Out in the ever-more-astonishing world, things are beginning to crack open. Flopping into plain sight, sometimes by accident even.
I had noticed that global markets were pretty unfazed by the world suddenly minus a fifth of its oil, fertiliser and rare earths. I had even noticed that the oil market was being pumped, in share market terms, to conveniently engorge the coffers of the North Atlantic financial hegemony and even found an article on the best stocks to buy during a war.
Surely, we are not usually allowed to know these things?
Leaning on the kitchen bench, coffee in hand and looking down to the sea, I found myself fascinated by a newspaper clipping about the New Zealand company manufacturing sustainable wool sports shoes that was floated on the Nasdaq in late 2021 and doubled its share price to a stock market capitalisation of US$6.7 billion.
Last month, after nearly US$450 million of after-tax losses, missed profit forecasts and sliding sales, the valuation had slipped to US$22m. The company then sold the shoe business for US$39 million, renamed itself Allbird AI and, with no visible expertise in AI infrastructure or silicon chips, watched its share price rise nearly six-fold on the announcement.
According to the headline, that obscure turkey of a company could be about to burst the Artificial Intelligence bubble. Or even the market itself.
Against this background, and on a more modest scale of good news, New Zealand’s independent and fiercely local community newspapers are quietly emerging as an acknowledged force across the country.
Many of them are publications rescued by their former staff, others handed over for a dollar as the news media industry players NZME and Stuff exit a market that has been systematically wrecked over decades by mainstream acquisitions and closures, market forces and now endemic tech competition for advertising revenue.
Owners, editors and staff of New Zealand’s remaining – and growing – cohort of independent hyper-local newspapers met for the independent community newspaper association’s annual conference in Auckland last week, armed with recent research that says trust in newspapers at grass roots community level is far and away the most read and trusted news source for New Zealanders.
Feisty, reliable local news and proven expertise is not an optional extra when it comes down to who communities can trust in today’s turbid poly-crisis of polarisation, disinformation and even angry targeting of individual journalists, RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson told the meeting.
There was work to be done to recover lost ground, Thompson said. The public’s right to know needed to be called out and the fight taken to councils who now rely on their public websites as a routine way to hide stuff that officials didn’t want its citizens to see – a strategy that has severe consequences for the community.
“Putting notifications on Facebook is hiding them,” he said. “If the government wants to help the economy, it needs to support local news providers – not Meta.”
In the meantime, the public is completely disenfranchised, and the considerable revenues go straight offshore, along with the work of their newsrooms.
Many of us at the conference had memories of more robust days when national and local body officials were strictly required to advertise important information in newspapers, providing a backbone of revenue for local papers and a secure connection between public servants and their various communities of interest, age and community well beings.
We also remember the bloodbaths of the Murdoch years with Independent Newspapers Ltd (INL) that became a massive publishing powerhouse until exiting our market in 2003, hastening the demise of the country’s great daily and local papers with their family dynasties and once thriving and productive regions.
The creeping disregard for transparency and public engagement in civic life must be called out. The so-seductive notion that burying vital planning and financial information on a complex council website where everything from liquor licences to highly sensitive planning trumps the public’s right to know.
It’s an old and dreary story and probably why the Allbirds’ meteoric flight into AI is still in my mind.
I guess I have left it too late to float our own business on the stockmarket as an IPO which is a pity. Money on that scale could do a lot of good. But then, as with the Allbirds meteoric flight-or-flame-out, things go fuzzy.
Flash in the pan or existential threat? It seems we are all holding our breath and keeping very still, trying to be content with not knowing about anything much in the meantime while furtively squirreling away signs of hope.
• Liz Waters
