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.

Eric Crampton: Canada a cautionary tale for big tech paying for news

Donald Trump convinced himself and a lot of Americans he could build a wall at America’s southern border and make Mexico pay for it.

It was an obviously terrible idea. And, unsurprisingly, it did not go well. Hundreds of miles of walls were built. But they weren’t very effective. And the money to pay for it largely came out of the US defence budget. Some parts of the wall cost $46 million per mile.

A lot of New Zealand’s newspapers have convinced themselves and the New Zealand government that they can have a whole lot of new newsmedia funding and make Big Tech platforms pay for it.

It is also an obviously terrible idea.