Ruth Zanker

PRODUCERS SPEAK: CREATING CIVIC

SPACES FOR NEW ZEALAND CHILDREN

Abstract
This article examines children’s television production discourses. It first contextualises
how regulations in New Zealand shape the children’s broadcasting environment, then
it asks producers of children’s programs to describe how they go about creating
public service programs for children within a complex media political economy.
Several questions are addressed, with a key one examining how producers imagine
their audiences and construct appropriate public spaces for them within the current
constraints of funding and advertising regulation. The field research is based on
extended face-to-face interviews conducted in 2009 with producers, a free-to-air
television programmer and the television managers for the two funding agencies,
New Zealand On Air (NZOA) and Te Māngai Pāho (Māori language media funding).

Producers speak: Producing civic spaces for New Zealand children

This article examines children’s television production discourses. To provide a context, it
begins by summarising how funding and advertising regulations in New Zealand shape the
broadcasting and digital spaces available to children and young people. Then it asks top
producers of children’s programs to describe how they go about creating public service
programs for children within a complex media political economy. It addresses a range
of questions, a key one being: How do producers imagine their audiences and construct
appropriate public spaces for them within the current constraints of funding and advertising
regulation? The field research is based on extended face-to-face interviews conducted in
2009 with four experienced children’s producers, one programmer of a free-to-air channel,
and the television managers for the two funding agencies New Zealand On Air (NZOA)
and Te Māngai Pāho (Māori language media funding).
Each producer involved in the study is committed to making programs that put
New Zealand on air for local children. Their live or magazine compilation shows are
affectionately called ‘cheap and cheerful television’ by many in the industry. Unlike
globally successful children’s production brands like the BBC and Nickelodeon – or
indeed individual producer success stories like Jonathan Schiff in Australia and Richard
Taylor from Weta in New Zealand, these producers are not aspiring to design products for
global audio-visual markets. In contrast, their prime objective is to provide New Zealand
children with their own cultural experiences and sense of place.1
This article argues that each of the chosen producers creates programs that are much
more than just local, ‘cheap and cheerful’ presenter-driven television. As producers, they
are committed to tailoring desirable national civic spaces for New Zealand children in
a period when children are presented with a smorgasbord of global pay TV children’s
television channels, as well as the plethora of other branded amusements like computer
games, websites and social networking sites.

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 Convergence technologies are amplifying, not replacing, national free-to-air television.
As the web and social networking spaces become everyday creative tools for program
makers, more children’s voices are being heard on national free-to-air television, which
in turn creates a more nuanced and diverse cultural representation and sense of national
identity for rising cohorts of citizens.

The case for a children’s global media public sphere

It has been argued that pay services like Nickelodeon and Disney, phenomena like Harry
Potter fan websites and social networking sites like Bebo and Facebook have invigorated
a sense of a ‘transnational public sphere’ for children (de Block and Buckingham, 2007).
Such options are clearly transforming children’s choices and empowering youth audiences
with new opportunities for community and free expression.
Geraldine Laybourne articulated her quality global branding strategy for Nickelodeon
from its earliest days. The channel and now website are designed to work ‘on the side
of children’. ‘Nick’ is constructed to appeal to a universal, actively consuming ‘kid’
with attitude (Laybourne, 1995). Much global content is of a high quality and based on
extensive formative research with children in the country of origin. But this formative
research behind children’s media products reflects a North–South divide. For example,
the Nickelodeon ‘generic child’, it can be argued, reflects the tastes and desires of
children tested in Orlando, Florida, or at best in large regional markets (Lustyik, 2005).2
Transnational children’s and youth’s television networks owned by the largest media
corporations, such as Viacom’s Music Television (MTV) and Nickelodeon, have been
particularly well positioned to expand on a global scale, since ‘the accumulation of
enormous capital, marketing experience and the control of the global market have given
them a tremendous competitive edge’ (Wu and Chan, 2008: 198). MTV, Viacom’s most
prolific global television network, has been promoted as the world’s largest television
network and ‘most valuable multimedia brands for youth’ for more than a decade, and
MTV’s sister channel, Nickelodeon – which belongs to the MTV International group
– has been described as ‘the world’s only multi-media entertainment brand dedicated
exclusively to kids’ (Viacom, 2008). According to the interactive global map available
on Viacom’s corporate webpage, titled ‘Global Reach’, Nickelodeon has been able to
cover the globe almost completely, with only a few exceptions such as Greenland. What
the map is unfortunately not designed to show is the level of ‘localisation’ required in
various geocultural regions of the world. The majority of Nickelodeon channels operating
around the world have a strong US ‘flavour’. As Sandlers (2004) points out: ‘despite
Nickelodeon’s success in embracing multiculturalism and diversity on an international
scale, 75 percent of the programming on the international channels [comprises] Nick US
originals’ (2004: 65).
According to a recent report published by Screen Digest, a global media market analysis
firm, Nickelodeon, Disney and the Cartoon Network are the ‘masters of the children’s
television universe’. They have been able to preserve their dominant position and generate
‘impressive profit margins’, even though the competition has increased during the last
few years (Westcott, 2008).

Ambiguity over children’s media rights

It is worth briefly describing how the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the
Child addresses children’s media rights. The convention supports the media rights of
children in the following Articles:
Article 12: the rights to express their views freely in all matters affecting the child
Article 13: the rights to freedom of expression

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 Article 17: the rights over access to information and material from a diversity of
national and international sources, especially those aimed at the promotion of his
or her social, spiritual and moral well-being and physical and mental health. This
includes the linguistic needs of indigenous children and access to their local cultures,
information and right to have a voice (The Convention on the Rights of the Child).
As Buckingham et al. (1999) note, this is an ambiguous document. The tendency
of the discourse of children’s rights has been to admit children to the public sphere.
It treats them, in certain respects, as citizens – as in ‘children’s views should be given
due consideration in processes that affect their interests’. Rights also extend the sphere
of welfare rights into that of the media. At the same time, ‘the Convention affirms the
“freedom” of children to seek, receive and impart information of all kinds … orally, in
writing, or in print, in the form of art, or through any media of the child’s choice’ (1999:
169). Thus those targeting child consumers can draw on freedom of speech principles to
argue that children are active audiences whose agency should be respected in terms of their
market preferences within popular consumer culture. These tensions between freedom of
access to global consumer culture and rights to local culture and experiences are central
to debates over children’s media provision in New Zealand.

Public service broadcasting in New Zealand

New Zealand public service broadcasting and a sense of national identity are very closely
interconnected. The broadcasting environment was shaped by neo-liberal politicians in the
late 1980s, and the principle of countering ‘market failure’ remains central to New Zealand
broadcasting policy. It is minimalist regulatory policy framework. There is no pure non-
commercial public broadcaster. TVNZ, the state broadcaster, is highly commercial, with
90 per cent of its funding coming from advertising. Public service outcomes focus on
audiences for which the commercial system does not provide, and this includes the remit
to cater for children under section 36(c) of the Broadcasting Act 1989. In the place of a
public service channel, the Broadcasting Act put in place the Broadcasting Commission,
a funding mechanism for the production of local content. This was branded as ‘New
Zealand On Air’ (NZOA) early in its existence. NZOA has a strong public profile, partly
as the result of funding much-loved children’s productions that have fostered New Zealand
culture and identity.
The 2000 guidelines for children’s production challenge producers to address children
as both consumers and citizens, echoing Nick but local in focus. Over NZ$11 million
is spent on children’s programming each year out of a television budget of more than
$70 million. Since 1993, Māori language content has been funded by a parallel funding
agency, Te Māngai Pāho, which sits under the Māori Language Commission, Te Puni Kōkeri.

Advantages and disadvantages of the NZOA funding mechanism

Most importantly, NZOA provides contestable funding for children’s programming. Without
this funding, there would be no New Zealand public service children’s television production.
State-owned TVNZ’s two channels win the majority of viewers and NZOA funding, but
TV3 – owned by Ironbridge Capital, an Australian private equity investor – has also been
successful in obtaining money. Producers pitch to broadcasters, who agree to schedule
the idea before pitching in turn to NZOA. Commercial broadcasters are therefore very
powerful gatekeepers over what is funded.
A decision was made in 2000 to fund more elements of higher production value, like
drama and animation, but it is fair to say that the dominant genre is still ‘cheap and
cheerful’ local presenter-led television.

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The programming environment
Television still remains the top entertainment choice for children (NZOA, 2008; Lealand
and Zanker, 2008), but commercial interests argue that children do not want targeted age-
specific local public service programs. People meter measurements indeed demonstrate
that children are drawn like flies to the honey pot of popular prime-time television – for
example, The Simpsons – but it is important to recognise that programs targeting five- to
twelve-year-olds screen in ‘off-peak’ timeslots that rate low for all genres (NZOA, 2008).
Children’s programs are, for the most part, still required to work for programmers within
a commercial broadcasting environment.
Recent food advertising constraints limit what can be advertised during children’s
programming. Traditionally, treats (high sugar cereals, biscuits, lollies and ice-creams)
were key advertising categories within children’s programming. The loss of this advertising
revenue makes the children’s genre even more of an opportunity cost for broadcasters.
This political sensitivity over food messages to children also narrows down the range of
sponsors that traditionally have contributed to higher cost content within children’s shows.
Milo, for example, has traditionally sponsored children’s sporting events, but its products
are now regarded as high-sugar foods.

Producers as cultural agents

Children’s producers, as cultural agents, are entangled in a web of local and global politics.
As Dornfeld (1998) puts it:
We need to rethink producers as particular types of agents, producing media texts
within contexts constrained by culture, ideology, and economy, but operating within
particular social locations and frameworks. (1998: 13)
New Zealand children’s production should be seen as critically balanced between state
public intervention and transnational capitalism.
Dornfeld (1998) argues that producers are far from disinterested cultural agents within
power struggles in and over media discourse. Producers are necessarily grounded in ‘fields
of financial and cultural capital and this constrains the kinds of agency available to the
producers and the practical strategies they employ’ (1998: 32). Furthermore, this article
argues that children’s producers bring their own cultural capital to the task of making
judgements about what is important for children.
Audience and cultural studies demonstrate that television remains the first window for
news about popular culture for children (Lealand and Zanker, 2007; Drotner and Livingstone,
2008). It provides aspirant children with information about the ever-differentiating symbols
of cultural capital within consumer culture. Marketers value local television as the prime
marketing placement for campaigns promoting films, games, toys, music and fashion
(Kidscreen, 2010). Children’s production teams acknowledge that they trawl marketing
‘news’. They may not support a particular form of cultural capital, but they have an
ongoing interest in sources of cultural capital: music, computer games and entertainment
programs (Zanker, 2002). They are positioned as trusted cultural intermediaries.
The next section draws on the interviews to explore how producers work on the side
of children as citizens and consumers, as required by NZOA.

Producers talk children’s television

Producers of presenter-led television argue that this form of children’s television continues
to have salience and value, despite its lowly status as a genre within the professional
production pecking order. All informants suggest ways in which presenter-led children’s

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 television is extremely effective in connecting with its audiences. It is under-estimated by
those who argue for money to go only to so-called ‘quality’ genres like drama, animation
and documentary. Most importantly, presenter-led children’s TV is valued by producers
for its ‘live/nowness’, which is lacking in all other children’s genres. As one producer
puts it, ‘it’s alive … unlike the rest of your viewing on Disney and Nickelodeon, which
is flat’. All producers prided themselves on talent scouting. Children’s presenters become
national stars, and thus important cultural role models. One commissioner joked to the
author that presenter-led kids’ television worked on the principle of ‘rainbow presenters’
(Zanker, 2001). Their proven talent is often raided by mainstream producers, in turn
enriching the diversity of risk-averse mainstream television. Feedback from children and
production team members makes it clear that presenters validate children in their cultural
Pacifica diversity. In turn, these presenters network and draw in others from their own
cultural communities. Local programs provide a showcase for a diversity of role models
drawn from local soaps, music and sport. These programs gain much of their power from
being deeply intertextual media projects, as they weave both imported and local material
into their programming strands.
All producers aim to give opportunities for involvement in their shows to as many
New Zealand children as budgets allow. Presenters are used to drawing the nation’s
children together by visiting different regions of New Zealand. The shows are designed
to showcase rural and urban, North Island and South Island locations. If money does not
permit visits, technology connects with children across the nation. Presenters also stay
in intimate contact with their audiences via qualitative audience research, copious fan
correspondence and website traffic. As one producer put it:
Anyone who calls for more stand-alone shows (like animation and drama) …
doesn’t understand the audience. You should come to the office and see what kids
send in each day. Kids have a place to be and it’s their club.
All producers interviewed consciously created clubs for their viewers. Within these
clubs, the voices of young people are heard on a range of matters of pleasure and concern
to them. These clubs are diverse in their content and reflect their producers’ views of
what matters to New Zealand children. All these national branded clubs now transcend
the television medium.

The amplifying effect of digital technology on national public spaces

for children
Budgets are limited for acquiring flashy digital post-production tools, but children’s
producers employ young people who are willing to experiment with new media tools.
Sticky TV has saved on costs by moving from an expensive traditional three-camera
studio and using one roving camera with an old villa as a set. Presenters ‘live’ in the
house and do a range of everyday things: cooking, cleaning teeth, sleeping, gardening,
washing up in the ‘club’ home. It is serendipitous that this gives the show a ‘reality
television’ aesthetic that is amplified into the club website. This is run very cheaply by
one employee as a show add-on. It is not covered by NZOA funding.
The oldest children’s show, What Now?, plays on the non-commercial Sunday morning
slot on TV2. It calls itself ‘world famous in New Zealand’ for the innovative ‘Spy rider’
digital video feed, which enables a live and interactive program between home-based
presenters and kids living in provincial towns. Its website is well visited. Studio 2, an
after-school show on TV2, has a very sophisticated website, funded by NZOA, which
encourages traffic and interactivity during the program, as well as between shows.
All programs use their web spaces to keep their program brands alive between shows.
Competitions and website content enable viewers to download content (recipes) and upload

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content (photos). These producers view their program brands as not just television programs
funded by NZOA but as cross-platform spaces for New Zealand children.

What children want: The producers’ view

Producers conduct feedback research with their audiences, and believe they are ‘in touch’ on
a daily basis through audience feedback from calls, letters and emails. They acknowledge
that some audiences are more difficult than others. All agree with the producer who
says: ‘We have the five- to nine-year-old pretty well battened down.’ They find that they
can address this age group as both consumers and citizens, just as NZOA requires and
Nickelodeon pioneered in the United States.
The ambiguity around defining children’s media rights has already been discussed.
We now explore how producers in New Zealand interpret the NZOA brief of being on
the side of children as both citizens and consumers.
All producers admit to struggling with the ten- to thirteen-year-old age group of
‘tweens’. As one put it: ‘They are a whole new challenge because they don’t tell you
what they do want, but they do tell you what they don’t like and turn off.’ All rely, to
some extent, on their young presenters being ‘cool’ enough to pick up on popular culture
trends, language and gossip. Some producers are keener than others to adopt the cultural
capital of popular culture, with its lure of edgier gendered material.

Education versus entertainment

Some producers described their programs in educational and culturally specific ways. Others
said they brought a ‘producerly’ expediency to the methods they employed to keep children
hooked in via their desire for news about consumer fads and entertainment. Whatever
their style, all producers kept a weather eye on the desires of their commissioners. One
producer expressed this anxiety well when she described one element as ‘very educational’
and immediately added the caveat ‘if you are going to use the word … I am always
taking it out of stuff [proposals] for [commercial] broadcasters.’
Mary Phillips, the producer of Sticky TV, and trained as an early childhood educator,
follows the government Statement of Focus for Schools, in particular its focus on healthy
eating and resilience. She talks to teachers and children. She uses television to ‘scaffold
school learning in a relaxed after-school club environment’. Her message to kids is that ‘it
doesn’t matter that you come from the Styx with no parental support or money, YOU can
rise above it’. The program’s emphasis is on rhythms of family life. Presenters demonstrate
cheap recipes in the Villa kitchen. ‘We love it when children send photos of their whole
Samoan family in THEIR kitchen eating fish curry from the $20.00 challenge.’ Her desire
for homely realism extended to one sick presenter being nursed in the villa’s bedroom
where he was visited solicitously by the rest of the team. She argues that entertainment
and education are the same thing, and that there is a hunger for cultural role models,
back-to-basics approaches and homely cosiness, rather than ‘glittering marketing stuff’:
Like the good old days, clubs and making things. Why wouldn’t kids want that
now? They tell us they do!
What Now?’s executive producer, Janine Morrell, also draws on the Statement of Focus
for Schools. But she began her career as a producer, and understands what her commercial
broadcaster needs from her brand. It must signal a semiotic cool through signifiers
incorporated from popular culture (Kinder, 1991). This is despite the show appearing on
non-commercial Sunday morning TV, which is classified as non-commercial programming.
Nicole Hoey, the producer of the Māori language Pukana, is required by Te Māngai
Pāho to use her program to contribute to revitalising the Māori language. Pukana aims

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 to scaffold Māori language for Kura Kaupapa (Māori language immersion primary
schools) students beyond primary school. She quotes research suggesting that language
is retained in adult life only if you have been spoken to in that language past the age of
twelve years. Pukana is widely recorded by schools because it offers mid-level colloquial
language, rather than the more formal Māori used in the news. Pukana is also broadcast,
with subtitles funded by NZ On Air, on mainstream TV3. This brings Pukana into the
broad reach of New Zealand homes (Quinn, 2009), thus providing a window into Māori
culture as well as an opportunity for those less confident in Māori. Consumer culture is
not foremost in her creative strategy of reaching out to young Māori, but humorous skits
reflect the production team’s canny understanding of current fashions and advertisements.

The pre-teen drift

Producers struggle with what appears to be a relentless shift by pre-teens towards
global media flows. As Janine Morrell, the producer of the pre-teen Erin Simpson Show,
eloquently puts it:
I have done a whole prop on the fact that they (older demographic) don’t want to
be Kiwis and New Zealanders and so we have to subtly sow the seeds of pride
in being who they are … about being a New Zealander and how great that is …
but don’t tell them!!!
It is a strategic decision to make a show that is far more focused on fashion, consumerist
news and promotions than other local shows.
Anahera Higgins, who produces the older skewed teen/young adult show IAMTV,
provides another perspective on this. She describes this draw to global flows as a passage,
not a settled state of cultural identification. Yes, popular global culture attracts young
viewers but it does not lose them forever. She sees that being attracted to popular global
culture is a rite of passage through which young people pass. As she puts it: ‘Preteens
say, “We want the latest, the fastest, the coolest … people telling us what is hot”; older
teens say, “We are really about our identity now. We want it a little bit slower. We want
to take our time over slightly cooler stuff that we create.”’ She notes that Kiwi youth
refuse to ‘Geo fence’ their viewing (that is, choose New Zealand content). They explore
their local identity within a wider context. They become ‘increasingly proud of displaying
their particular origins … through their local news, music and performance’. Paradoxically,
this is what producers of younger children’s content are also aiming to do in terms of
their specific child audiences’ local cultural pleasures and engagements with both global
and local cultural experiences.

The art of making more with less

Budgets are tight. As one seasoned producer put it: ‘If you let it, (stingy budgets), get
to you it can turn you septic.’
Pukana’s producer, Nicole Hoey, lamented that she was unable to travel to more
regions because: ‘Our van is so run into the ground we can’t use it, we have to hire
vans … expensive.’ She shoots field items in her home to stretch budgets. Mary Phillips
of Sticky TV uses ‘the same old sofa in year seven as in year three’. A studio hand had
offered to fix the set’s fridge the previous weekend.
Producers who own their program’s intellectual property are in a stronger position than
those who are hired hands. In one telling case, a respected children’s producer created
a successful show with the Rugby Union. The next season, the broadcaster produced
the series with the Rugby Union and cut the producer who created the show out of
the production process. This episode has been viewed by some children’s producers as

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an attack on their professionalism and as a demonstration of a lack of regard for their
specialist audience knowledge.
For those who own their creative property, the annual NZOA funding round is still a
nerve-wracking event. All bar one producer interviewed is funded annually. Only Janine
Morrell, producing the flagship show What Now?, has funding for more (three years, in
her case). This gives her considerable advantages when it comes to growing capacity.
Mary Phillips, producer of Sticky TV, describes the energy it takes to pitch every year
to the broadcaster and of the heartbreak of not being able to pay her specialised team
over summer, thus losing key workers for next season. She accepts that her broadcaster
cannot afford an increased licence fee for what is an off-peak program; however, she
yearns for the stability of funding that would enable the development of production depth
and consistency.
Producers have a range of commercial relationships with broadcasters. One may
choose to manage prize inventory, sponsorships and contra, while another may give more
freedom to the producer to broker sponsorships and contra. The funder NZOA knows that
producers are forced to stretch their budgets in such ways. The soft end may consist of
low-level contra – for example, free ingredients for use in a cooking show or seeds for
a garden plot. At the business end, significant deals are brokered.
The best sponsorships provide a close fit to program content objectives. So, for example,
What Now? has a sponsorship deal with NZ Post around the theme of ‘keeping in touch’.
It also has a long-term deal with Weetbix, which sponsors the ‘Weetbix triathlon’ and its
theme of ‘keeping fit’. But sponsorships can also be tricky. They can cost the producer
time and money to tailor content to the requirements of the sponsor. They can also become
problematic for a range of political reasons. For example, one producer sought a lucrative
sponsorship with McDonald’s. This was designed to award certificates marked discreetly
with the fast food franchise’s logo. There was no presenter promotion of the brand on the
show at all. This sponsorship was turned down by the broadcaster, which was nervous
about any association with fast food.
The ditching of the Labour government’s social marketing campaigns for healthy eating
and sport after the National Party won the last election has had flow-on effects too in terms
of valued income that had been used to develop new higher production value program
threads. One example of a social marketing campaign delivered via children’s television
was a ‘keep your parents fit’ competition, which saw children winning certificates and
uploading pictures of parents being ‘made fit’ by running with them around the block,
doing push-ups and playing cricket.
The change to a more business-friendly National government may also see a directive
to NZOA to fund local children’s content on pay channel Nickelodeon, a move so far
resisted by the funder. This may be desirable in terms of Nickelodeon reflecting more
New Zealand culture, but it will mean spreading the limited production pie for children’s
programming outside current provision of funding for solely free-to-air television.

Conclusion: The fragility of children’s production as professional

practice
Who shapes national media public spaces for children in New Zealand? This article
has discussed how committed children’s producers win commissions, and how creative
teams work as advocates for children. They provide spaces for children’s voices to be
heard. But children’s production teams can really only grab tactical opportunities ‘on the
wing’ to create these public spaces for children. There are many other more powerful
stakeholders who help define what is available to children. There are the commercial
channel strategists trying to make ends meet in a tiny broadcasting market as pay and

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 web channels proliferate. Their program commissioners and programmers make seasonal
choices over what is available for children, even when they often have little interest in,
or understanding of, children as audiences – beyond what the rate card tells them. And
finally, there are the political winners of discursive battles between divergent lobbyists
on issues of funding and advertising codes over what children should have access to
through broadcasting.
Pragmatic children’s producers provide us with snapshots of how they go about the
everyday business of creating public spaces for children as citizens and consumers in
a complex mixed commercial media environment. These producers are key industry
informants who guide us to the heart of who has power to define civic media resources
at the disposal of New Zealand children.

Notes
1
There have been international success stories. Let’s Get Inventing, funded by NZOA and TVNZ,
sold its format to the BBC, where it became the second most popular kids’ show (tvnz.co.nz/
view/page/687734). Staines Down Drains (Flux animation and Hothouse productions with NZOA
and Film Finance Corporation Australia), an adventure animation set down a drain, and Sparkle
and Friends (Mukpuddy animation) have been successful in other territories. Co-produced dramas
have also sold internationally.
2
Until recently, New Zealand was part of the Southeast Asian feed of Nickelodeon, whereas the
larger and more regulated market of Australia managed to negotiate its own feed.

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Interviews
Face-to-face interviews (conducted in 2009)
Anahera Higgins, executive producer of IAMTV, shown on TV2 Saturday 10.00 a.m. and Bebo,
http://tvnz.co.nz/i-am-tv.
Nicole Hoey, executive producer of Pukana, Saturday 4.00 p.m. on the Māori Television Service,
Sunday 9.00 a.m. TV3 with subtitles, Māori language show funded by Te Māngai Pāho. English
subtitles funded by New Zealand On Air, www.pukana.co.nz/Kainga.aspx.
Annette McFadgen, producer of Studio 2, after school weekdays, 3.30–4.00 p.m., http://tvnz.co.nz/
content/2757660.
Janine Morrell, executive producer of What Now? Shown on Sunday, 8.00–10.00 a.m. This is the
longest running children’s show in New Zealand. It began in the early 1980s, www.whatnow.
tv. Also executive producer of The Erin Simpson Show on TV2 at 4.30–5.00 p.m. on weekdays,
www.erinsimpsonshow.tv.
Mary Phillips, executive producer of Sticky TV, which appears after school on weekdays,
3.00–3.05 p.m., 4.00–4.30  p.m., www.stickytv.co.nz. It has run for seven years.
Ben Quinn, programmer for off-peak programs at TV3.
Glen Usmar, the television manager at New Zealand On Air.

Phone interviews
Larry Parr, television manager of Te Māngai Pāho
A spokesperson for Sport and Recreation New Zealand’s Healthy Eating, Healthy Action social
marketing program.

Ruth Zanker is a program leader at the New Zealand Broadcasting School, Christchurch Polytechnic
Institute of Technology. She researches and publishes widely on issues concerning New Zealand media
policy and funding. Her current research focuses on young people’s media use, in particular the
opportunities and challenges presented by digital media.

No. 139 — May 2011

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