Winning Video Journalist of the Year, then being made redundant days later, neatly sums up what it’s like working in youth media nowadays.
This was the position Re: News journalist Zoe Madden-Smith found herself in after TVNZ confirmed it would close its youth-focused news platform, shortly after she was named New Zealand’s top video journalist for the second year in a row.
“Winning Video Journalist of the Year and being made redundant in the same fortnight is pretty wild but here we are!” Madden-Smith wrote on LinkedIn.
Media companies need younger audiences. They need to be more digital, more visual, more platform-savvy and more willing to meet audiences where they are. But when the money gets tight, youth platforms are often the first to be shuttered.
Re: News was launched by TVNZ in 2017 and spent nearly a decade serving rangatahi [youth] audiences. It went through several changes over that period, including cuts in 2024 and a shift away from text-based reporting towards predominantly video storytelling. More recently, it had been most visible on TVNZ+, where it had its own section, and across social channels including Instagram and Facebook.
TVNZ has now confirmed the platform is being wound up.
“We’ve made the difficult decision to wind up the editorial side of Re: News,” a TVNZ spokeswoman told the NZ Herald’s Shayne Currie.
“Content might be produced under the Re: brand in future, where there are viable commercial or funding pathways to do so. We’re proud of what Re: News has delivered. TVNZ is a commercial broadcaster and while we investigated several options, we could not find an ongoing way to fund this work.”
The closure matters because Re: News was a youth journalism platform housed inside a major broadcaster. Its shuttering is likely to mean fewer specialist youth reporters, fewer early-career pathways, fewer obvious homes for youth-focused stories and fewer teams whose job is to take younger audiences seriously on their own terms.
Madden-Smith’s LinkedIn response to being made redundant was gracious, but she took the opportunity to go into bat for the ailing youth media sector.
“I know Re: News is ending for pÅ«tea [funding]/strategy reasons but I hope this can show you that youth journalism shouldn’t be minimised as a ‘nice to have’,” she wrote.
“It is vital to our democracy that young people have a dedicated platform so their voices and issues aren’t sidelined, like they often are in traditional media.”
“Youth journalism isn’t just little TikToks, it’s agenda-setting investigations, it’s documentaries, it’s representation, it’s award winning and it’s crucial.”
Madden-Smith’s award-winning work was by no means throwaway lifestyle content. In her LinkedIn post, she said the stories she was recognised for sought to “protect trans people, uplift our neurodivergent whanau [community], and get everyone to please (please please) listen to people with chronic illnesses like ME/CFS”.
Re: News is just the latest in a growing collection of youth-focused media experiments that have either been closed, folded back into parent brands or heavily reworked.
RNZ shut down its youth platform Tahi last year as part of its response to an almost $5 million annual funding reduction. At the time, RNZ said the youth market was “notoriously difficult” and that Tahi had not reached its target audience to the extent needed to justify continued funding.
NZME has also launched and closed youth-focused brands in recent years, including digital audio brand Kick and social media brand What the Actual?!. RNZ previously operated The Wireless, a digital youth-focused website that ran between 2013 and 2018 before being folded back into RNZ’s main site.
The same pattern has played out across the Anglosphere. Vice, once the swaggering poster child for youth media and valued at US$5.7 billion at its 2017 peak, filed for bankruptcy in 2023 and later stopped publishing on Vice.com as it shifted towards social channels and a studio-led distribution model.
BuzzFeed News, another much-heralded digital native that won a Pulitzer Prize, was shut down in 2023 as BuzzFeed cut staff and retreated from hard news.
In Australia, Pedestrian Group stopped publishing local versions of Vice, Refinery29, Kotaku, Gizmodo and Lifehacker in 2024.
These were serious attempts by major media companies and digital natives to solve the youth-audience problem. The fact so many have been cut, closed or diminished suggests the problem is not a lack of investment, effort or imagination – it’s the business model.
For journalists, youth brands have often functioned as training grounds for newer reporters, video journalists, social-first storytellers and producers. They give younger journalists room to experiment with formats, voice and subject matter in ways traditional newsrooms can struggle to accommodate. They also build specialist knowledge around issues affecting younger audiences, from housing and climate to work, identity, mental health, education, technology and healthcare.
When these platforms close, those stories do not necessarily disappear. But they become more likely to be covered episodically, reactively or through the assumptions of older institutional newsrooms. Youth coverage becomes everyone’s responsibility, which often means it becomes no one’s priority.
For PRs and communications professionals, the contraction also matters. Youth-focused campaigns now have fewer obvious editorial homes. Stories involving young people, online culture, education, climate anxiety, mental health, cost-of-living pressures or emerging technology may need to be pitched into broader newsrooms, where they will compete with general news priorities and tighter editorial resources.
That does not mean youth-focused stories can’t be told. But it does mean the bar is higher. A vague “Gen Z angle” is unlikely to survive outside a specialist youth outlet. Strong data, sharp case studies, credible young voices and genuine public-interest stakes are now more important than ever.
When Influencing contacted Madden-Smith to ask her about the state of youth media and her future plans, she told us:
“It can be so easy to feel angry about the state of youth journalism, it’s made me cry too many times. But seeing what Re: News achieved as essentially an ‘experiment’ a decade ago makes me confident it can be done again. The audience is there, they’re actively engaged and they’re waiting. Talking to journalism students is also the best way to soothe the anger too, they are so fired up and talented – that gives me hope.
“I’m also hopeful about the future of journalism because I have to be. Otherwise, there’s no point sticking at it. Being made redundant gives you the opportunity to completely start again and reinvent yourself, but I had a four-day break and jumped straight back in helping to produce for [current affairs program] Paddy Gower. Probably should have taken longer, but here we are. While I am deeply grieving the loss of Re: News, I’m excited for the next chapter.”
The uncomfortable lesson from Re: News is that youth journalism can be award-winning, socially useful and democratically important – and still find itself on the chopping block. Media organisations understand younger audiences are the future. The question is whether they will fund the journalism those audiences recognise as being for them.