New Zealand is about to feel the widespread effect of one of the consequences of media climate change – news deserts.
NZME’s announcement last week that it is “proposing” to close 14 of its community newspapers – that is a nice way of saying it has already decided to do so – will leave gaping holes in local reporting. Journalists, whose sole task is to tell people what is happening in their small communities, will lose their jobs.
The story, reported with uncharacteristic frankness (about itself) by the New Zealand Herald, also mentioned that the announcement came on the heels of major cuts this year by TV3 and TVNZ.
There is, however, a significant difference. TV3 contracted Stuff to fill the hole it created by closing Newshub, and TVNZ has sufficient means to cover news and current affairs even if it does so in reduced form. Once the NZME community titles go, residents will be deprived of vital links to information.
The Herald’s Shayne Currie, made no bones about it. He described the closures as “a body blow to local news in many New Zealand regions”, adding: “In some regions, these titles are the only source of local news, covering their local councils and other public bodies.”
The mastheads that will die are the Te Awamutu Courier, Hauraki-Coromandel Post, Katikati Advertiser, Te Puke Times, Taupō & Tūrangi Herald, Napier Courier, Hastings Leader, CHB Mail in Hawke’s Bay, Stratford Press, Bush Telegraph in Tararua, Whanganui Midweek, Manawatū Guardian, Horowhenua Chronicle and Kāpiti News. The Te Awamutu paper has been serving its community for more than a century.
Some areas such as Napier and Hastings will still have coverage by regional tiles like Hawke’s Bay Today but not in the same breadth and certainly not at a granular level. Others will simply miss out.
Local Government New Zealand called on the government to expand the Local Democracy Reporting scheme run through Radio NZ, and Central Hawkes Bay mayor, Alex Walker, was moved to release an impassioned statement on the closure of CHB Mail. Here is an extract:
I am devastated.
It’s a big word to use for a little newspaper. But it’s a necessary word.
Once again it is rural New Zealand bearing the brunt of these decisions. We are told we are the backbone of New Zealand’s economy, yet we are hindered on every side. Our banks were taken away, and now it’s our newspapers.
Why is it that rural New Zealand is the one that always has to do without?
Closing the CHB Mail is a massive blow to our district – for many, especially our elderly population, this is their lifeline to the community.
CHB Mail is our community newspaper, it’s where we discuss our district, we tell our stories, and most importantly, we connect.
It’s the one constant thing that reassures our community members.
Her clear distress will be shared by residents, and by those in other districts now confronted by news deserts. These arid areas, in which there are no local newsgathering organisations or outlets, are already a phenomenon causing concern in other countries. In the United States there are 1500 counties – with a combined population of 55 million – classed as news deserts. In the United Kingdom there are 38 local authority areas that are not served by any dedicated local news outlet and an estimated 4.1 million people live in these areas. In Australia, 29 local government areas have no local print or digital news outlets.
NZME’s announcement will not be the end of local closures. In fact, it is not even the beginning. Back in 2018 while it was still under Fairfax’s disastrous ownership, Stuff announced the sale or closure of 28 community titles. Most, but not all, were in areas also served by other outlets. Several were titles aimed at the farming community.
Stuff editor Tracy Watkins was moved to write an editorial in last weekend’s Sunday Star-Times, expressing sympathy for the plight facing NZME and the local communities involved before expanding the issue to discuss the high cost of news production generally.
In that leader she said: “If there is any good to come out of the NZME closures, maybe it is that the government will finally take seriously the loss to local communities if more closures happen, and realise that something has to give if it want to avoid a domino effect.”
That ‘domino effect’ relates not only to the fate of remaining community newspapers but their regional stablemates and a number of digital equivalents. We are in real danger of heading into the 2025 local body elections without the ability to scrutinise some of the candidates and the past performance of incumbents.
Already we have seen the end of Queenstown’s Crux as a website with a staff of five and a number of free subscribers. It is now reduced to a one-man-band (founder Peter Newport) on a Substack site that costs from $20 a month up to $350 a year for a premium subscription. As he said in an email, he has no choice but to charge a subscription in order to survive.
The Sunday Star-Times editorial said government and local councils had increasingly bypassed local media, spending their advertising and marketing budgets on comms teams and newsletters and directing large amounts of money to social media platforms.
If you want proof of what Watkins was talking about, look no further than the West Coast. Last week the Buller District Council announced it was pulling all its advertising – apart from urgent statutory notices – from the Westport News and will publish a monthly spread in the West Coast Messenger, a weekly free newspaper published by the Greymouth Star and distributed to 15,000 households. The council’s chief executive, Simon Pickford, described it as “a more accessible, inclusive model for sharing our updates”.
That may be so, but the loss of revenue could be an existential blow to the Westport News, which can be a vocal critic. The subscriber-based publication led with the council’s announcement and devoted most of its front-page to the issue, including an editorial by the co-owners Lee and Kevin Scanlon headed “Your newspaper is at risk”. It called on readers to speak up against the move.
There can be winners as well as losers, and in this case the owners of the Greymouth Star are the beneficiaries. Councils also need to spend ratepayers’ money efficiently. However, local authorities also have a responsibility to support and foster democracy at a local level. Does endangering the financial sustainability of a newspaper that has served its community for 151 years do that? I don’t think so.
As for NZME, it is a business and makes business decisions in the best interests of its shareholders. If it can’t make community newspapers pay, those shareholders are best served by cutting its losses.
Such decisions do not, however, serve the best interests of the community.
Instead, they stand as stark examples of a broken business model that must be replaced by a system that is capable of sustaining journalism at all levels. What is happening to the NZME local papers, and what may happen to the Westport News, are signals that the government must facilitate an across-the-board strategic rethink as a matter of great urgency.
For their part, the news media must display the unity – and sense of common purpose – that has been sadly lacking in what appears to me to be a pervasive attitude that the last-man-standing will win. Each, of course, sees itself as the last survivor. Each, invariably, will be wrong. There will be no survivors if the model is not replaced by something that is actually fit for purpose.
But enough doom and gloom. Let me end on a positive note.
When I noted the impending closure of the Crux website, I received an email from Tony O’Regan who runs the Wanaka App and the weekly Wanaka Newsletter (the latter is the successor to a publication started by former AAP-Reuters New Zealand correspondent, the late Ian McCrone). Tony O’Regan informed me that his mobile-based app and online newsletter was running successfully with an average of more than 25,000 readers a month, generating 140,000 reader sessions and 800,000 page views.
He said that to be competitive a local publisher must reach at least 60 percent of its adult market each month, and they must engage on average 10 times per month. Also – this traffic must be direct (not referral). If these benchmarks can be hit then the publisher has the opportunity to drive advertiser demand.
He then set out how his “tech stack” was achieving that objective. The key to his operation’s viability is the mobile app. It is clear that, to be successful at a local level, there needs to be a sophisticated technical structure that delivers a range of revenue options including innovative variants on advertising revenue and subscriber support.
It works in Wanaka and I daresay the model could work elsewhere. It’s not the silver bullet that solves all of the industry’s problems, but its refreshing to hear from someone with a blue skies attitude when all around are the disastrous effects of climate change.