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Conversations about the intersections of media, culture and technology in New Zealand, hosted by Duncan Greive, founder of The Spinoff.
325 Episodes
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Richard Edelman was deeply prescient, when he responded to the “battle for Seattle” by commissioning an annual global survey of institutional trust. For a quarter century the trust barometer has revealed the extent to which countries and societies have grown insular and mistrustful, and catalogued the downstream consequences. basically, it’s not just media, it’s everyone.New Zealand is no different, and Acumen, which runs the research locally, has the numbers. Chief executive Adelle Keely joins Duncan Greive to discuss what it shows, and what (if anything) can be done about it.
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After six months of careful deliberation, and six years after it first floated the idea, the broadcasting standards authority decided that it definitively does have jurisdiction over platforms like The Platform. This set off a firestorm stretching across politics, law and media, with the regulator having the temerity to suggest that one, relatively tiny corner of the internet was within its bounds. In a reversal of typical roles, Toby Manhire hosts Duncan Greive to break down this story, at once arcane and enormous.
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Joe Webb was working as a coder when he printed a t-shirt at a mate’s house. Within a few years YOUKNOW had become a ubiquitous brand, thanks to their knack for creating social content which created a real sense of community. Then in 2023 he repeated the trick in a whole new paradigm, launching The Morning Shift as a daily podcast to overnight success. He joins Duncan Greive on The Fold to talk about the challenges of running these two businesses, what made each click – and why the future of the media side is aiming global.
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Joel Gouveia is a music supervisor, artist manager and booking agent, with a Substack. Earlier this year he wrote a series of posts, each more successful than the last, which drilled into the streaming music economy in a vivid and challenging way. He talked about bands with millions of streams that sold a dozen tickets, while others with comparatively tiny audiences could sell out tours. He looked some of the economic and cultural failings of music streaming and shone a bright light on them, basically – and those posts were the most popular pieces on the whole Substack network, showing just what a chord he struck. He joins Duncan Greive on The Fold from his office in Toronto to explain his thinking, and why he started speaking out.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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).
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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.
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Really interesting overview of the discussion document on this important topic - media reform.