John Campbell is as effusive in his gratitude for guests as ever.

Radio is dead. So Radio NZ has brought back JC from his long days and nights in the wilderness. He is to be the face of the resurrection.

This is awfully familiar, but also a little strange. John Campbell is behind a desk, in a studio, looking down the camera and shuffling a sheaf of typewritten pages as he talks about the news of the day.

Shut your eyes and it's Campbell Live back from its trampled grave, as his voice plays its familiar tune: a warm baritone burble punctuated with excitable high notes and elongated syllables and the occasional run down the scale to a creaky bass note, almost a sob, as he nearly runs out of breath at the end of a ludicrously long sentence.

CHRIS MCKEEN / FAIRFAX NZ John Campbell, new host of RNZ's multimedia revamp of drivetime news show Checkpoint.

Eyes open you spot the differences: He's wearing a dangerously casual checked shirt under his suit jacket. The big word in the logo behind his shoulder is "Checkpoint", and the cameras he's staring down are remote-controlled things, 20cm tall and shaped like Darth Vader's helmet, bolted to the walls of a tiny, newly-built studio in the Auckland offices of Radio New Zealand, sorry, "RNZ". John Campbell is back on the telly. But only kind-of.

READ MORE:

* The sad end of John Campbell

* John Campbell opens up about life after Campbell Live

* Carol Hirschfeld brought John Campbell to Radio New Zealand

* John Campbell delivers first report for Radio NZ







When RNZ's flagship drivetime news programme Checkpoint signed off for the summer break it was two hours long, had two presenters and was, quite simply, a radio show.

When it returns at 5pm on Monday, "with John Campbell" will be bolted onto the title; it'll be 30 minutes shorter (a world digest occupies the spare half-hour), and it will be a multimedia extravaganza, with the usual audio for the commute home, but also streaming video coverage and Skype interviews and a Youtube page and shareable video clips and opportunities to comment online or even watch it on Freeview's Channel 50, just like real TV.

CHRIS MCKEEN John Campbell during a technical run-through five days before Monday's launch of RNZ's new multimedia version of drivetime show Checkpoint.

Radio with pictures is hardly new – there have been webcams in radio studios for years, and it's impossible to ignore the parallels with Paul Henry's TV3 breakfast show simulcast on Radio Live – but for RNZ this is a really big deal, a major step toward building a digital life-raft in readiness for the day, who knows how far off, when traditional radio finally slips beneath the waves. RNZ already has a respectable website and its youth-oriented spinoff thewireless.co.nz, but this is a transformation of the sacred Checkpoint, one of RNZ's two news flagships.

Today is a rehearsal – an abbreviated run-through five days before launch, but it's real-ish, with today's actual news bulletin read by Katrina Batten, live crosses to actual reporters nattering into tripodded smartphone cameras, and a Skype interview with a Sydney journo mate who's agreed to play along.

The control room, connected to the studio through a pane of soundproof glass, is tiny too, with just enough room for the four operators – editor, sound, vision, digital – driving 10 or so screens and various consoles. People pop in and out. Photographer Chris McKeen and I lurk in a corner with RNZ head of content Carol Hirschfeld, where she answers our queries and occasionally gets us to move so someone can reach their desk.

Running the show is Pip Keane, formerly Campbell's producer at TV3. She's talking simultaneously to Campbell, colleagues in the room and someone in her earpiece.

"This is Kim donutting his Supergold track," she says; and "Liveview off the back!"; and "He'll throw to his package … then we'll go to sting and trail."

It's TV talk but apparently this isn't TV.

"We are a radio show with a layer of pictures," says Hirschfeld. They're taking enormous care not to alienate all the poeple still simply tuning in. Editorial choices, technical decisions, how they use video packages – all will evolve over time in response to the audience.

Focus groups said they wanted more sport, she says, so there'll be more sports in the top-of-the-hour bulletins.

Really? Aren't RNZ listeners rather less sports-obsessed than the average Kiwi? Won't they moan?

RADIO NEW ZEALAND John Campbell takes you behind the scenes at all new Checkpoint, at Radio NZ.

"Well," says Hirschfeld. "It's negotiable."

NEGOTIATING A DIGITAL WORLD

Much about RNZ seems negotiable right now, as changes chief executive Paul Thompson has been foreshadowing since his arrival in 2013 start to bite.

"Radio New Zealand" recently became "RNZ", a clear de-emphasis of "radio". In late 2014, around the same time he snapped up Hirschfeld from dysfunctional Maori TV, Thompson hired his former Fairfax colleague Glen Scanlon to push RNZ's digital strategy. Checkpoint's new deputy editor, Catherine Walbridge, is a former TV3 staffer. Recently hired presenters include Guyon Espiner, Mihingarangi Forbes, Jesse Mulligan and Wallace Chapman – a talented but notably TV-heavy roll-call.

With a frozen state income of just under $40 million a year, RNZ doesn't have to manage the catastrophic revenue collapse that is plaguing most commercial media, but it still needs an audience to justify its existence, and increasingly audience are online.

Last year Thompson jetted to a convention of public broadcasters in Munich and on his return told RNZ managers how everyone was trembling in their boots as global players like Apple, YouTube and Facebook poached their audiences. Young people in particular aren't touching that dial.

Some broadcasters thought the solution was pooling together to build a global public digital platform to rival Silicon Valley's profiteers, but Thompson sided with those who said the future lay in focussing on making independent, free, diverse and distinctive material, like always, and working on new distribution models alongside the tech giants. Sure enough, RNZ is now streaming on MSN and iHeartRadio as well as its own website, and the new Checkpoint will stream on YouTube.

RNZ's funding has been frozen for the seven years and on-air advertising is off the table, so Thompson's investments come at a cost.

In November he reportedly told staff overall headcount would fall from 283 to 270 by July, with 20 jobs disestablished and seven new digital roles created. RNZ's music department will bear the brunt, with a reported nine out of 33.5 FTEs going. It is understood many redundancies will take effect late February, and that the mood at RNZ Concert especially is grim. Last year, three notable RNZ old-timers – newsreader Hewitt Humphrey, documentarian Jack Perkins and Sounds Historical's Jim Sullivan – all left.

Restructuring, says Hirschfeld, has been incredibly tough. "I feel a deep empathy to my colleagues who are having to undergo times of uncertainty and real change. For some people it's the end of their careers. It's not pleasant at all."

OLD SCHOOL RADIO AUDIENCE

Upsetting staff is bad enough. Upsetting listeners would be a larger calamity.

Rehearsal over with no major disasters, Campbell insists his new show will never take its old school radio audience for granted. He'll rein things as necessary. On Campbell Live he'd use words like "shit" and "bugger" – and RNZ listeners don't like that.

"If you say bugger on Radio New Zealand you get a letter explaining what buggering is, in quite graphic terms."

He's excited. He's no longer sad and tired like he was late last year as he struggled with the death of Campbell Live. He loves this job. He's glad to be back. Everything is, basically, marvellous. And he thinks he can connect with the blue-collar folk who used to watch him on TV but barely know what RNZ is.

"We need them. And I want them to listen to us because I think we tell their stories.

"Campbell Live had a beautiful relationship with the Samoan community – ABs to Samoa, that was such a triumph. I want to connect with that Polynesian Auckland. That would be a wonderful thing to do."

The pictures they're adding to the radio needn't scare off the loyalists.

"If you think of some of the greatest television ever – I'm thinking of Melvyn Bragg interviewing Dennis Potter in The South Bank Show when Potter was dying. Two men sitting talking, and it was absolutely beautiful and compelling television that would also have been beautiful and compelling radio.

"We're not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We're making radio first and foremost – you're just going to be able to watch us do it."

WHO'S LISTENING? WHO'S WATCHING? WHO'S DOWNLOADING?

In late 2014, RNZ's radio audience on National and Concert combined fell by 70,000 listeners compared with the previous year – around 13 per cent.

The figures remained stubbornly low throughout 2015, but finally recovered late in the year.

Current figures show the weekly cumulative radio audience for listeners aged aged 15+ was 488,000 for RNZ National and 152,000 for RNZ Concert – totalling around 15.7 per cent of the population.

Radionz.co.nz had 4.3 million page views in November 2015, double that of a year earlier.

SOURCE: Neilsen All NZ Radio Survey, Feb-Nov 2015.