The Fold

He’s very familiar as the star of Wellington Paranormal, and a radio host with Hauraki – but Mike Minogue’s greatest achievement might be Frank, his burgeoning agency. Frustrated with the quality of talent representation in Aotearoa, Minogue started Frank to bring a different approach to the established players. But he added speaker representation and, crucially, podcast representation to Frank’s...

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 differe...

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...

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 ab...

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...

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 the...

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...

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...

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 Wash...

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 u...

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 inten...

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 ch...

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 increasingl...

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. The...

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...

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 bombsh...

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...

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 C...

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 exercis...

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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 i...

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 be...