The New Zealand Rose who became a media mogul

Back in May, Belfast-born Sinead Boucher made headlines when she purchased New Zealand media group Stuff from its Australian owners for the symbolic sum of NZ$1. In doing so, Boucher became the sole owner of the media group and helped rescue it from an uncertain fate. Stuff operates the most popular news website in New Zealand and also owns 49 print titles, including a number of national newspapers, local newspapers and magazines. The company also owns Neighbourly, a hyperlocal social platform which aims to connect neighbours.

Boucher’s takeover has been well received and was even described by one New Zealand commentator as “a gutsy, big-hearted and highly risky play”.

So how did a Belfast girl ascend the ranks to become one of the most respected and influential figures in New Zealand media?

Boucher was born in Belfast in 1970. When she was three years old, her parents, Seán and Mary O’Hanlon, decided to move the family to Christchurch. They were an ordinary working-class family, she says. Her father worked as a glazier while her mother worked a variety of jobs. She recalls making one trip to Ireland as a youngster, but otherwise the family stayed put in New Zealand. Boucher now holds dual citizenship, having become a citizen of New Zealand three years ago.

Sean Moncrieff: Privacy these days? Mind your own business

---

Staycationing just means paying too much to sleep in someone else’s uncomfortable bed

---

We emotionally reticent Irishmen would be even worse without sport

---

After school, Boucher decided to study law at Canterbury university. It wasn’t for her and she dropped out to take a year off and travel.

Around this time, she entered the local Rose of Tralee competition and was selected to be the New Zealand Rose. She travelled to Ireland to represent her adopted homeland in the competition. Nearly 30 years on, she describes the experience as “huge fun”.

“It was a really nice thing to do, to come over from here and do that. I didn’t really have any idea what a big deal it was down there. The girl who won was from Cork,” she recalls. “She did this thing where she whipped off her skirt and she was in her Irish dancing dress and performed a great dance. That was lots of fun.”

With the Rose of Tralee having covered the cost of her plane ticket to Ireland, she decided to spend a year in Belfast. She lived with her aunt and spent her time getting to know her extended family and becoming reacquainted with the city she left as a small child.

While there, she got a job working in the purchasing department of the Europa Hotel through the local job centre. After the hotel was targeted in a bomb attack, Boucher ended up leaving to work in a local newspaper selling classified ads. It was her first foray into the world of media.

“I was so useless,” she laughs. “I sold no ads at all. I don’t think even one. I definitely proved I had more talent on the editorial side of the business than the commercial side.”

Upon returning to New Zealand, she enrolled in a six-month course in journalism school. She spent several years working as a rookie reporter with Christchurch paper The Press before moving to London with her now husband, Mark. There, she worked as a digital reporter with FT.com and as a news correspondent with Reuters. After welcoming a daughter in 2003, the couple decided to relocate back to New Zealand where they live in Wellington with their two children.

Back on home turf, she landed a gig as assistant editor with The Press. In 2007, she was appointed group digital editor tasked with overseeing the development of stuff.co.nz, then a fledgling online news outlet. Following a stint as group executive editor, she was appointed chief executive of Stuff in 2017.

In 2018, Stuff's parent company Fairfax Media merged with Nine Entertainment, an Australian media company. It quickly became apparent that Nine Entertainment had little interest in holding on to Stuff.

“They didn’t want to own a New Zealand business,” explains Boucher. “We were the strange thing at the bottom of the box of things you buy at auction.”

Due to competition laws in New Zealand, the new owners encountered trouble finding a quick and easy sale. NZME, one of New Zealand’s top media companies and one of Stuff’s main rivals, launched a takeover bid but it failed to progress. “There was a lot of concern about the level of control it would give one company over the media,” says Boucher.

One night earlier this year, Boucher’s boss in Nine Entertainment called her and told her the deal with NZME wasn’t going anywhere. The company wanted to exit the New Zealand market by the end of May and were looking at potentially winding Stuff up if a buyer could not be found.

“I got off the call and I felt so gutted about the fact that they were prepared to walk away from some of those titles,” she says, noting that some of the newspapers in the stable are more than 160 years old.

After speaking with her husband and Ramesh Vedachalam, the chief financial officer of Stuff, she decided to put in an offer for Stuff. “I rang him [her boss] back and said, ‘Rather than close down the company, would you sell it to me for $1?’ You can walk away and we can keep going. And he said, ‘Yes.’”

What followed was two intense weeks of negotiations conducted remotely from her kitchen table. “Even though the price was a dollar there was a lot of detail to go through,” she says. Eventually in late May, she submitted an electronic signature and the deal was done.

“It got signed at midnight,” she says. “I was sitting at the kitchen table and everyone else had gone to bed. The house was dark.”

Celebrations that night were subdued. She told her family the news on Zoom and they were “gobsmacked”. Afterwards, she went over to her friends’ house in “sweatpants and slippers” for a celebratory drink. Happily, the news was warmly welcomed by staff.

“I had people come over and just stand looking at me with tears running down their face,” she says. “It was a reflection of the anxiety and uncertainty that had gone on. It was incredible.”

A few weeks later, Boucher went to a lawyer’s office and officially handed over $1 for the company.

“Because we were still doing social distancing I had to throw my dollar to the lawyer,” she laughs. “She dropped it the first time so I had to pick it up and throw it again. Then I gave her another dollar out of my pocket because I wanted to keep that one. I have it in a little frame now.”

Boucher takes over Stuff at what is an undeniably challenging time for the media. The coronavirus pandemic has been devastating for many outlets, including Stuff, which experienced an 80 per cent dip in advertising in the initial stages of the crisis.

However, she says that the pandemic has also led to a surge in traffic as well as newspaper subscriptions and voluntary contributions. People have been reminded of the need for quality journalism and credible news.

“While we’ve all been more challenged as businesses, it has reminded us what the purpose of our work is,” she says. “It gives us an opportunity to build on that, build up public trust and ultimately encourage people to want to pay for journalism and contribute to a healthy and corruption-free democracy.”

In recent weeks, Stuff has garnered international attention over its decision to stop publishing articles and videos on Facebook. The group had previously stopped advertising on Facebook due to the social network's "underwhelming" response to the Christchurch mosque shootings in which 51 Muslim worshippers were murdered by a single gunman. The attack was livestreamed on Facebook.

“We withdrew our advertising then because we didn’t think it was right to fund a platform that enabled those things to happen,” she says.

That decision had “zero impact” on the business and they started discussing the idea of withdrawing from the platform entirely. Facebook was quickly becoming a “morass” of misinformation and hate speech and they no longer wanted to participate in it.

With that in mind, they stopped posting content to Facebook on July 5th on a trial basis. So far, they haven’t seen much of an impact.

Why should we fund the creation of good work with a view to putting it on a platform that won't take responsibility for its own mess?

“What we have seen in the four weeks or so is that our audience has dropped very marginally,” she says. “Our page impressions have hardly had a dent in them at all.”

Some in the industry have argued that news should be shared on Facebook to counteract the widely shared hoaxes and conspiracies that bounce around the platform. Boucher doesn’t agree.

“Why should we fund the creation of good work with a view to putting it on a platform that won’t take responsibility for its own mess?” she says. “People can freely access our news. It’s not paywalled.”

Things are brighter than when Boucher first took over Stuff all those months ago. New Zealand has all but eliminated the virus and successfully emerged from lockdown. Advertising has picked up and is now at 80 per cent of what it was prior to the pandemic. Public trust and goodwill is high. Nonetheless people are cautious.

“There’s a sense that everything has gone back to normal but at any point there could be some breach of the quarantine or another outbreak and what would happen then?” she says.

Boucher’s goal for now is to ensure that Stuff can withstand future shocks to the system.

“We own the business, we’re preparing our strategies and all the things we want to do. But we’re also preparing our business to be strong enough to survive another lockdown and build up reserves of cash to carry us through.”

It might be gutsy and risky, but the Belfast native wouldn’t have it any other way.