When Sinead Boucher famously acquired New Zealand’s Stuff media group for NZ$1 (A$91c), it came with an opportunity to rethink concepts taken for granted for years.

One was the decade-old mantra of “digital-first”.

And with its ethos to ‘Follow No One’ came a bold and counterintuitive move to separate its newsrooms, “re-transforming” the legacy media business. Head of life media Sarah Stuart explained the process in an INMA Ideas blog.

“Digital-first was the mantra for Stuff Group’s journalists for more than a decade after it became the first of New Zealand’s big media companies to fully embrace 24/7 publishing,” she says. “It was delivering news as it happens on the country’s largest digital news site, stuff.co.nz, before its large legacy network of mastheads went into production for the next day’s newspaper.”

Stuart says marrying powerful print newsrooms around the country with its digital upstart colleagues had not always been easy, “but by the early 2020s, the marriage was comfortably settled”.

Then powerful external forces disrupted the industry again – news avoidance, crippling overheads, a cost of living crisis, and the emergence of GenAI loomed; how could an organisation of almost 400 journalists in 19 newsrooms adapt again for the future?

Stuart says marrying subscriber digital and print mastheads with a mass and free news website had created content and audience at scale, but at a cost of ubiquity across the products. “For reader revenue to thrive, and for digital-only platforms to innovate at speed, they needed to carve their own path.

Under owner Sinead Boucher, Stuff’s new leadership team asked itself, ‘if we started today, what would we do’… following the question with an audit to establish what was driving scale and what was driving subscriptions.

The answer became clear,” she says. “After ten mostly happy years together, a conscious uncoupling was needed. And so the separation began.”

The process started with the appointment of two managing directors, each with separate businesses and operations and separate editorial teams. Each business was tasked with its own revenue targets and news drivers, news agendas and products to deliver.

At Stuff Digital with its flagship stuff.co.nz, the country’s most-read and most-visited news website, and the large social network Neighbourly, the relentless focus was on innovating fast, driving first-person data, growing audio and video, and delivering revenue from its deep understanding of New Zealanders.

Over at Stuff Masthead Publishing, newsrooms pivoted to deliver on their legacy mastheads’ promises – beautifully-told New Zealand stories with writers, visual storytellers, podcasters, and subscription experts driven by content that would deliver deep engagement, loyalty, and ARPU. Digital subscription mastheads were launched for newspapers 160 years in the making.

The creation of two discrete profitable businesses – both with trusted journalism at the core of their newsrooms – created innovative ripples that immediately paid benefits. Stuff Digital and Masthead Publishing formed their teams around standalone balance sheets with transparent cost attribution and overheads.

Despite a reduction in dedicated staff and daily content, stuff.co.nz further grew its No. 1 position as the country’s largest news website, adding 328,000 unique views to its 2.5 million monthly unique audience – all in a country with just 5.5 million people.

Masthead Publishing almost doubled the reach of its three mastheads – The Post, The Press, and the Waikato Times – by launching its new subscriber websites, becoming one of the fastest-growing news brands in New Zealand, and growing ARPU plus incremental audience for the Stuff Group.

“New products were launched, AI-led print automation was introduced, and major sports partnerships were formed with FIFA and the Rugby World Cup. Uncoupled and unshackled but united as a family, the separated newsrooms have developed unique voices, business models, and strategies,” says Sarah Stuart.

“Stuff Group’s ethos is to Follow No One. The counterintuitive move to separate its newsrooms again was bold. It was a business transformation strategy that required its teams to be courageous and deeply understand their audiences and commercial partners.

“And it was a success, earning INMA’s Global Media Award for newsroom transformation in 2024.”