My grandmother grew up in a remote area in Taranaki, in a town which no longer exists. Born a few years before the first World War, her first journey was by horse-drawn gig, which rattled and bumped the baby home from Whangamōmona to a farmhouse 9km away, in a long-vanished village called Kōhuratahi.
Although there was no television or internet, or even (until the mid 1920s) radio, the community had access to two well-staffed regional daily newspapers: the Taranaki Daily News and the Taranaki Herald, delivered by train every evening. And there was the Auckland Weekly News, which came in time for the weekend.
Considering how remote they were, the family had better access to regional news than many New Zealanders do today.
Although Whangamōmona is 65 kilometres north-east of Stratford, it lies in Stratford district. Today its residents might read the Stratford Press, established in 1960, as well as the old Taranaki Daily News, which first rolled off the press in 1857.
Stratford Press, its corporate owners have announced, will probably close before Christmas; ironically, I read about it in the Daily News (now owned by Stuff). Parent company NZME (owner of The New Zealand Herald) intends to cull 14 of its community newspapers across the North Island, including the Stratford Press.
In a story by RNZ Mediawatch, NZME chief executive Michael Boggs blamed “a substantial increase in costs. [Newspapers] have suffered from a decline in advertising revenue and increasing costs to the point where [they are] no longer profitable.”
NZME’s annual report, noted Mediawatch, contained no hint of trouble. Plenty of people are reading these community papers – their weekly audience, according to NZME, was 223,000 in 2023.
Community papers not owned by NZME point to the company’s lack of engagement in the communities their papers serve. Employing a skeleton crew on a paper like the Stratford Press, which covers several towns and hundreds of miles of rolling farmland, is never going to work. Locally owned newspapers like Gulf News are thriving and it isn’t hard to see why. The owners and reporters are responsive to the needs of their community because they are part of it. When your ferry fares go up, so do ours.
NZME editor at large Shayne Currie, who broke the ‘kill-list’ news in his Media Insider column, detected the presence of a ‘tough economic environment’ and the diversion of advertising dollars to foreign tech giants. This is, of course, a huge issue, especially for large media outlets; that sucking sound is the sluicing of truckloads of cash out of New Zealand, money which used to pay for the salaries of specialist reporters on papers like the Herald. The loss of expertise in education, arts, science, labour relations, crime, local politics and health has had a dire effect on the quality and accuracy of mainstream media reporting.
Following the slashing of jobs at Newshub/Three and TVNZ, in March The Spinoff put the number of journalists working in New Zealand at around 1,439. By the end of 2024, this figure will have dwindled even more – an effect of the collapse in media advertising revenue. Interestingly, a single US newspaper, the New York Times, employs far more ‘on the ground’ journalists than every news outlet in New Zealand combined.
The coalition government has seemingly stalled on the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, frightened off by sabre-rattling from Google.
Unsurprisingly, Google, whose New Zealand operation made almost $1 billion last year, hates the bill, describing it as a ‘link tax’. Working people may not find this a particularly compelling argument. Isn’t paying tax the cost of doing business? And Google certainly is doing business at the expense of readers like you and I.
It seems the future of news lies in locally owned community newspapers like this one: pages written and filled with familiar faces, not faceless websites with no search function or phone number.
Instead of relying on clickbait opinion pieces, local reporters collect news and share it. If they get it wrong, it’s their name under the headline. If mistakes are pointed out, they are acknowledged and corrected. After all, we are bound to bump into each other at the supermarket.
Real community papers photograph and report on sports and art exhibitions; school and marae news; writers, artists, adventurers and inventors; events and small businesses. They keep a weather eye on the machinations of the council, local board, transport companies and the health services we all rely on, coverage requiring deep local and civic knowledge.
When a historian wants to study the history of Waiheke, their first port of call will not be Google, but the archives of the newspaper you are holding. Some New Zealand communities are watching their own historic legacy disappear in a cloud of corporate smoke.
• Jenny Nicholls
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2024
