Claim OwnershipThe Fold
Subscribed: 241Played: 9,307
Subscribe
© The Spinoff
Description
Conversations about the intersections of media, culture and technology in New Zealand, hosted by Duncan Greive, founder of The Spinoff.
321 Episodes
Reverse
Alan Soon is a journalist and media consultant who runs Splice Beta, one of Asia’s most popular news media festivals. He recently wrote an extremely provocative piece arguing that journalism as an institution has been ignoring and underplaying advances in AI. He joins Duncan Greive on The Fold from Singapore to unpack this thesis.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Fold’s regular hosts go through the audience’s best questions, running from media buying to the government as an advertiser to the future of Sky to whether Three should have been born at all.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Last call for our first ever listener questions episode – fill out this form to pose a question of hosts Duncan Greive and Glen Kyne.
Glen Kyne joins Duncan Greive to discuss a major week for Sky, which staged the first upfronts from any New Zealand broadcaster since 2023, and delivered its first set of results since its acquisition of Three.
After attending the upfronts, Glen and Duncan share their notes – and also analyse Paramount’s shock win in the race to acquire Warner Brothers, and NZME’s impressive annual results (and some late-breaking editorial news).
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Fold's first ever listener questions episode is coming – fill out this form to pose a question of hosts Duncan Greive and Glen Kyne.
A different episode of The Fold this week, leaning on Glen Kyne's deep experience with MediaWorks to tell the story of this perennial underdog of the big media companies – one which has always had great, authentic brands and even greater debt loads. Now that it's finally debt-free, Kyne talks Greive through the great saga of its various eras, as it finds itself once again for sale.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Fold's first ever listener questions episode is coming – fill out this form to pose a question of hosts Duncan Greive and Glen Kyne.
Anna Rawhiti-Connell joins Duncan Greive on The Fold to discuss three huge stories impacting the social media and platform world. First is a landmark trial which contends social platforms are faulty products which visit huge harms upon their users – both Snap and TikTok have settled out of court, while Meta and Google will go to trial in a case with potentially enormous implications for the platforms.Next, they discuss the under-16 ban movement, which is spreading rapidly around the world, including New Zealand. Finally they analyse the EU’s multi-faceted resistance to big tech, one which epitomises the downstream consequences of Trump’s hostility toward his traditional allies.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Fold's first ever listener question's episode is coming – fill out this form to pose a question of hosts Duncan Greive and Glen Kyne.
This week, Glen joins Duncan to discuss a flood of major media stories, led by breaking news: The Warehouse Group's shock decision to pause all advertising. Then they discuss the future of Mediaworks after its split from QMS, the end of a dismal era for the Washington Post's CEO Will Lewis, a new CEO for Disney and a fork in the road for Nielsen in New Zealand.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Eddie Johnston is first and foremost a huge music fan – he grew up loving New Zealand artists like The Mint Chicks and the Phoenix Foundation, and understood music in the paradigm of CDs and scenes. For many artists, even young musicians, those were the archetypal good old days, before social and streaming broke the model. But Johnston, who performs under the name Lontalius, has a clear-eyed and unsentimental response to the changing times, and tries to find ways to love making music even in the big tech era. He joins Duncan Greive ahead of his Laneway slot to explain how he learned to stop worrying and love the platforms, deep flaws and all.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
A quite different episode this week, because discussing media without reference to the wider world feels particularly pointless at the moment. Duncan Greive hosts his friend David Brain on The Fold, to discuss Davos, the gathering of political, business and media elites, all in the shadow of Trump. Brain is a longtime attendee of Davos, and breaks down what it’s like on the ground, its noble intentions, its wrong turns and how incompatible it feels with the new world order, before trying to figure out what New Zealand’s response should be.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Glen Kyne joins Duncan Greive on The Fold to discuss the biggest questions facing New Zealand's media in 2026. How will the John Campbell signing impact RNZ? Can NZ Rugby arrest its slide into chaos or has Sky got a big problem with its biggest partner? Will TVNZ follow Netflix into podcasts or UGC? Is Jim Grenon done with NZME? Will the Warner Brothers acquisition go through, and how will that change Netflix – and impact New Zealand? Is our government going to keep watching forever, or will it act? Will TradeMe take all of Stuff, and where will that leave mastheads?
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Fold is taking a break over summer. We’ll be back soon with new episodes but, until then, here’s one of our favourites from 2025:
Anna Rawhiti-Connell joins Duncan Greive on The Fold to discuss two violent deaths, one driven by the internet, the other digested by it. They discuss how each shows in different yet profound ways how treating the internet as a separate sphere of life is increasingly impossible – rendering the libertarianism of one incompatible with the laws and mores of the other.
This episode was originally published on September 16 2025.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Fold is taking a break over summer. We’ll be back soon with new episodes but, until then, here’s one of our favourites from 2025:
Sophie Moloney has been CEO of Sky NZ for five years. For much of that time she’s been dealing with downsides – a failed acquisition of MediaWorks, Spark Sports gifting their rights to TVNZ and prolonged satellite issues. But lately, things have been looking up. They successfully brought NZ Cricket rights back, scooped up Three’s assets for $1, and just last week lengthened their rugby deal under very buyer-friendly terms. She joins Duncan Greive on the Fold to dig into all those issues and more.
This episode was originally published on August 29 2025.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Fold is taking a break over summer. We’ll be back soon with new episodes but, until then, here’s one of our favourites from 2025:
Nick Becker is an Aucklander who spent 15 years in the UK, much of it in key roles with huge EPL teams Arsenal and Manchester City, before a spell in Melbourne. He returned home to launch the city’s first professional football team in more than a decade – one which overcame early doubts to become a phenomenon right out of the gate. He joins Duncan Greive on The Fold to talk about the decision to let a documentary crew film their first season, how to build fan engagement and delve into the complexities of reach versus reward in sports rights.
This episode was originally published on July 15 2025.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Glen Kyne and Duncan Greive complete the second part of The Fold’s 2025 finale, this time picking and ranking the five best performing global media players. The podcast was recorded in the immediate aftermath of the Netflix-WBD news, which scrambled rankings and will be a huge storyline for months, perhaps years, to come.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Glen Kyne joins Duncan Greive for a two-part finale, ranking the performances of New Zealand’s scale media companies. They take on MediaWorks, NZME, RNZ, Sky, Stuff and TVNZ, based on public facing metrics, conversations and general vibe-based diagnosis. There’s a clear winner, but wide disagreement on the losers. PLUS an instant reaction to the Netflix-WBD deal.
RNZ’s Paul Thompson on that bombshell radio report
Sky CEO Sophie Moloney on the NZ rugby and Three deals and the depth of its moat
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2025 has been a year of profound change in the regulatory landscape for Australian media. There is a social media ban for under 16s, which goes live next week. There are new local content spending rules for the big paid streaming platforms. And there is a revised version of the news bargaining code which aims squarely at Meta. Tim Burrowes has covered all this at Mumbrella, and rejoins The Fold to update Duncan Greive on what our near neighbour is doing – and what our government could copy (but probably wont).
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Last week we kicked off a new partnership with New Zealand's leading media agency, PHD, which will partner with The Spinoff and The Fold on a series of podcasts on the increasingly complex intersection of media, advertising and technology. We held a live event at The Spinoff in front of a room full of senior marketers, featuring Helen Brown (PHD Chief Investment Officer) and Rachel Bayfield (PHD Chief Technology & Innovation Officer), along with James Davidson, (PHD Chief Strategy and Planning Officer). We reviewed the year in local media, highlighted by a pair of major deals at Stuff and Sky, while surveying big changes in search and the continued strength of OOH and radio. Finally we cast ahead with some predictions for 2026.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Duncan Greive goes solo to deliver a quick response to the NZ Screen Awards, which fused film with television in a way which showed a lot of promise while also needing some serious tightening. There were big wins for The Convert, and a big beautiful crowd, but Tinā felt neglected and the randomised nature of the awards meant that energy came and went. The highlights more than justified the exercise – but a more streamlined and sequenced show should be the aim for 2026.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2025 sees the release of the latest in The Fold’s obsession: NZ on Air’s Where Are the Audiences research. This time the focus is on children’s media – the third time this subject has been assessed, following work in 2015 and 2020. It tells a story even more stark and challenging than that which comes out of the bigger grown-ups survey. The Spinoff’s head of audience Anna Rawhiti-Connell has dug into the report, and talks with Duncan Greive about its most interesting insights. Then they dig into a fascinating new piece of research from the Broadcasting Standards Authority on the often vexed issue of trust in news media – one which has fresh detail both on types of media consumed, and how trust actually works in this context.
https://www.nzonair.govt.nz/news/where-are-the-audiences-childrens-media-use-report-2025/
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Spinoff editor-at-large Toby Manhire joins Duncan Greive this week to discuss a very unfortunate case of journalistic mistaken identity. Former Herald reporter Bevan Hurley had an explosive exclusive with former Bill de Blasio, in which the former New York mayor critiqued Zohran Mamdani, the current mayoral candidate he had previously strongly endorsed. Or so Hurley thought – he had in fact been talking to a wine importer by the name of Bill DeBlasio, who holds very different views to his near-namesake. It blew up into an international media storm, which the pair break down, along with a confession from Toby's past at the Guardian. Also, the succession situations at Morning Report and TVNZ’s 6pm bulletin – what are the risks and opportunities for those two big dogs of our news media? And finally, a word on Juggernaut II – the sequel to our hit 2024 podcast which launches next week.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Download from Google Play
Download from App Store
United States
Really interesting overview of the discussion document on this important topic - media reform.