Much to my distress our newspapers are dying, in their wake leaving a legacy of widespread ignorance. They have now (the Otago Daily Times excepted) stopped publishing their sadly diminishing sales figures.
The NZ Herald had the initiative to package up their print issue with their web-site access but inevitably, I suspect, will pull stumps on the printed version, particularly home delivery.
Fingers crossed however, that the ultimate outcome of this state of affairs will be a single national quality newspaper, read by a hard core of doers and shakers who call the shots.
Such a newspaper would of necessity largely compose opinion pieces, print nowadays beaten to the punch by the instant news electronic media provides. Considered intelligent analysis of an increasingly turbulent world has never been more essential.
The precedent is already there in Europe. Whether Kiev, Stockholm, Paris, Lisbon or wherever, newspaper booths all prominently display the accepted world’s best newspaper, namely the Weekend Financial Times. For that matter it’s also on sale everywhere in North America and most African and Asian cities.
To some extent this situation has been achieved in Australia with the Australian weekend edition, always a wonderful read.
11 Comments
Then for those who really enjoy a good laugh, there is always Fox News.
Wasn’t the NBR looking to fill the function you describe above? It’s demise may indicate there isn’t a large enough market in NZ for such a publication, and those of us that want this type of analysis will need to stick to foreign publications such as The Economist, FT, etc.
But Bob how will the public learn about maori wonderfulness, the certainty of a climate calamity or the means a child might have of deciding which sex it will choose to be, without The Dominion Post and layabouts like that Joel Maxwell?
Bob
Offer $2 for Stuff (100 % profit on purchase) and off you go.
Then again, CNN will have you rolling about with tears running down your face.
Oh dear. Hope springs eternal. I suggest you start following former journalists on Substack, where you will find – for a fee – the sort of in-depth analysis and thoughtful argument that you might have found in the newspapers and magazines fifty years ago. Same with some of the blogs led by retired lawyers, military, business, healthcare and many others with a lifetime of practical experience.
They’re more expert than any journalist ever was, and certainly more so than the mid-20’s crowd hauled in by dying MSM outfits because they’re cheap and who know only how to be Politically Correct on any issue you care to name. No Speaking Truth To Power there. It’s precisely such ordinary people who worked together in 2004 to destroy the idiot “anchorman” Dan Rather at the peak of his power, because they knew things about computerised word processing and military documents that he and his idiot research staff did not, nor ever thought of asking questions about.
The Weekend Financial Times? Perhaps; given their financial coverage it’s likely they’re able to make a crust, sufficient to then be to investigate the non-financial world.
The first act of the incoming National Govt in 2023 should be to cancel all the ‘free’ Domposts that are strewn around the lifts of Government Departments every morning.
But how will I light my fire without newspaper?
Whether Print of Online, the key question is bias of the reporting.
NZ News Media is basically crap with threadbare analysis and often dubious reporting of fact.
It has killed itself – and Stuff is the prime example….
This, sadly, is true. The standard of journalism in New Zealand is at an all-time low. Many of our so-called journalists struggle to write coherent English let alone to seek out and adequately report the news.
We need the legacy media to die so it can be replaced with something less moribund and corrupt. Sean Plunket’s “The Platform” is an interesting use of technology to get back to what NZ media used to be when they used to actually interview people rather than just slagging them off.