Imagine the country’s biggest media company without its leader. News Corp without Rupert Murdoch if you like, though it wasn’t Australia (or the US) I had in mind (writes Peter Coleman).

Transport yourself instead across the Tasman, to a land where the single proprietor of the country’s second-biggest media outfit picked it up for a dollar because its Australian owner couldn’t get out fast enough.

And where a Canadian-born “PE tycoon” is hovering around larger rival NZME, seeking board places and a say in the editorial direction of its flagship New Zealand Herald, which lacks a dominant shareholder. Jim Grenon has already spent just more than NZ$9 million (A$8.23 million) on a 9.3 per cent stake in NZME, and a reasonable question would be what he plans to do with it.

There’s a tendency in this industry for red lights to flash at the mention of private equity: Is NZME ripe for an asset-stripping exercise; have costs already been cut to the bone? Grenon is certainly credited with experience in turning distressed companies around.

So far, the focus has been on a different area – content. Grenon has been critical of the Herald’s editorial leadership (or lack of it), seeking to appoint a new board to “improve” its journalism and appeal to “a wider political spectrum”. That may have prompted this curious commitment during a recent financial results presentation.

A slide promised the NZ Herald would “take a leadership position in helping New Zealand to thrive”, would “support the reboot of NZ’s economic recovery”, and would “improve the tone of the conversation to build positive momentum for all New Zealanders”.

Nor were those results necessarily as bad as the net loss following a “non-cash writedown of NZ$24 million on its publishing assets” – quite likely to have been goodwill – suggests.

Statements from Grenon – who owns beachfront in New Zealand – indicated “no current intention to make a takeover bid”, despite a later suggestion he wanted to replace all NZME’s current directors, and an announcement that he was talking about these ideas with shareholders that hold 37 (or maybe 47) per cent of the publisher, including his 9.3 per cent.

Grenon’s own publishing activities are reported to have included involvement with right of centre online publication The Centrist, which has criticised the country’s mainstream press. In the wider world, he’s responsible for the irresistible pun that sees clients and associates of his Canadian investment business, TOM Capital Management being taken sailing (pictured on their website). That’s right, TOM Cruise!

Peter Coleman