Karl du Fresne: 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 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.

Karl du Fresne, a freelance journalist, is the former editor of The Dominion newspaper. He blogs at karldufresne.blogspot.co.nz.