Experts question fairness of consultation process amid Today FM cull

Media experts and a senior employment lawyer say they are shocked at how swiftly MediaWorks axed Today FM.

Staff were called to a meeting earlier today and then just after 5pm, an announcer on the station's frequency said it was no longer broadcasting, while some services would continue to be broadcast until a new station launched.

Listeners heard the station’s demise unfold in real time this morning after the hosts were told to stop broadcasting and start playing music instead.

High-profile presenters Duncan Garner and Tova O'Brien said on air they had been "betrayed" and "f****d" by MediaWorks management.

"We've been on the air for a year; we were told we had the support of everyone, from the chief executive through to the board, through to the executive," O'Brien said.

"And they have f***** us. We're all gonna lose our jobs, and the station is gonna go off the air."

Garner said: "This is betrayal."

A producer at the former radio station, Tom Day, said the team received a notification there was going to be a meeting at 12.15pm but that was brought forward and the morning team was taken off air to attend it.

Day said MediaWorks' interim chief executive Wendy Palmer told the meeting the board had set forward a proposal to shut down Today FM, a year into what the employees thought was a five-year plan for the station.

Day said they were given until the end of the afternoon to make submissions on the proposal, adding staff were “gutted”.

Media experts told 1News they were amazed at how quickly the consultation was done.

Media commentator Tim Murphy said he had never seen or heard anything like it.

"I was listening to it this morning. It was shocking, really, that anyone’s job or workplace would be dying live in front of us."

He said its demise wasn’t a "complete shock" given the current economic troubles and the fact Today FM hadn’t really "taken off" and "grabbed the market it needed".

Murphy said he was shocked by the events of today.

"The way it occurred, announcing while you are live with your most prominent hosts, allowing perhaps then to go and discuss what the company has done… and the listeners hearing it raw – a pretty poor result all round," he said.

He believed the quick consultation "can’t be fair".

"You are supposed to be given time to consider it, to get some advice, to get someone to go with you to meetings."

Murphy said it was a very "strange process" but that MediaWorks must have considered if there were any consequences of running a fast process.

Head of Radio Studies at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT), Dr Matt Mollgaard, said he’s never witnessed such a media cull in his decades of experience as a broadcaster, manager, creative and academic.

"A lot depends on the contracts the people working there had, which would likely be confidential," he said.

"Reasonable pay-outs would probably be triggered for key staff and be tied to non-disclosures and other instruments to protect the company’s commercial interests. The consultation period is remarkably short – I’ve not come across such a compressed timetable in my 30-plus years in broadcasting. It is very unlikely the staff could come up with anything workable by then.

"It was a fiasco at the end – but also incredibly sad for those people who have lost jobs after putting so much into the station and the website.

"It is also sad for the industry as a whole – that’s one more channel we no longer have to hold power to account, to keep all the other big players on their toes and to provide vital training and experience for the next generation of journalists and media workers."

Today FM wouldn’t respond to specific questions from 1News around the fairness of its consultation process with employees.

A spokesperson said it was "an ongoing employment matter and we are working through the process, we have no further comment at this stage".

Palmer issued a statement this evening saying, "MediaWorks, like the whole advertising sector in New Zealand and internationally, continues to be impacted by an environment with lower revenues and higher costs.

"At the request of the MediaWorks Board we have undertaken a review of the entire business to identify further areas of potential cost saving and to reshape the business for the market conditions.

“This has led the Board to take the difficult decision to take Today FM off air and to explore options for a digital content offering. This is a hard day for this talented team who put everything into building a new talk platform in Aotearoa. They’ve worked tremendously hard and we’re incredibly proud of the work they have done.

"We’ll be working with the team to identify other opportunities within MediaWorks where possible and to support them in their next steps."

An employment lawyer and senior associate at law firm Duncan Cotterill, Jeremy Ansell, told 1News that, from his understanding, it seemed like a very "rushed process".

"You’ve got quite an extraordinary situation where staff are all finding out at the same time about a redundancy proposal, including on-air broadcasters."

He said employees were effectively given "less than a day" to digest the proposal, understand it, give their feedback on it and potentially take advice.

"It’s very, very quick in terms of the normal consultation timeframe that you’d expect from an employer engaging in a redundancy process like this," Ansell said.

He said MediaWorks would likely have "genuine business reasons" to make the change based on lack of advertising revenue and a failure to "crack the market" but given the speed of this process, "it’s unclear to me how they could possibly tick off all of those consultation boxes in the course of a day and so quickly".

Ansell said if the correct process wasn’t in place and "you don’t engage in genuine and sufficient consultation with your employees, the whole termination can be undone and it can be found to be unjustifiable by the Employment Relations Authority or the court".