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.

Karl du Fresne: Stuff's operating model: cheap and lazy

Last Tuesday’s edition of my local paper, the Wairarapa Times-Age, devoted an entire page to an Associated Press (i.e. American) feature story about affluent middle-class professionals taking extended career breaks.

The people mentioned in the story are representatives of an elite US metropolitan class who can afford to put their careers on hold while they spend months enjoying a “reset” in exotic locations such as Egypt and Brazil. It’s hard to imagine a story less relevant to readers of a paper in a New Zealand provincial town where many people are struggling.

Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Did Stuff make the right call publishing the Tom Phillips audio?

I'm baffled by the Police Commissioner writing that open letter telling off Stuff today.

You probably missed this thing when it actually happened, which was back in September, but in the week that Tom Phillips was shot and the kids were saved from the bush, Stuff got its hands on some of the audio of the police chase, and they published it.

Matua Kahurangi: NZ Herald buys silence

Free speech champion gagged by contract

The New Zealand Herald has revealed itself as one of the biggest bullies in the media landscape, and the latest example is their handling of Jonathan Ayling, the recently departed chief executive of the Free Speech Union.

Simon O'Connor: More biased voices wanted

Stuff is calling for kiwis to share views on what's happening in Israel and Gaza, but don't expect there to be any balance.

The Stuff headline (below) can be best described as a lie. To date, Stuff has shown little interest in presenting a range of views on this complicated conflict, and this call made at the start of the week will be no different. I would anticipate a careful selection of ‘voices’ that reinforce the single narrative Stuff has been pushing for months now. More worryingly, it will probably enable the usual tropes, slurs, and half-truths to be repeated. What we are witnessing is not reporting but propaganda.

Matua Kahurangi: Stuff sinks to new low as convicted thief Golriz Ghahraman becomes their voice on Iran

Stuff has just confirmed what many Kiwis already suspected. The line between journalism and activist propaganda has all but disappeared. In its latest farce, Lloyd Burr and the Stuff editorial team have handed a megaphone to none other than Golriz Ghahraman, the disgraced former Green Party MP and convicted serial shoplifter, to lecture New Zealanders on the state of democracy in Iran.

DTNZ: Trade Me and legacy media outlet Stuff announce merger in major digital media shakeup

Legacy mainstream media outlet Stuff and auction site Trade Me have agreed to a merger in which Trade Me will take a 50% stake in Stuff Digital, the division behind stuff.co.nz and ThreeNews, while Stuff’s newspapers, events, and Neighbourly are excluded from the deal.

JC: Why Do the Left Not Learn

The question is something of a conundrum. I am referring specifically to their behaviour and strategy. From their perspective politics is littered with examples of how these two things hurt them in all sorts of ways. They seem to have become obsessed with the nasty side of politics. They have a propensity to go after the person and not the policy. This fanaticism extends, unsurprisingly, to their comrades in the media who seem to think, irrationally, this is a good idea.

David Farrar: Stuff refusing to run ads on the Treaty

Hobson’s Pledge reports:

We attempted to book the Sunday Star Times, The Post, the Christchurch Press, and The Southland Times. It would have been a tidy sum of money for the financially beleaguered media outlet…

Our ad was very simple. Just words on a page communicating what is at the heart of the debate – equal rights. Vote for the Bill for equal rights. Say no to the Bill, say no to equal rights.

Ele Ludemann: Free speech loss

Stuff refused to publish this advertisement from Hobson’s Pledge:

Stuart Smith: ECAN and the Blythe River

As local MP I have had a lot of complaints about the inaccuracies in ECan’s report which led me to write to them seeking an explanation.

What is particularly alarming is ECan’s dismissive response to these legitimate grievances. Instead of engaging in meaningful dialogue and addressing the substantive issues raised, ECan has chosen to cling to hollow assurances of being “Honest Brokers” and championing the accuracy and integrity of its science reports. Such platitudes ring hollow in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Sir Bob Jones: Reefton - The new Paris

In an at times ridiculously over the top article by an Annamarie Quill, the Stuff website recently waxed worshipfully about the virtues of the West Coast town of Reefton.

First, it had the cheapest houses in New Zealand. There’s an age-old reason for that being few people want to live there, notwithstanding its vaunted trout-fishing, potential gold mining resources and the discovery of a rare mineral, antimony, yet to be mined but apparently in hot demand.

Peter Dunne: Media students and jobs

There has been a positive but restrained response to the deal announced between Stuff and Warner Brothers Discovery to “save” TV3’s six o’clock nightly news bulletin, currently screened under the Newshub label. According to Stuff, the deal will mean that around 40 of the jobs involved can also be saved.

Cam Slater: Death Spiral or Flat Spin?

Political journalists and commentators are often prone to examples of exaggeration. Tova O’Brien is one of the worst, but it is understandable when you work for a niche publication that is so close to failing that its staff resort to calamitous exaggerated headlines to attract readers to their dross.

Sir Bob Jones: Is Stuff stuffed?

Reading Stuff’s principal newspaper, Wellington’s The Post, I now treat as a daily entertainment for its blunders.

Worldwide, newspapers are going over like ninepins, sustained only because they’re a life-long habit by older generations. Most people under 35 have never as much held a copy, glued as they are to their brain-rotting, ironically so-called smart phones and their diverse idiotic but plainly addictive offerings.

The problem for print media relying on that aging demographic is the buggers keep dying off.

Point of Order: Yes, voters supported the scrapping of the Māori Health Authority......

.....but Stuff reminds us of the Waitangi Tribunal’s role…

Reinforcing the credence of an article posted here last week, Stuff yet again has been promoting the notion that “The Treaty” should over-ride the country’s democratic governance arrangements.

In the article published on Point of Order under the headline Media chiefs struggle to understand democracy, Graham Adams noted that New Zealand is about to be immersed in a highly charged debate about the “principles” of the Treaty of Waitangi and its status in New Zealand’s political life.

Graham Adams: Media chiefs struggle to understand democracy

News outlets compromised in the Treaty principles debate.

Listening to Sinead Boucher speak last week at a parliamentary hearing on the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, it was easy to be captivated momentarily by her rhetoric about democracies requiring a strong and free media.

Addressing the select committee MPs, she said: “A strong, independent news media is essential… As elected representatives in a democracy, I know you really understand the necessity for a strong, free press… that helps inform and educate New Zealanders on the issues that are really important to them.”

Then you remember suddenly she is talking about Stuff.

Karl du Fresne: I defended the media then; I wouldn't now

In his media column in the New Zealand Herald today, Shayne Currie reports that media organisations are having to think about security arrangements for journalists covering the election campaign. TVNZ went to the extent of hiring security staff for its news team at the National and Labour campaign launches, both of which were disrupted by protesters. Currie quotes TVNZ executive editor Phil O’Sullivan as saying: “Globally we’ve seen an increase in anti-media sentiment. We’re now seeing this in New Zealand too, with an increase in abuse directed towards our reporters while out in the field, and threatening behaviour in online spaces disproportionately impacting our female reporters.”

Karl du Fresne: The Family First advertisement you didn't see

Too hot to handle: the Family First ad that six papers refused to publish.

Last Wednesday, Family First launched a campaign of resistance against the pernicious spread of gender identity ideology. The “What is a Woman?” campaign invites people to sign a petition that defines a woman as an adult human female – a proposition so self-evident that the necessity of affirming it would have been considered laughable only a few years ago.

Bruce Moon: Should these books be burnt?

“The first reaction to truth is hatred.” Tertullian, ca160-225AD

In “Stuff” for 2nd July 2023 there appears a piece by one Gabrielle McCullough, entitled “Racist Propaganda; The undercover campaign to infiltrate school libraries.” Wow! “Undercover”? That’s good, since the weapons used in this alleged “campaign” were actually books!! Hard covers or soft??

These books were published by independent publisher, Tross, of Khandallah, Wellington. Librarian Julia Smith at one school was “shocked” to find that a teacher had bought a couple of Tross books which were already on her library shelves. As the Stuff article continues: