Getting Brainy with Duncan Greive, CEO & Publisher, The Spinoff
Culture, politics and the best chip in all New Zealand. The Spinoff is one of the quirkiest sites in the country, and founder Duncan Greive couldn’t be prouder. Yury Glikin discovers how Duncan grew the site into the youth media powerhouse it is today.
What do you do and what was the inspiration for the publication?
In terms of content creation, I try to stay in my lane, writing and talking about the media as an industry, running my podcast The Fold, along with our fun reality TV recap show, The Real Pod. The largest chunk of my time is meetings.
These can be anything from liaison, to talking with the government about media policy. In terms of inspiration, I am someone who worked in and was shaped by magazines. I felt like there was a hole in the market for a modern, playful online magazine site. Somehow it’s worked out for us.
The Spinoff is unique in that it encompasses a news outlet, creative agency, and video production company. Can you expand on why you pursued this model?
The Spinoff is a current affairs platform operating across text, audio, video, and social. Daylight is a creative and digital agency which was founded last year, and Hex Work Productions makes factual series for The Spinoff and other platforms.
It’s not necessarily unique – TVNZ could say the same – but for a smallish operator it is somewhat different. The model works because it flowed out of finding extraordinary talent and building something which felt nimble, playful, and open. We have great creative and commercial leaders across the business, and they now carry a huge amount of the vision and strategy.
What kinds of stories does The Spinoff publish that draws the most eyes?
Our biggest stories tend to have a particular set of qualities. They traverse elements of some of our core interest areas, like politics, media, business, te ao Māori (the Māori worldview), and culture. It’s a bit hard to explain, but we know a Spinoff story when we see it, and I think our audience does too.
What are some issues that The Spinoff will be tackling over coming months?
We were excited about Matariki as a public holiday, a symbolic but also tangible acknowledgment of tangata whenua and mātauranga Māori. We covered that closely.
We love doing themed weeks, and did one recently examining the beast that is Shortland St. Later in the year, the local elections are hugely significant. Making a younger audience care deeply about them is incredibly important.
What have been some of your favourite topics covered so far on The Fold?
Our biggest episode was last year, when Judith Collins’ former press secretary Janet Wilson gave a stinging and surgical critique of her old boss. That made the 6pm news.
My favourite episodes have been with people who are really innovating within our area – Lucy Blakiston from Shit You Should Care About, who is a friend and someone I admire a lot. Mike Lane from the Alternative Commentary Collective is as smart a thinker as we have. But I think getting into what makes practitioners tick – Emma Espiner, Kirsty Johnston, and Joe Daymond, who is both a creator and an operator – they were all super interesting conversations to me.
How have you seen the media industry evolve in the time since the podcast has been running, and where do you see it going?
You can feel the waning influence of centralised/ destination platforms, and the acceleration of the importance of distribution. I always advise young operators never to start a website because people’s habits are so weird and hard to break into now. I think that trend will continue.
What’s your favourite podcast (not your own?)
I mainly listen to chat pods about basketball, particularly Zach Lowe and Ryen Russillo, which is basically comfort food for me at this point. But I love both the Shit You Should Care About pods, I think the format and delivery are super smart. I like Trapital, Hal Crawford, Brian Morrissey, and Peter Kafka’s pods for hardcore media nerdery. But I think my favourite pod is and always will be Gone By Lunchtime. They just have insane chemistry and give you facts, perspective, and analysis while also being wildly funny too. I don’t know how that works.
What about your favourite newsletter?
This is impossible to answer. I am a newsletter freak. But my must-reads include Rex Woodbury, Jay Caspian Kang, Lucas Shaw’s Screentime, The Spinoff’s Weekend, and Dan Runcie’s brilliant Trapital. Metro Eats and The Boil-Up are essential on food. I think Ben Evans is incredibly smart and disciplined as a thinker.
But if I could only have two, I’d pick the Shit You Should Care About daily, and The Bulletin. I know it’s cheating but I’ve loved that newsletter and relied on it since launch under the incomparable Alex Braae. I really think it’s stretching into a superb new place under new editor Anna Rawhiti-Connell. (Check out all our newsletters here!)
A good book?
I read about business and media, and detective novels (currently: Walter Mosley). Pick one? The First Tycoon. It’s a biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and you see the beginnings of American capitalism and the modern economy through it. He was one of the earliest of the founder-maniac types, and T.J. Stiles brings him and the era to life incredibly vividly.
Can you recommend a Spinoff story you think everyone should read?
How to pick just one? But probably our editor, Mad Chapman, ranking every flavour of chip in NZ. It was a story which would be incomplete at most outlets, but she brought in community, race, and class.
