Two weeks ago, the magazine I once worked for quietly died. It hadn’t been well for some time, it is true.
When Bauer Media closed its New Zealand wing during the first Covid shutdown, a pile of magazines fell off the shelves, including North & South. Editors called the closure an apocalypse for the New Zealand media.
I sometimes think about all those magazines that never quite made it to the printer – the ghost issues of May 2020. So much research, so many photographs and interviews that nobody, except us, ever got to read.
Some magazines were picked up by new owners. The Listener, Woman’s Day and Kia Ora were sold to Sydney-based Mercury Capital, which renamed its media group Are Media.
Before Bauer sold it, North & South’s readership was around 200,000. It was bought by a well-heeled couple from Germany who said they liked the magazine’s longform investigative journalism. But they struggled to replicate it, and in 2023 they sold North & South to School Road Publishing, a media group with deep ties to the advertising industry.
A year ago, North & South stopped publishing its print magazine. It became, in the words of a spokesperson, a “digital offering” – basically a monthly e-newsletter.
A respected editor was working on a print relaunch this month, although a piece in The Spinoff on 18 October didn’t fill me with confidence.
“There were plans to return [North & South] to print by the end of the year,” wrote Madeleine Chapman, “but according to [the] owner just this week, “I’m just not satisfied that the revenues are there”. In other words, it’s dying a very slow and quite depressing death.”
In its heyday under editor Virginia Larson, North & South specialised in journalism which took months, sometimes even years, to research and write. Unlike US magazines with vast circulations, N&S earned most of its income not from magazine sales, but advertising. Ironically, online advertising spend is now even higher. The problem is that it no longer supports journalism but US giants like Google and Meta.
New Zealand news outlets need far more journalists than they can afford. Without them, local body politics, arts and science go unreported, corruption hides and injustice continues.
North & South won more than 300 journalism, photography and design awards. Each issue contained seven or eight stories. The last printed pre-lockdown issue, before the magazine changed hands, was April 2020. The cover story was 20 pages long, and it was a humdinger. ‘The Lundy Murders: Anatomy of a Scandal; 20 years of lies, cover-ups and incompetence. The story that will make you question our justice system.’
The story was by Mike White, one of the most awarded investigative journalists in New Zealand.
No, you can’t borrow my copy.
Another of my workmates was Donna Chisholm, North & South’s editor-at-large. Donna was the first female chief reporter at the Auckland Star. In the 90s, she spent six years on an investigation for the Sunday Star Times that helped to free David Dougherty from prison for a rape he did not commit.
I have never heard anyone bash a keyboard like Donna. No keyboard could survive that kind of treatment for long, and the lettering on hers had completely worn off. Donna was famous for phone-grilling senior officials; the Commissioner of Police, for instance, and these conversations sometimes got so tense the rest of us would stop working to listen. It invariably ended with a triumphant smash-down of the receiver.
When the new owners of North & South announced in late October that the magazine was going on ‘indefinite hold’ there was little interest in the rest of the media. Possibly because few of its once vast readership still knew it existed – and possibly because there simply aren’t enough journalists left to cover stories like this.
But New Zealand needs journalists who are not afraid to hold power to account. And this was a month which showed just how much impact one journalist can have.
Without months of dogged effort by Jared Savage from the New Zealand Herald, one of the most jaw-dropping police scandals for years could have remained hidden. Just think about that for a moment. Savage spent months fighting a permanent name suppression order which prevented publication of a damning report by the Independent Police Conduct Authority.
His workmate, the journalist Matt Nippert, credited Jared on social media. “Getting suppressions lifted is a complete professional pain in the arse (stories get delayed months or years, and days get lost in legal meetings and court) but he has stuck at it. Onya, Jared.” (Eighteen likes, one repost).
It is easy to criticise the mainstream media. Without journalists like Mike White, Donna Chisholm and Jared Savage, it is true, maybe we would feel better about the world and the way it works. We would never have to read stories with headlines like this: ‘Jevon McSkimming saga: Young woman suffered ‘devastating impact’ after police arrested her for anonymous emails instead of investigating sex allegations.’ By Jared Savage.
And all the things which need to change, never will.
• Jenny Nicholls
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2025
