Watching from afar, we are witnessing the cratering of the venerable Washington Post under its billionaire ownership and recent subservience to the extremes of Trumpian edicts, the queasy optics including a journalist reporting from her car in a war zone in Ukraine where Russia was pounding its neighbour’s infrastructure being one of 300 in the prestigious newsroom to be terminated.
Less than a decade ago, the New York Times and the Washington Post were almost neck and neck in the race for readers, reputation and scoops. The Times was always bigger, but The Post under tech bro Jeff Bezos has been declining in influence, newsroom staff and financial health, while The Times is on an astonishing upward trajectory with operating profit approaching $200m. The Times now has newsroom staff around the world of over 2000, while The Post has slipped from nearly 1000 to just 400.
However, in a time when our own national newsrooms are shrinking, global platforms are reshaping attention and trust in news continues to waver, local journalism is emerging as one of the most critical pillars of New Zealand’s media ecosystem.
“Not long ago, nearly every suburb and rural community in Auckland had its own newspaper. Publishers differed. Content and quality were inconsistent. Delivery to your letterbox could be monthly, weekly or more frequent. But every resident could rest easy knowing that local news and events would be covered by their local rag,” Spinoff writer Derek Whaley said when Stuff’s seven remaining Auckland community newspaper mastheads, some of them going back generations, were closed last year.
Not since the 1850s had Auckland had so few newspapers.
Yet, while only 33 percent of New Zealanders trust news in general, the AUT’s 2025 report on Journalism, Media and Democracy said in a survey by the Newspaper Publishers Association (NPA) “that more than 80 percent of New Zealanders trust the news provided by their local media outlets”.
The survey asked which types of news, if any, interested them and showed 72 percent preferred local news, followed by international news at 70 percent, political news at 62 percent, crime and security at 56 percent, science and technology at 50 percent, environmental news and education at 41 percent, business news at 36 percent and sports news at 34 percent.
NPA director Andrew Holden said people respond more positively when they are asked about local newsrooms rather than a generic ‘media’.”
“Much is made of declining trust in media as measured in other studies, but this shows that New Zealanders have a connection to their local newsrooms, they understand how important it is to have journalists on the ground reporting about their community – in good times and bad – and they want to see that work reflected in search and social media.”
The power of working within communities has never been more evident, he said. “When journalists and communicators build real relationships at the local level, they gain access to perspectives that national narratives often miss. These connections help to promote stories that resonate more strongly, represent more voices, and reflect the nuance of lived experience.
“Regionally-based reporters frequently become the trusted intermediaries between organisations and the public, and the quality of that relationship can determine whether information is received with interest, scepticism, or not at all.”
Waiheke has had many community papers, sometimes up to three at once, and farmers and businessmen dominated the Waiheke County Council since the 1970s. Although run by professional journalists, Gulf News was suspected of being hippy and feckless but no-one round the boardroom table grudged the county’s bill for advertising which covered the wages for at least one of us every month.
That revenue stream went when the 1980s supercity started its own ‘newspaper’ and fielded its own centralised models of ‘delivering’ democracy.
Since then, income streams have been picked off by corporate acquisitions (including Rupert Murdock for many years); from the technology heists and monetising of Facebook and Google; from advertising buying patterns by corporates and by the loss of local government and national spending.
Councils across New Zealand are still pulling out of community newspaper advertising and it is believed that 90 percent of New Zealand’s advertising spend currently goes overseas to the various tech giants.
Despite the fact that local journalism restores proximity and purpose, we haven’t, like the national corporate media, asked for government funding.
Instead the Community Newspaper Association’s long-held message to government says: ”‘We don’t need funding… just give us back the steady revenue of government advertising instead of these same organisations paying Facebook and Google for advertising.”
You don’t have to go past terrifyingly low voting turnout figures in last year’s Auckland Council local body elections to see which of the city’s surviving and emerging community newspapers had provided the glue for community engagement, participation and empowerment. Residents turned out for candidate meetings and voted by large margins: 51 percent on Waiheke compared with 29 percent in the city overall.
If the council’s corporate intention is to improve woeful overall citizen voting statistics, it could return a fair share of its advertising budget to the city’s existing and emerging community newspapers.
• Liz Waters
