The Last Post

That’s it then. The End. Finito.

That was my immediate reaction to the news that Stuff’s printing plant at Petone will shut down next year and printing operations will be relocated to Christchurch.

The paper most affected will be The Post, Stuff’s Wellington morning paper – known in a previous incarnation as The Dominion Post, a masthead whose name was itself an ungainly amalgam of its precursor titles The Dominion and The Evening Post.

The Post is on its knees already. It won’t survive this upheaval.

Printing the paper in Christchurch and then freighting it north by truck and ferry, as Stuff apparently proposes to do, will be a death blow to a paper whose heritage dates back to 1865. I was tempted to use the phrase "coup de grace" rather than death blow, but strictly speaking, a coup de grace is a swift and merciful end for a person or animal that is suffering. This will more likely be a cruelly slow and inevitable decline, and painful to watch for anyone who values newspapers.

The proposed move means The Post’s final editorial deadline would be pushed back to the early afternoon, at best. Nothing that happens after that time will be covered in its news columns. It will therefore abandon any claim to be a genuine morning newspaper, or even a newspaper at all. Whatever “news” it contains will be withered and stale by the time it reaches any remaining readers.

The Post will be forced to rely even more on soft, flabby content that isn’t time-critical. This means more long-winded and ultimately pointless opinion columns, more cheap filler material lifted from overseas sources and irrelevant to New Zealand, and more lifestyle-oriented fluff – such as articles about movies, television, the arts, gardening, interior design, food and fashion – that used to be the preserve of glossy (for which read women’s) magazines.

Already the Auckland-based New Zealand Herald consistently carries more – and sharper – Wellington news. Wellingtonians who want to be informed on what’s happening in their own city have to read a paper published 500 km away.

And The Post won’t be the only title affected by the move. Stuff’s other North Island dailies – the Taranaki Daily News, the Manawatu Standard and my own local, the Wairarapa Times-Age – will also be printed in Christchurch and trucked north, which means they too will be subjected to the uncertainties of Cook Strait weather, ferry breakdowns and the inevitable road delays caused by a New Zealand Transport Agency that seems blithely indifferent to the impact of its endless and needlessly disruptive roadworks.

Those newspapers will therefore lose even more of the vital sense of “localness” that makes them relevant to their communities. Already their newsrooms have been hollowed out to the point where coverage of local news is scant and superficial. With the shift to Christchurch, the factors of time and distance will mean the papers become still more remote from the readers they supposedly serve.

This is madness. Much as I feel for the journalists still employed on these papers, some of whom I know personally, it might be more merciful – and more realistic – to shut the papers down now and abandon the pretence that they will continue to mean something in their terminally enfeebled state.

How did Stuff arrive at this dismal juncture? The immediate cause is the acquisition by the wealthy property investor Troy Bowker of the land and building that houses Stuff’s Petone printing plant. Bowker is not favourably disposed to Stuff, I assume for ideological reasons (Stuff is left-wing, Bowker is decidedly not), and I sense that he derived some satisfaction from giving the company notice to clear out next year and take its printing press with it.

He would have known very well that this created an existential predicament for Stuff, notwithstanding Stuff owner Sinead Boucher’s insistence that the company was ready and prepared for it and will take it the massive disruption and expense in its stride. Bowker obviously doesn’t believe her and I’m not sure I do either.

But the real origins of Stuff’s decline lie much further back. It began with the creation in 1999 of Sam Morgan’s Trade Me, a bold use of digital technology that deprived newspapers of a vital revenue stream from classified advertising – those lucrative pages of small-type ads for jobs, cars, properties and second-hand goods. In Australia, classified ads were famously described as “rivers of gold” and the same was true here.

That was followed by a much wider migration of advertising from print to online. Display advertising – the industry term for big ads, often occupying a full page, placed by department stores, car manufacturers and big corporates such as banks and telecom providers – soon dried up too as advertisers realised they could target their ad spend more effectively online.

Simultaneously, newspaper publishers were panicked into a suicidal rush to place editorial content online at no charge to readers. The assumption was that advertisers would follow in due course, to the benefit of newspaper websites. They didn’t.

The result was that newspapers were left with the same cost structure (because good journalism, after all, costs money) accompanied by a catastrophic slump in advertising revenue and income from newspaper sales – because why would people pay for a paper when they could read the news free on their PCs and mobile devices, and hours before the paper came out?

It didn’t help that some key media leaders – Boucher was one, as was Paul Thompson, now chief executive of RNZ but then executive editor of Stuff’s precursor, Fairfax Media – had an almost evangelistic faith in the digital revolution. The old newspaper model was being deconstructed and it was assumed that a brilliant new one would replace it. We’re still waiting.

Another baneful development was the sale of Independent Newspapers Ltd’s chain of newspaper titles – the ones now owned by Stuff – to Sydney-based Fairfax in 2003. INL was controlled by Rupert Murdoch but it was run by New Zealanders with a fierce commitment to newspapers.

Fairfax showed no such commitment either to newspapers or New Zealand. When the print media business became just too tough, the Aussies fled back to Sydney. They showed just how much they valued their New Zealand titles when Nine Entertainment, which by then had merged with Fairfax, sold them to Boucher for a token sum of $1. (The Petone building wasn’t included in the deal, for reasons that escape me.) 

Boucher herself then showed how much she valued her papers by changing the company name to Stuff. A company that took newspapers seriously wouldn’t have demeaned them by giving the company a frivolous name originally created for the INL website by whiz-kids from the advertising agency Saatchi, no doubt over a few bottles of expensive wine.

There have been other missteps along the way. Stuff recklessly alienated previously loyal readers by abandoning traditional journalistic principles of objectivity in favour of an overtly left-wing line that permeated all its news coverage and editorial comment. This coincided with, and no doubt contributed to, declining levels of public trust in the media overall. Stuff’s breast-beating front-page apology to Maori in 2020 for decades of supposedly racist coverage was dishonest as well as disgracefully unfair to generations of journalists who didn’t have a racist bone in their bodies.

This was consistent with the ignorance and disregard Stuff has regularly displayed for its editorial heritage. In 2023 it announced that The Dominion Post would be renamed The Post, a bland and meaningless name that conveyed no sense of the paper’s notable history. In fact it was a conscious disowning of the paper’s past. “We are under no one’s dominion,” then-editor Caitlin Cherry pompously pronounced, in a spectacularly fatuous statement that reflected the paper’s ideological obsessions. Cherry’s time as editor was short-lived and the inane change of masthead is the only reminder that she was ever there. The pointlessness of the change is evident from the fact that three years later, people still refer to the paper by its old name.

So now the paper formerly known as the Dom Post, and before that as two competing titles, The Dominion and The Evening Post, is about to take another step on its slow march to oblivion. It saddens me because I love newspapers and want them to survive; but it angers me too because at so many points along the way, the company that owns the paper has needlessly hastened its demise. And society as a whole is all the poorer for losing what was once a crucial source of reliable information about events of significance.

I often pass the Stuff printing plant on my way to Wellington on the Wairarapa train. It still displays the name of The Dominion Post. I was in that building on the night the new, state-of-the-art German press was used for the first time in 1990, when I was editor of the Dominion. It was a time of optimism and faith in the future of print. Now the press is to be dismantled and the building, by the sound of it, will be converted into apartments.

Much of what has happened in the years since the first papers rolled off that press was unavoidable. It was inflicted on the industry by the advent of digital technology. But the effects of the digital revolution could have been mitigated with better editorial and managerial judgment. Newspapers don't need to die; well-managed titles are still thriving overseas. 

For now, the Petone building is a poignant reminder of a time when newspapers mattered in New Zealand and the print media thrived; when the local paper was a vital part of daily life. Once the printing press and the Dominion Post sign have gone, the memory of that time will gradually recede to the point where it will be erased altogether. And The Post itself, which is already only a ghostly echo of what it used to be, will fade away too. Moving to Christchurch won’t save it, and anyone who says it will is either in denial or dishonest.

Correction: An earlier version of this post said Sinead Boucher bought the Stuff papers from Fairfax Media. In fact the seller was Nine Entertainment, of which Fairfax had by then become a part.

A masterclass in damage control, and Labour's PR flunkies didn't have to lift a finger

It has been fascinating to observe the media’s treatment of allegations against Labour leader Chris Hipkins by his ex-wife.

The first thing to note was the uniformity of the coverage. It was as if the political editors of the mainstream news outlets hurriedly got their heads together when the news broke yesterday and decided on a common approach.

The stories were all brief and couched in “nothing to see here, folks” language. They all made the same points: that the claims were “unsubstantiated” and that no one was accusing Hipkins of doing anything unlawful.

All the reports focused on Hipkins’ denials of his former wife’s damning claims. But crucially, not one explained what the allegations were. So the public were left in the dark.

Labour’s media team couldn’t have asked for a more obliging response. It has been a masterclass in damage control, and for all we know the Labour PR apparatchiks didn’t have to do a thing.

The stories also emphasised that the private Facebook post by Hipkins’ ex-wife, Jade Paul, had since been taken down – the clear implication being that at the very least she had had second thoughts, or that her claims were defamatory or untrue.

She has now said, however, that she stands by her post, which appears to have been triggered by a Labour Party election policy statement that she regarded as hypocritical.

“So many women are hurt by high profile men who just do what they want with no consequences,” Paul wrote in a subsequent post.

“We get told all of the time that if we speak out then our lives will be ruined, our kids will be impacted. We get labelled as ‘crazy’ or defamatory when we tell the truth.

“Today I have had enough.”

So what are Jade Paul’s claims? Essentially, that Hipkins treated her cruelly – for example, leaving her to drive herself home in a bloodied hospital gown after she miscarried because he was too busy to visit her and bring her clothes, and refusing to help after their brief marriage ended when she couldn’t afford groceries, saying their two children were her responsibility in the weeks she had them.

If true, the allegations are a damaging reflection on Hipkins’ character. In a brief statement, he rejected them “entirely” and said he didn’t intend to make any further comment. The stories also reported that Hipkins was taking legal advice (subtext: “I am the wronged party here”).

Will that be enough to settle public questions about the man who wants to be our next prime minister? I don’t think so.

The tone of the media coverage was summed up by a headline on the RNZ website: “Chris Hipkins’ ex-wife makes series of unsubstantiated claims about him”. It accompanied a relatively brief story by RNZ’s deputy political editor Craig McCulloch*.

It was a very peculiar headline in which the key word was “unsubstantiated”. It’s a word I don’t think I’ve seen before in hundreds of stories reporting accusations against politicians.

It neatly shifted the focus from the claims themselves to the fact that they were “unsubstantiated”. This could have been read as meaning they had no basis in fact (which is in itself unsubstantiated), or at the very least that they lacked credibility.

But “claims” are, by their very nature, unsubstantiated, and the media are not in the habit of inserting this loaded word in stories about allegations relating to politicians. Was this a case of RNZ acting on over-cautious legal advice, or did it decide the claims couldn’t possibly be truthful, that Hipkins’ reputation had been unfairly tarnished and it was the media’s duty to protect him by shutting the story down?

Here’s another thing to consider: would RNZ, and the media at large, have been so deferential if the accused politician had been, say, David Seymour? Hmm.

The claims against Hipkins presented the media with a crucial test. Public trust in journalists, as measured by opinion polls, has never been lower. That low level of trust is at least partially attributable to the public perception that journalists overwhelmingly lean left and that they give politicians of the left a free pass.

This perception was cemented during Jacinda Ardern’s prime ministership, when Beehive press conferences were an exercise in sycophancy and voices of dissent against the government were marginalised, ignored and shunned as pariahs. Bizarrely, National in opposition was subjected to harsher scrutiny – some of it merciless – than the party that was in power.

The government has since changed, and with it the tone of political reportage. Journalists and broadcasters who were obsequious toward the former government are notable for having magically rediscovered their killer instincts. Government politicians and policies are subjected to a level of aggressive scrutiny that was markedly absent during the Ardern years.

The disclosures by Hipkins’ ex-wife gave the media a chance to redeem themselves – to restore public faith in the willingness of political journalists to apply the blowtorch to the left as well as the right. And they blew it.

They could have reported the nature of the claims against Hipkins while making it clear they were unsubstantiated. That’s how the media in previous times would have dealt with the story.

There is a crucial matter of public interest here, and I don’t mean mere idle curiosity about the private lives of party leaders.

The accusations against Hipkins go to the heart of his character. New Zealanders are entitled to know what sort of man is putting himself forward to lead the country.

The claims against him may be false or unfair, but in other comparable countries – Australia, Britain and the US – you can be sure they would have been all over the front page. The public would have been told what he was accused of, Hipkins would have been given ample opportunity to defend himself and in due course the court of public opinion would have reached a verdict.

But no, not in New Zealand. Here the media try to extinguish the story as a non-event and expect the public to accept soothing assurances by a leading female Labour MP, Barbara Edmonds, that “marriage break ups are hard”, the implication being that Jade Paul has lashed out in anger because she’s hurting.

The tone of Edmonds’ statement struck me as patronising. It also raised an interesting question about Labour Party feminists and their solidarity, or lack of it, with a woman who claims to have been badly treated. Perhaps loyalty to the party takes priority over all other considerations.

I don’t know whether Jade Paul’s claims are true, although to me they have the ring of truth. They don’t strike me as the sort of stories someone would make up. But the bottom line is that the public are entitled to know what she has alleged, and it’s the media’s duty to tell them.

*The original version of this post wrongly described Craig McCulloch as RNZ's political editor.