from elsewhere.

NZME, one of New Zealand’s largest media companies, recently reorganized its newsroom around a live desk focused on breaking news and free reach, alongside nine specialist desks producing investigative and enterprise journalism designed to deepen subscriber engagement. They also launched Herald NOW, a weekday live streaming video news channel, while editorial, marketing, subscriptions and digital advertising were also brought together within one publishing division.

The transformation has attracted international attention. In May, the New Zealand Herald won Best Innovation in Newsroom Transformation at the 2026 INMA Global Media Awards. Herald NOW placed second for Best Use of Video, while NZME also took second place for Best Revenue Diversification Strategy. This recognition is a reminder that experiments in small markets can be world leading.

Stuff has followed a different path, using a range of different models. When Warner Bros. Discovery shut down Newshub, one of New Zealand’s two primary television newsrooms, Stuff stepped into the gap. The digital and print publisher began producing the nightly 6 PM ThreeNews bulletin for Warner Bros. Discovery’s Three network. Stuff also took stewardship of Newshub’s digital archive.

In 2025, marketplace giant Trade Me acquired a 50% stake in Stuff Digital. The move reconnected two business areas that had historically been intertwined. Newspapers once owned enormously profitable classifieds businesses before the internet disaggregated them. Now a major digital marketplace is investing in a publisher, providing branded slotting into Stuff’s content where it provides property and motoring listings.

Takeaway: Diversification for its own sake. It’s finding new ways to create and capture value from what you’re already good at. This might be achievable through a reorganization or restructure, as well as fresh partnerships, new products and collaboration.

5. When it comes to AI, start with the problem

Some of New Zealand’s most interesting AI experiments aren’t attempts to transform entire businesses or newsrooms. They’re narrow interventions aimed at identifiable bottlenecks.

Earlier this year, the Google News Initiative AI Workshops challenged newsrooms to take one idea from concept to working pilot.

Pacific Media Network built a customized Gemini tool to translate daily news bulletins into Tongan and Cook Islands Māori, reducing a process that took as much as three hours to around 15 minutes. The Central App developed a tool to identify potential news angles in dense council-meeting transcripts; its two reporters subsequently doubled their story output.

These are narrow applications. That’s the point.

Rather than developing an overarching AI strategy, these outlets focused on solving a particular problem and seeing how technology could potentially help address it. Against a backdrop where research by Auckland University of Technology (AUT) reveals that 60% of New Zealanders remain uncomfortable with news produced mostly by AI, it is therefore imperative that publishers explain how, where and why, AI is being used.

Takeaway: Don’t begin with “What’s our AI strategy?” Start with: “What problem are we trying to solve?” and be sure to communicate this to your audience.

6. Relationships with platforms will probably always be contradictory

Many of the experiments highlighted above have something in common: through training, funding or their product suite, Google helped make them happen. Nevertheless, at the same time, New Zealand publishers have argued that the economic relationship between journalism and major technology platforms needs rebalancing.

Of course, that contradiction isn’t uniquely New Zealand. But it highlights the on-going tension between the support that platforms can provide publishers with, while simultaneously competing with publishers for advertising, attention and the role of being consumers’ first port of call for information. That tension is only going to grow in the AI-era.

In common with several other countries, New Zealand has been debating a Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill designed to enable bargaining between New Zealand news organizations and digital platforms over commercial arrangements for news content. The bill has been on hold since late 2024. Whatever the eventual policy outcome, publishers can’t assume regulation will solve their business and revenue model problems. Nor is withdrawing from platforms realistic.

Takeaway: Publishers need to continually ask two questions of every platform relationship: where does it create value, and where does it create dependency? That applies as much to AI platforms today as it has to search engines and social networks. Publishers need to be especially clear about the assets they cannot afford to surrender, and those where they are willing to accept a trade-off, especially if it can help them in terms of reach, revenue, efficiency or organizational capacity.

Small market, big lessons

New Zealand isn’t a publishing utopia. The industry remains under intense financial pressure. Trust remains low. News avoidance is high. Experiments may not succeed.

However, the size of the country makes it worth watching, because in a market of five million people, it’s harder to duck some of the big strategic questions that publishers are facing worldwide. With less scale, capital and runway, New Zealand publishers have to choose which audiences’ matter, which platforms deserve their investment, what people will pay for and what they can uniquely provide.

That means looking to be distinctive rather than generic, diversifying around your strengths, providing as frictionless a reader experience as possible, using AI to solve problems, collaborate where it can create scale, and recognizing the complexities of relationships with platforms.

New Zealand’s publishers don’t have all the answers, and the lesson isn’t to copy them. But the constraints of their market mean they have little choice but to confront many of the questions facing publishers everywhere. As such there’s much to learn from them, both now and in the future.