Expanding staff skillsets and hitting KPIs may well be weighing on the mind of Stuff owner Sinead Boucher according to media experts, as Newshub's replacement bulletin will wrestle with falling viewership ratings in its bid to rival TVNZ.

Stuff has signed on to produce and provide a daily bulletin on TV3 from July 6. Following Newshub's closure and the threatened loss of 300 jobs, the news company will provide an hour-long weekday show and a 30-minute bulletin on Saturdays and Sundays.

The news hasn't just raised questions from those watching outside of the industry, with one media commentator claiming that in-house staff at Stuff are already questioning how the operation will be carried out.

Talking to Newstalk ZB, media commentator Duncan Grieves said he spoke with several Stuff staff members after yesterday's announcement and said it's already dawned on the workers that a news bulletin is nothing like what they've been trained for.

"Stuff have fantastic journalists - more journalists than any other news organisation in my understanding - but those journalists joined largely thinking they'd be creating print stories. And even though [Stuff has] decided to do TikToks and podcasts, everyone has quite a big difference in terms of the level of scrutiny and the quality of performance required to do a 6pm story instead of a TikTok," said Grieves.

"The staff I spoke to really expressed that, they just don't have a lot of runway to get to that TVNZ or Newshub standard."

Grieves said Stuff's journalists have also begun questioning whether their employer has considered the ramifications of increasing their workloads and changing the nature of their jobs.

"[Some journalists] were like: 'Will we get more money for this? Will we get wardrobe allowances for this?' Typically, these are things you would ask for in television but, certainly, Stuff is not predicated on those things happening. So there are complexities to it."

Under the new deal, Warner Bros Discovery will pay Stuff an annual fee - likely in the low millions of dollars - to provide the 6pm-7pm weekday news bulletin.

The deal offers considerable opportunity but also risk for Stuff, which has no traditional live-broadcast history. As a result, the company will need to bring in a decent amount of broadcasting and production expertise.

According to Grieves, it's likely that Warner Bros will outline KPIs that will need to be met to keep the operation sustainable long term. He said the role that news played in keeping TV3's ratings high is bigger than one might think.

"It's absolutely crucial that they have some news product at 6pm," he said.

"Otherwise, their ratings crater and that tends to drive how many people watch TV past 7pm - which is where stations make the vast bulk of their money. I mean, Newshub was down 18 per cent each year in the 25-to-54 demographic, so you're already seeing mass amounts of younger audiences migrating away from television already."

Boucher told reporters during her press conference yesterday that Stuff "weren't getting into linear television", something that Grieves said was likely an elegant sleight of hand suggesting the company wouldn't be providing more television content beyond their bulletin.

"But fundamentally this will be scrutinised by the current Newshub 6pm bulletin, so if it's not that slick and high quality, people will pounce and that's the nature of a high-profile TV product."

Other media companies including NZME were among the bidders for the TV3 news slot and ultimately lost out to Stuff - NZME's chief executive Michael Boggs told his staff the bulletin would have been a distraction to the company.

Grieves said he was surprised NZME didn't win the bid for the contract given their vast broadcasting capacities compared with Stuff, but believed the latter company won out due to seeing an opportunity and "running towards it".

However, former Newshub head of news Mark Jennings told The Mike Hosking Breakfast that Boggs' comments might be more a case of "sour grapes" from NZME losing the bid and said he would take them with a pinch of salt.

"But Michael Boggs is right, it will be a lot of executive time that goes into focusing on this product that won't be going somewhere else," he told Mike Hosking.

"Also, the [dollars margin] here will be tight, so you don't want to get that wrong either."

Jennings said a big risk with a company like Stuff providing television content will be the online news organisation's output being compared with TVNZ - which has specialised in television bulletins for decades and has far superior expertise from the get-go.

"Sinead Boucher talks about their journalists being multi-platform journalists who are used to collecting video in the field, the much harder thing here is, yes, collecting video and putting it onto a website is one thing - doing a 6pm bulletin that will compete with TVNZ with all the live work and graphics and packaging that goes into it, and the skilled television journalism that reporters develop over the years, that isn't going to be there," he said.

"So it's a big ask."