It takes a lot to bowl over seasoned journalists but the appointment of Matthew Hooton as editor-in-chief of The Post in Wellington skittled more than a few. Even the Stuff website described it as “a bombshell move”.
Hooton’s background is political communication and public relations. He was one of Jim Bolger’s press secretaries and a National Party strategist. He has never been a journalist, although his commentaries have been a regular feature in the New Zealand Herald and other publications.
His website describes him as “the country’s leading centre-right political commentator”. It goes on to say he “is well connected with the most senior figures in all three parties in New Zealand’s centre-right National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government and with the Opposition Labour Party.” Perhaps he is not on the Green Party or Te Pāti Māori invitation lists.
Although he has widespread consulting experience beyond politics, it is his perceived political leanings that will create the greatest controversy over his appointment at The Post.
There will be critics aplenty, who will see The Post being printed on blue paper and espousing the unchallenged views of the Right (with a very large Capital R). They will be goaded into red-faced rage when they see the title of his recently completed PhD thesis: “Groundwork and Principles of Applied Conservatism”.
I suspect that controversy has a large part to play in Sinead Boucher’s decision to appoint him editor-in-chief of Wellington’s daily newspaper, but it will not be through any desire to provide him with a powerful soapbox for political allegiances.
The co-owner of Stuff is too smart to disenfranchise a large part of The Post (and Stuff’s) readership by shifting the paper to an overtly partisan position. It would also run counter to the roles she has characterised for her company’s journalism.
Matthew Hooton will be controversial…on an ongoing basis. I know him a little and I would say it is in his nature to challenge, to push against conventional thinking. When we both had commentary spots on RNZ National, we sometimes sat chatting while waiting to go on air. I sampled the way he thinks and the way he throws challenging statements into a conversation to gauge the thinking of others. Not that I needed much encouragement, but sometimes he made me think.
He will push the staff of The Post and he will push its audience. That, I think, will be a good thing. It will be a good thing, however, only if he leaves his past at the door.
He will face enough challenges without courting claims of political bias. The first will be learning to be an editor.
Firing off newspaper columns via email does not teach you the complex business of news production. It is nuanced, sometimes arcane, inculcated with a newsroom culture often developed over decades, requiring judgement on multiple planes and derived from news values that are learned on the job, and always facing the unanticipated. All this is before we even start to think about the technical production of nightly editions and insatiably hungry digital sites.
He must also overcome the temptation to regard it as his newspaper. It is not his, nor that of its publisher. It is something held in trust for its readers and it is their needs that it must meet.
Matthew Hooton is smart enough to learn these things, and smart enough to know how easy it would be to lose a vital part of The Post’s audience by taking it to places it should not go. He is also smart enough to recognise his own limitations and work with a team.
Sinead Boucher has made a canny move by appointing political editor Luke Malpass as the paper’s associate editor. He will fill some of Hooton’s knowledge gaps. However, the new editor-in-chief will also need expert technical guidance. The imminent shift to printing The Post in Christchurch and shipping it north could write a new chapter for “Tales of the Unexpected”.
Many will think Hooton’s appointment is unprecedented: “An editor who has never been a journalist? An editor with clear political links? Unheard of!”. Not so. Leslie Munro, a lawyer and Dean of the Auckland Law School, had written expert editorials for The New Zealand Herald before being invited to become editor in 1942. He had to resign from the National Party’s Dominion Council to take up the role but in the nine years he was in the chair he solidified pro-National coverage and cemented a “Tory” reputation that the newspaper has never entirely lived down (in spite of my strenuous efforts when I sat it that chair).
Ian Grant’s book Pressing On quotes an academic, Sarah Sharp, on Munro’s editorship and that which followed. She drew a strong parallel between Munro’s political associations and the Herald’s coverage: “…the coincidence between a heavily pro-National imbalance in the election news coverage and the vehemently anti-Labour editorship is so strong as to beggar any other explanation of the imbalance.”
If anything, Sir Leslie Munro (he was knighted in 1955) should provide Hooton with a lesson in what not to do. The incoming Post editor-in-chief may be controversial, but he should court controversy for the right reasons.
Metro’s 11th-hour revival
Warwick Roger will be smiling down from the firmament at the news the magazine he founded 45 years ago is getting a new lease on life.
Metro has been technically ‘paused’ for the past six months and its sale to Simon Farrell-Green and Hannah Kidd comes as the minute hand gets perilously close to the end of the ‘golden hour’ surgeons have to save serious trauma patients.
Farrell-Green and Kidd have the right credentials to save the patient but no-one should doubt the challenge they face.
A look at the Metro website suggests it has adopted many of the characteristics of the dead parrot in John Cleese’s famous Monty Python sketch.
The Metro website shows subscriptions to its print and digital editions are “currently unavailable”. Curiously, that lack of access has a price – $0.01. The last edition of the magazine to be produced was its Summer 2026 issue which appeared last December. The print edition is “sold out” but a digital copy can still be purchased for $7.95. The last free article posted on its website seems to have been placed there in September 2025. This once storied magazine was giving every indication it had become as devoid of life as Mr Cleese’s parrot.
Its new owners, however, have obviously detected vital signs in the Auckland-focussed periodical Roger created in 1981.
We’ve all heard those stories about critically ill patients being brought back from the dead. Farrell-Green and Kidd do not have a medical miracle under their belts, but they do have a track record for successful beginnings.
Farrell-Green was a victim of Bauer’s desertion of the New Zealand market in 2020. He had been editor of Home magazine, which closed abruptly in the pull-out. He wasted no time teaming up with Kidd and launching architectural magazine Here, a bi-monthly that has just clocked up its 36th issue.
Home was not the only Bauer casualty. Metro was also in the stable. It briefly closed but was one of the mastheads purchased from Bauer by Australian publishing group Are Media. It was swiftly sold on to local publisher Simon Chesterman, who on passed it three years later to Still Media. Its subsequent fortunes might be described as faltering. By the end of last year, the faltering had robbed it of most signs of life.
Its one-time stablemate North & South has also been on “indefinite hold” and its bedside monitor is likely to continue to flatline. On the other hand, Farrell-Green and Kidd could well pull off a miracle and bring Metro back to good health.
I doubt it will be business-as-usual for a restored Metro. That is not the pair’s style. Here shows they are innovative. It is a magazine with, yes, style. Its flair and high production qualities tell me they will bring a fresh look to the Auckland magazine and market the digital edition as hard as the print issue.
Farrell-Green is a one-time contributor to Metro but his association with the magazine was not close enough to risk him falling into a nostalgia trap. He is more likely to approach the challenge as he did with Here – not entirely a clean slate (he applied what he had learned editing Home) but very obviously different.
Metro needs more than a return to good health. It needs a rebirth. Auckland is not the city it was more than four decades ago when Warwick Roger presented it with the shock of the new. While his innovations and contributions to journalism must not be diminished, his vision for Metro has had its day. Successors such as Bill Ralston, Nicola Legat and Simon Wilson each made their marks but I have always sensed the founder’s fingerprint remained as a watermark on its pages before and after his death in 2018.
Six months is a sufficient interval to allow a new Metro to emerge – long enough for some of the familiarity to dim but not so long that the magazine has been forgotten. It must still trade on the undoubted residual value in its masthead but inside the covers it should be a new offering.
The new Metro will launch itself onto a different city, a different audience, and different content challenges within a digital kaleidoscope. One thing has not changed: Auckland is still the biggest market in the country, and its population has more than doubled since Metro first hit the street.
That has brought with it changes in the city’s demographics and culture. If any publication needs to reflect and serve those changes it is Metro. It has always identified with the city and has unashamedly directed its focus there. That must not change, but its new owners must rethink how it meets those needs.
Farrell-Green and Kidd have said very little about their plans for Metro, but one announcement is an encouraging signal that they don’t intend to simply restore what already exists.
They have hired Shannon Gibson, a former Auckland art director who comes with an impressive portfolio compiled working on London’s Financial Times’ weekend magazine. Her website demonstrates a talented blending of traditional elements (that might attract older readers) and strong graphical elements that are unafraid to hit (younger) readers in the eye. Her magazine covers and features layouts are clever and quirky. Take a look (https://studiosg.co.nz).
The new Metro team will have many challenges, not least being the defining elements of who they serve and how. They must also decide the correct balance between its digital output and a magazine they still want to see in people’s hands. It is all too easy for one to be at the expense of the other.
The acquisition has a good feel about it. Now we wait to see who will be appointed as its editor.