Veteran broadcaster Bill Ralston has described the imminent axing of Newshub as "a tragedy" in an interview with 1News this afternoon.
Ralston has worked at both TV3 and TVNZ. He was TV3's political editor from 1989-1994 and was TVNZ's head of news and current affairs from 2003-2007.
He said it was a "sad day" not only for Newshub staff, but the media market and the whole country.
"For 35 years, TV3 has had greedy and often incompetent management of the companies that have owned them."
Ralston said he is concerned about the flow on effects into the commercial market and production houses.
"You can see TV3… just becoming a thing that just regurgitates foreign information and programming, and local programming will evaporate over a period of time."
Newshub's shutdown is the first instance of this disappearance of local programming, he said.
TV3 has had a "very, very rough" history, with Ralston saying that it "almost immediately ran into problems" upon launching in 1989.
"It got bought by other people, they ran into major problems and difficulties, they've constantly been hitting the wall as time has gone on."
He believes the one thing that helped it recover and get by is that the organisation has had "really good, hardworking staff."
"I just feel so sad for all those people because where are they gonna get jobs now."
Its position as a competitor to state-owned TVNZ was a "main driving force" for TV3, said Ralston.
"Luckily, there are other news organisations in the country, but they are in radio, or print, or online.
"That's the main driver for some really good news and current affairs stuff: the fact that you've got a competitor there and you've got to beat them."
Warner Bros. Discovery Asia Pacific president James Gibbons said in a statement that the new model would be focused on a "digitally-led business", with ThreeNow at its core supported by free-to-air linear channels.
When asked what the much-discussed digital future looked like from his perspective, Ralston described it as "anorexic".
"You've still got to get revenue out of it, and the costs of running a television organisation, particularly a news operation, are huge. $30-$40m easily, that's a lot of money for people to find these days out of ad revenue."
'Not just an effect on journalism, but on democracy' - commentator
Media commentator Gavin Ellis said he was shocked by the news, not by the closure itself, but the timing of it.
"I had predicted that at some point TV3 would move to a streaming service, which had implications for its news, but the timing of it has shocked me to the core."
The former NZ Herald editor said Newshub's closure would be a "big blow" for the media industry, as many journalists and associated professionals would be leaving.
"It's not just an effect on journalism, but an effect on democracy."
News benefited from the competition between TVNZ and TV3, Ellis said.
"The reduction to a single source means that people do not have the ability to test one journalist's views against another, or test the opinions of the people they interview against another."
He compared those who argue that there is a pluralism in media with websites and social media platforms to the knight who loses all his limbs and still will not admit defeat in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
"Every reduction is a real reduction, and we can't simply say there are others left in the field. Yes, there are, but fewer and fewer and fewer, and we get to a point where you can't hold a sword anymore because you don't have any arms.
"It is getting harder and harder to sustain journalism, which means we have got to start looking at different ways of ensuring that we still have journalists in our future because they are essential to democracy."
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