Our State of The Kākā Nation 2024

After four years, we have over 20,600 subscribers, including 2,520 who pay; We’ll stay focused on housing, climate & poverty in Aotearoa-NZ, but with less news curation & more exploration of solutions

TL;DR: Mānawatia a Matariki! It’s that time of the year for reflection and renewal so here’s our annual State of The Kākā Nation Report for 2024. Total subscribers grew 46% to 20,600 and paying subscribers grew 29% to 2,520 over the last year. Subscriber comments, ‘views’ and likes’ increased more dramatically, thanks to the growing use of Substack’s app for notes and chat. We’re eternally grateful and are celebrating again today.

A very happy day just over a year ago in a warm place.

The last 12 months was much busier and more newsey than we expected, thanks to a change of Government and the mass reversal and disruption of policies across our focus areas of housing, climate and poverty. We had to react to and cover those changes, but it’s time to edge away from the churn of the news cycle and look around, over and ahead, especially to Election 2026.

We’ll be doing less news curation and reactive coverage of news over the year ahead, and instead look for and analyse potential solutions to our long-running, deep and politically difficult crises of housing unaffordability, dangerously-high climate emissions and debilitating poverty and inequality. We’ll begin compiling and refining an integrated and coherent set of potential solutions in articles, video interviews and podcasts the public can pick through over the next two years until the General Election likely in late 2026. We’re calling this work The Kākā Project for 2026.

(That’s the summary version for all our non-paying subscribers. As with all our articles, we have a lot more detail and analysis below the paywall fold. Paying subscribers get it all in the emails and can access the full-fat¹ version online. If we get more than 100 likes, we open these articles up for full public access and sharing online. Join our community of paying subscribers to also be able to comment and get access to our ‘Hoon’ webinars.)

It’s been a hell of a year, with some heaven thrown in

Just over a year ago, Lynn and I were getting married (again) in the courtyard of a stone cottage on the Greek Island of Andros. It was a wonderful, warm and relaxing time, but we still produced almost daily news emails while on that holiday. That’s partly because my news reading and curation is by now deeply habitual², but also I’ve been publishing subscription email newsletters long enough to know that stopping publishing for any length of time can be very damaging to subscriber retention and overall subscriber growth.

Our basic approach has been to publish at least once on average every work day. Since September 2020 when we began publishing, there have been about 975 work days and we’ve published 1,537 emails, so it’s worked out at more like 1.5 emails per work day. In total since late 2020, those emails, articles, podcasts and videos have generated over 12 million ‘views,’ as defined by Substack’s measures of views by unique users via email and on the various sites and platforms, including Substack’s own app. It is increasingly useful and heavily used by The Kākā’s paying subscribers as a safe and nourishing place to share news and views. I’d encourage you to try out the chat function on the app if you have it, and download it if you don’t.

The last year saw a significant increase in both our output of articles and the number of views. There’s also been an acceleration in the growth of new subscribers in the last six months, although overwhelmingly they are non-paying, rather than paying subscribers. There’s a few reasons for this growth, including:

• The new National-ACT-NZ First’s election and formation in November and its surprisingly disruptive pumping out of policy reversals and positions meant we felt simply had to cover them, even when they were coming so thick and fast it was hard to both keep up and analyse them properly;

• An increase in the number and frequency of our emails and podcasts, driven by all this extra news and our addition of work from The Kākā’s climate correspondent

  Cathrine Dyer
  ;

• The growth in the scale, features and useability of Substack’s networking tools on its app and website have made it easier for subscribers to comment and connect with each other; and,

• We’ve promoted our articles and podcasts more widely on more social media, including Substack Notes, LinkedIn and BlueSky, in part because Twitter started down-grading Substack links in its algorithm when Substack launched notes.

It has been a very reactive and sometimes exhausting process for us as publishers, let alone for citizens and subscribers. Simply reacting can also be dispiriting, especially when in our view so many of the changes appear backward steps in addressing our triple crises of housing unaffordability, climate change inaction and worsening poverty.

How we work and what we do daily

To understand how and why The Kākā’s articles may evolve over the next year or two, it’s worth describing in detail what we do every weekday, and often on weekends and public holidays to create these emails, articles, videos and podcasts. Subscribers may be a bit shocked at the scale and intensity of what we do, and how it has escalated over the last year. Don’t worry too much. We love our work mostly and it’s mostly sustainable, with a few tweaks.

Over the last year, Lynn and I have been getting up to start work before 3:30 am Monday through Sunday. We have been very early risers for over a decade as publishers of subscription news emails. It’s just a fact of life that daily news summaries and commentary are most useful as readers start their days, which means we have to do our work before others start reading. News is a constantly evolving and snarling beast that has fewer and fewer ebbs, and many more flows. The best point of the day to collate and publish is at the lowest ebb of the news flow — between 7pm and 7am.

But over the last year we have had to get up even earlier and do even more work, in part because there seems to be ever more news, but also because we have expanded our operation and output. We now also produce the daily

5 in 5 with ANZ

podcast and email covering global economics and financial markets. We work with another journalist, an audio editor and ANZ Institutional team of more than 20 economists around the world to create a tightly-edited and widely-reported 10 minutes a day of global economic and financial news.

Lynn and I no spring chickens (although the winter swims are rejuvenating, and Lynn seems to have a Dorian Gray-style portrait stashed somewhere) so are conscious of the need to save as much as we can, while we can. Unfortunately from a financial point of view,³ we invested 15 years of sweat in two online news start-ups that created no equity and not nearly enough savings. We’re very proud of Interest.co.nz and Newsroom.co.nz, which are still thriving news organisations that make a real impact.

We have a few years left to do as much good work as we can and save as much as we can. Doing the global markets podcast is our way of achieving that and supplementing the income we’re very greatful to receive from subscribers to The Kākā. It also helps replace income lost from speaking engagements, partly due to Covid, and partly because we’ve made an active decision to travel less. Combined with Lynn’s digital exports, it means we actually earn more in US dollars, euros, Australian dollars and pounds, than local dollars. We realise we are now proud services exporters employing around five FTEs, including ourselves.

Every morning, we get up and I read the following sources in the following order, most of which we also pay to subscribe to:

• The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Reuters, The New York Times and The Washington Post;

• RNZ, 1News, Newshub⁴,Interest.co.nz, Newsroom and The Spinoff;

• The New Zealand Herald, The Post, The Press, The Waikato Times and The Otago Daily Times; and,

• Many blogs and Substacks.

We then curate, edit, publish and promote the emails and podcasts for The Kākā and 5 in 5 through the morning and typically finish around 8.30 am or 9am.

We then take a few hours off to get some fresh air and exercise before an early afternoon nap. We then start work again for a couple of hours through until late afternoon when we walk Tim the dog. Often that work involves doing interviews for 5 in 5 and The Kaka and starting the compilation of the next morning’s email. I usually watch the PM’s weekly news conference at 4pm on a Monday, Parliamentary Question Time from 2pm to 3pm Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday (when Parliament is sitting) and do the Hoon at 5pm on a Thursday. In the last year we’ve also been producing our weekly climate news wrap article and video with Cathrine Dyer. I also produce a weekly podcast with The Spinoff called When The Facts Change.

By the end of the week, I’m often a bit buggered, but when I do feel up to it I produce a Saturday morning news summary email and podcast. And then it all starts again on Sunday evenings. All up, our regular output is 10 daily 5-10 minute podcasts, 10 daily emails of 1,000 to 2,000 words each, and two hour-long weekly podcasts. Lynn edits and illustrates all of this output.

How we plan to evolve this work

Some of our subscribers may look at that routine and output detailed above and wonder how two people can sustainably produce that volume of work each week sustainably, let alone for almost four years and counting. We do wonder ourselves sometimes, but we love what we do and we do have a particular set of skills and use a bunch of technologies to increase our productivity. We use Substack, a cloud-based video and audio recording and editing software called Riverside (like zoom for podcasters) and all the usual social media platforms to gather, create, edit, publish and promote this work. We also work with and pay for three other audio producers and three other journalists. We have a home studio (a padded space inside a closet) and use a big, honking fibre connection to the Internet.

This is quite the machine and Lynn and I have focused our lives and living situations around it. Where previously I managed teams of journalists and did quite a lot of public speaking and MC-ing, I’m now focused solely on producing podcasts and emails. We also now work from home completely and have stopped travelling regularly back-and-forth between Auckland and Wellington over the last year to attend news events and do speaking engagements. Removing the travel and commuting created more space for work. Lynn and I are also empty nesters and in that privileged zone between raising a family and retirement.

But it’s worth regularly reviewing what we do and how effective and sustainable it is. The last year has been particularly busy and the numbers above for subscriptions and traffic suggest some success. However, we don’t always achieve what we or our subscribers might want and should expect within our various constraints. We appear also to be near our limits to growth.⁵

More deliberative and less reactive

Over the last year or so I’ve become particularly aware and wary of the scale of the news curation task, especially with the current Government’s ‘flood the zone’ approach to changing policies. My base instincts are to try to cover it all and make sense of it all, as well as find and test alternatives. In last year’s State of The Kākā Nation we previewed our efforts ahead of the election, which included doing some articles on potential policies that weren’t necessarily being debated in the election campaign.

In the 2022 version of The State of the Kākā Nation we specified an aim of getting to 2,500 subscribers by the end of 2023, which we almost achieved, reaching 2,339 by December 31. We hit the 2,500 milestone in late May, but there has been a noticeable slowdown in growth in paying subscribers in the first half of this year. We also have the naturally growing headwind of having to replace subscribers who, for many good reasons, leave over time. Our overall retention rate for paid subscribers after one year is currently 79%, which is down from the 93% we had for our very first ‘cohort’ of subscribers taken on in September 2021, but above the 63% for the cohort taken on around September 2022. As we get a larger number of subscribers and as time goes on, the addition of new subscribers needs to grow ever-faster just to keep up and exceed the attrition of ‘old’ subscribers, in pure nominal terms.

You can see the effects of a naturally falling retention rate over time in the number of net new subscribers over time. We now need to add 100 new subscribers each month for the 100 we lose.

It’s becoming clearer that we’ve grown about as much as we can without a significant increase in output and an increase in costs, in either actual costs or opportunity costs. We don’t plan on taking the risk of scaling up more. Largely, this is a problem of scalability and not ususual for specialist subscriber news services. Without the ability to clone ourselves⁶, it’s very unlikely we can continue the sort of growth in paid subscribers we saw in years two and three.

We could, in theory, just work harder and put out more articles, more often, but I don’t think that’s sustainable or desirable. The most useful, most read and most fun pieces I do are the more reflective and constructive pieces, that go deeper in analysing the problems and suggesting solutions. But they take time and have in the past been what I do after the daily news curation and basic news covering.

I am often my own worst enemy when it comes to getting the balance right on the spectrums between:

• Deliberation vs reaction;

• Creation and examination of solutions vs criticism of the current state;

• More ‘deep-dive’ evergreen pieces vs more ephemeral pieces;

• New and interesting and important vs already known and important

• More exploration and original content vs more curation to links elsewhere.

I am naturally curious and love exploring for new things that I can tell people about. But that also creates the danger of finding out lots of little new and interesting things, rather than concentrating on fewer not-so-new but more important things. New news is not necessarily both interesting and important. Sometimes the old news can be both more interesting and more important, if it is understood more deeply.

So what now? What changes?

So our instincts from here are to spend less time trying to keep up with every burp and fart of policy news from the Government, and more time exploring the underlying problems and examining potential solutions. I think it’s likely to be more satisfying for us in the long run than reporting a litany of destruction day after day.

For now, that means I’d like to try doing shorter and fewer ‘curation’ pieces linking to others’ reporting and views, and doing more deeper-dive ‘solutions’ pieces, especially building a coherent and internally consistent set of policy ideas ahead Election 2026. I’m keen to keep iterating this suite of ideas into The Kākā Project for 2026, which we can keep iterating, tweaking, testing and refining as we go.

This means I’d like to be:

• More deliberative and less reactive in the coverage here;

• More creative and solutions-focused than simply reporting the problems and criticising policy positions;

• More exploratory with more interviews and deep-dives, rather than more curation and shorter links to others; and,

• More evergreeen and less ephemeral.

That’s likely to mean the daily email will be less comprehensive, shorter and do less curation, but that there is likely to be more ‘deep-dives’ and interviews. It means the articles and podcasts are likely to be less reactive and about Government policy, and more about the underlying problems and potential solutions, even if they’re not within the current political debate.

But enough of what I think. What would paying subscribers like to see more and less of?

I’d also like to take the next week off fully before resuming publishing on July 8. I am nervous just writing this. Should I be?

And finally, I hope the next year brings as much luck and progress as we can all make together within our limits.

Mā te wa.

Bernard

1. There’s plenty of protein too.

2. And just quietly, I enjoy getting up very early in the morning to see what’s news and boil it down into a useful summary with a few twists.

3. But very rewarding from journalistic and personal points of view.

4. For one more week, sadly.

5. A bit like the global economy.

6. The last thing anyone needs is many more Bernard Hickeys.