Guide unaffected by heads’ resignations

Press, 7 December 1988, Page 12

Guide unaffected by heads’ resignations

PA Wellington The separate television and radio listings magazine to be published by the “Listener” and private partner looks set to ’go ahead, in spite of the resignation this week of the top two editorial executives from the “Listener.”

The listing guide will cost about $1.5 million to launch and carry complete radio and television listings. However, the managing editor of the “Listener,” Mr David Beatson, who announced yesterday he was quitting his job from

February, said it would affect both the existing television guides. The new guide would reduce still further the declining circulation of the “Listener,” Mr Beatson said, and would also affect readership of “TV Guide,” published by Independent Newspapers, Ltd, (INL). But the chairman of RNZ, Ltd, Mr Richard Rowley, said yesterday concerns Mr Beatson had voiced about the independence of the “Listener” after restructuring were premature. The board had yet to be

appointed but there was general support for the idea of a separate listings publication and of INL being brought in as a partner. An announcement on the new RNZ and TVNZ boards (which in turn will appoint the new “Listener” board) was expected to be made by the Minister of Broadcasting, Mr Hunt, yesterday. Mr Rowley said an independent “Listener” board would be appointed within two weeks and would include print specialists likely to favour the separate guide Mr

Beatson had proposed. “The ‘Listener’ is (at present) trying to be all things to all men,” Mr Rowley said. Mr Beatson’s resignation came after the editor of the “Listener,” Mr Peter Stewart, decided to leave in January and apparently reflected his dissatisfaction with how the “Listener” will function commercially and independently under RNZ and TVNZ’s joint ownership. “It is time for me to make a change,” he said. “I have had five years of number-crunching and was facing another five.”