Peter Bromhead, the cartoonist who has died at the age of 93, would have appreciated the irony in the fact that his only newspaper obituary of any substance was written for the title he spent years competing against…and they put it behind their paywall.
Shayne Currie wrote a commendable tribute to Bromhead for the New Zealand Herald last week but it appeared only online. The one place I have seen it in print is the Daily Post in Rotorua, where he died. It republished Currie’s story yesterday. Apart from an eight-line brief in the Otago Daily Times and some online tributes, I could find no other reference to his death. By coincidence, the Sunday Star Times published an interview with him only days before he died.
It is sad, however, that the closing chapter was not more widely acknowledged. Although Bromhead’s personality caused issues in the course of his life, his body of work was such that it deserved widespread recognition in its own right.
The minimalist style he developed after joining the Auckland Star in 1972 became instantly recognisable. Those who saw his cartoons as hasty scribbles were mistaken. The style belied both keen observation and thoughtful rendition. The economy of line with which he captured the character of Robert Muldoon, for example, was masterful. It is, perhaps, to Bromhead’s enduring credit that Muldoon reputedly hated the caricature.
Peter Bromhead added a personal insight to decades of New Zealand life, a viewpoint that will add nuance and bite to future histories. Cartoons fill a unique role in informing us about the past and his work has now been added to that panorama.
There was cynicism in Bromhead’s work that perhaps reflected the appalling childhood he chronicled in his memoir Scratching a Living. In May, after moving into hospice care near the end of a lengthy battle with cancer, he posted on Facebook what he said might be his last cartoon “after 50 years of inky drawing”. It was a play on the work of Saul Steinberg, another cartoonist renowned for what New Yorker (where Steinberg’s work often appeared) as “the masterful language of line”. Bromhead’s final cartoon was a jack-in-the-box skull and crossbones.
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The latest Nielsen print readership results presented me with a dilemma: Do I accentuate the positive or highlight some grimmer realities? I have decided to start with the good news.
James Frankham’s monthly New Zealand Geographic has piled on an impressive 18,000 extra readers in the past year and is read by 434,000. Meanwhile, three of the four local weekly magazines have also posted increases year on year.
Stuff’s TV Guide added 16,000 to reach a total readership of 297,000 while Are Media’s New Zealand Woman’s Weekly has increased readership by almost three per cent to sit at 443,000 and its New Zealander Listener is up more than four per cent at 222,000.
In the monthly market Rugby News – benefitting no doubt from international tours – is up an impressive 38,000 to 210,000 readers, while Stuff’s lifestyle title New Zealand Gardener has put on 29,000 readers (up 11 per cent to 284,000) and its stable mate NZ House & Garden rose 20,000 to now boast 400,000 readers.
The newspaper market could not match such gains, but the news was not all bad.
Stuff’s largest dailies held their own. The Post was up 1000 readers to 117,000 while The Press held steady on 93,000. The Waikato Times, however, was down seven per cent year-on-year but equalled the previous quarter at 53,000 readers. NZME’s New Zealand Herald was down marginally year on year to sit at 500,000 but faced a larger quarterly drop of 12,000.
The Otago Daily Times result was disappointing, given its strong endeavours to maintain a high level of local and regional news coverage. Its readership over the year dropped by 11 per cent to now stand at 81,000.
There were significantly different fortunes for the Sundays. The Herald on Sunday was up 3000 to 311,000 readers, while the Sunday Star Times shed 25,000 readers to stand at 170,000. Frankly, I am at a loss to understand why the SST would lose almost 13 per cent of its readership over the past year. It shared its then editor Tracy Watkin with The Post, which registered a rise. In 2024 Watkin was named Editorial Leader of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards and was highly rated by many people, including me. Perhaps we will see a turn-around with the appointment of Matthew Hooton as its editor-in-chief in June (outside the survey period), Hooton, who also heads The Post, has been making changes to both newspapers.
There was a time when I took readership numbers with a small grain of salt. That was because we had audited newspaper circulation figures on which to judge changing print fortunes. They were finite numbers – paid copies sold – while readership was an assessment of average readership based on multiplying formulae applied to survey samples. Audited newspaper circulation numbers are no longer made public because they are now only a shadow of the glory days of print.
We are left with their readership numbers. Quarterly changes can be influenced by the seasons, but annual comparisons are a sold gauge of changing audience sizes for print editions.
James Frankham, on the other hand, has been remarkably open about New Zealand Geographic’s subscriptions, circulation, and readership. He has made impassioned pleas for people to renew subscriptions or start new ones to ensure the magazine’s survival. On the basis of the latest readership numbers, those calls to action – along with attractive content – would seem to be paying off.
There is no doubt that our news publishers are putting much of their effort into digital and video versions of content. That is understandable. You only have to look at NZME’s interim report for the six months to June to see why. The group’s cumulative total for readership of its print titles stood at 1.2 million while their digital audience was edging close to two million.
Nevertheless, news publishers neglect their print editions at their peril. Across the country they continue to represent significant subscription and advertising revenue. Faced with the impact of AI summarising on referrals from search and social platforms to the papers’ own websites, this is money they can ill-afford to lose. Survey published by the Wall Street Journal in late June showed that its traffic from Google had declined by about 18 per cent from the previous June, while the Washington post had lost close to 45 per cent of its traffic from that platform. It affects not only US tiles. The impact is worldwide.
The relative stability in readership of our daily newspapers suggests there is life in the old girls yet.