Today FM’s end: What went wrong for the radio station? - The Front Page

Broadcasters Tova O'Brien and Duncan Garner were blindsided by the changes.

While The Front Page is currently on a summer break, we are revisiting some of the biggest news stories from 2023. New episodes will return on January 15.

Broadcasting on Today FM started routinely on Thursday morning, with morning host Tova O’Brien running through her show as she normally would.

But things started to take a turn when O’Brien ended her programming by telling the audience her team was being called into a meeting with management.

Speaking to The Front Page podcast for a special edition of the show, NZ Herald editor-at-large and media columnist Shayne Currie runs us through the bizarre circumstances that followed that seemingly innocuous announcement.

“It was an extraordinary 30 minutes or so of radio,” says Currie.

“We obviously monitor our competition quite closely. After Tova finished her show with that comment ... Duncan [Garner] kicked off his programme reasonably normally, but then he mentioned that Tova had just gone in and seen the interim CEO Wendy Palmer, and there were no assurances about the future of the radio station.”

It was at this moment that the script was discarded by Garner’s team.

“Over the course of the next 20 or 30 minutes, that led to some extraordinary radio where we firstly heard Duncan talk about his concerns for the future of the station, his colleagues and the listeners. And then Tova came into the studio as well, along with the rest of the newsroom. That was very emotional. Very raw. It’s a very sad situation for us all in the media industry to see the closure of something like this, but it had a huge impact in terms of raw emotion coming out of the speakers.”

Asked whether he thought it was a mistake to have the broadcasters on air as they were finding out that they didn’t have much job security, Currie says the timing could have been better.

“It’s always a tough one for employers,” says Currie.

“But I do think in this situation, given the live nature of [radio], a better option would’ve been for the station to call a meeting at 9am and involve everybody at that point and play music in the interim. Just given the serious nature of the proposal and the impact on the people, that possibly was a better course.”

So, where does this leave MediaWorks and its talkback radio ambitions?

Will the staff at the company be able to find other roles in the media industry? And is there any likelihood of MediaWorks calling it quits on talkback radio altogether?

Listen to the full episode of The Front Page podcast to hear Currie’s views on all these issues.

The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. New episodes will be back on January 15.

It is presented by Damien Venuto, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in business reporting who joined the Herald in 2017.

You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.