A new report emphasising New Zealand media group Stuff’s plans to split its digital and print businesses – detailed in GXpress in October – has gained a global audience.

Duncan Greive presents a more emphatic view of the plans, which include separate legal entities, in analysis in his The Spinoff, which has been linked in WAN-Ifra’s ‘executive news’.

Greive says “leaked emails and documents” detail the changes, which open up a range of options for owner Sinead Boucher.

Stuff had already detailed the changes which effectively separate the digital and newspaper-based businesses, although the latter (Masthead Publishing) will also have a digital operation.

Greive says staff will be forced into one or other entity.

Apart from its eponymous news website, Stuff owns newspaper-based mastheads including the The Post – formerly the Dominion Post – in Wellington, The Press in Christchurch, the Waikato Times, and a number of other newspapers around the country.

Both businesses will be allowed to “follow their own content and revenue strategies and have their own future focus” in what chief financial officer Dale Bridle calls a “conscious uncoupling” in an email to staff.

Beyond the speculation, what seems a logical move allows Boucher some flexibility for her own and the businesses’ future. Everyone knows digital businesses are ‘hot’, print is not, and investor interest reflects this.

Beyond the spectre of US-style asset-stripping touched upon by Greive, restructuring the entities would provide improved opportunities for philanthropic support and is similar to models employed by the UK, US and Australian Guardian and Singapore’s Straits Times.

Not everyone will be happy – Stuff has already lost its chief executive Laura Maxwell (to News) and head of commercial Matt Headland – but not everyone has to address the realities of balance sheet and P&L account.

Greive says Stuff didn’t answer a question about whether the move “was done with a view to sell one or both of the businesses”. But then, Sinead Boucher only came to own Stuff (famously for NZ$1) because no one else wanted the liability, and after then owner Fairfax Media’s attempts to sell it to a competitor had been blocked.

Peter Coleman

Pictured: Newspaper publishing requires a commitment to heavy machinery. Fairfax updated plant – at Christchurch with a new Goss Uniliner 80, and at Petone with a manroland pressline from The Age in Melbourne – before handing it over; this Uniliner tower was part of a 2008 stop-gap