Death by a thousand papercuts: Newspapers disappear as others thrive

• By PJ Taylor

It’s another very sad time in news media with the final nail in the coffin of Auckland’s Suburban Newspapers, the proud Couriers and Leaders of current events reporting.

This week, the newspapers network that has been a firm print on the fabric of Auckland’s news media landscape for more than half a century is no longer.

In printed form – gone. Yes, there will still be news reporting done on the ground in Auckland by publishers Stuff, but the famous mastheads are no more.

For many of us Aucklanders, they’ve been circulating as long as we can remember, as long as I’ve been around – Generation X and the Boomers.

These well-recognised and read titles have been dedicated to covering news in Auckland and are rolling off their last print runs. Goodbye: Central Leader, Western Leader, North Shore Times, Manukau and Papakura Courier, Eastern Bays Courier, Rodney Times, and Franklin County News.

Our local Suburban Newspaper was the Central Leader, growing up in New Windsor, a stone’s throw from Stoddard Road in Owairaka, where the Suburban Newspapers’ offices were once located for many years.

In the heyday 1970s and 1980s, when I was a kid and young adult, the Central Leader was a bulging, news and advertising local paper in tabloid size that got stuffed into letterboxes and most got into the house to be read for their news content and utilised to track down goods and services.

I’m sure it was the same in other parts of Auckland with their local newspapers.

In the days before internet competition and multimedia, newspapers were a highly viable news medium to get the message of advertisers in front of their prospective customers – their local community.

They still are, and the formula hasn’t changed – as the Eastern Times and Franklin Times are showing. The ad count was high, too, like for our present Times Media publications.

As Auckland grew, so did their circulation and importance – they let people know what was happening, and where it could be bought. Essential information in your neighbourhoods.

And all that for nothing! A free news and information service paid for by supportive advertising that saw the local newspaper delivered to just about every household letterbox in Auckland.

The end of the Stuff Masthead Publications’ Auckland Community Newspapers has been coming for some time. It has literally been death by a thousand papercuts.

It started about a decade ago when Stuff decided to create its own social media network Neighbourly. It got all its community newspapers’ editorial staff to build and populate it with content, get it up and running, and promote its relevance to their respective local audiences to generate engagement.

Then, towards the end of 2018, Stuff drastically axed the tens of jobs of most editorial staff who had built up Neighbourly from the Auckland Community Newspapers stable, while still producing the newspapers.

It left the citizens of the neighbourhoods and suburbs who have been loyal readers of and advertisers in Auckland local newspapers to a self-service social media network to generate their own news creation and information sharing.

The newspapers continued to be printed for the past six years but have been filled with lots of generic content that has been run in most titles. Hardly local-local news coverage.

For example, content in the Western Leader on one side of this vast region could be very similar to that found in the Eastern Bays Courier, and the Central Leader, and Manukau and Papakura Courier etc.

What that caused was a huge reduction in news stories being covered on the ground in Auckland.

Some areas of this region are poorly served in local news coverage, creating what is described nowadays as news deserts.

We at Times Media like to think East Auckland and Franklin are being very well served by our news coverage and clients’ advertising, via our popular websites www.times.co.nz, www.franklintimes.co.nz, through our regular Newsletters via email, on social media, and of course, in our hard copy print editions.

We produce newspapers, but we’re a community news provider, operating on several platforms. We want to connect with as many of the 180,000 people in our east Auckland as we possibly can.

It all comes down to relevance. If the content being generated is relevant and interesting to the readers in a publication’s circulation area, they’ll read it, while businesses and service providers will recognise that and support it with their important, highly valued advertising.

That is where Stuff has got it wrong since 2019. Sadly, its Auckland Community Newspapers titles were no longer relevant to the local communities they were supposedly meant to be reporting on and for.

We at Times Media applaud the bold, energetic and astute leadership and business expertise of our managing director Bo Burns, who, supported by her equally dedicated family, took on the ownership of this company last year.

She’s a community advocate, leader and businesswoman who is always focused on getting the best possible results for the communities she serves, lives and works in, and, when she does finally stop working, enjoys relaxing in.

We’re doing what all those proud, now former Suburban Newspapers titles were producing from their beginnings.

Most started out as small, independently owned community newspapers with a strong local focus, that eventually got bought up by a larger news media business, that came in the form of different owners over the past 25 years.

As the ink dries on the final print runs of the last editions of the Suburbans, I think of the great and amazing people and characters that worked for those newspapers down the decades.

I’d suggest most Auckland journalists have either worked for Suburban Newspapers or at least been published in them during their careers, and it’s a sad time to see the papers go, but at least we’ve the enduring friendships, memories and hard copy clippings.

But it does leave a large hole in the journalism sector for places where journalism graduates can get their first job, or experienced reporters can take on roles with greater responsibilities, such as editorships.

On this day, and it’s not customary for me to wish anyone dead, but I’m glad our former legendary editor-in-chief Pat Booth, one of this country’s most fearless, determined and competent journalists and writers, is not alive to see what has happened, because Pat would not be happy about this.

The late Pat Booth is the only journalist I know of who had the integrity and trust of his employers, the community and voters to be an editor-in-chief of a newspaper company, and to hold an elected position at the same time, when he was the Howick Community Board chair about 20-25 years ago.

R.I.P. Suburban Newspapers.

• The writer of this article, PJ (Phil) Taylor, worked as a senior reporter for Suburban Newspapers Ltd between 2001 and 2004 for then editor Edward Rooney (another Auckland news legend) at the Central Leader and Auckland City Harbour News; and at Stuff’s Auckland Community Newspapers from 2016 to 2018 as news director of the Eastern Courier and the Papakura Courier. They were great jobs working with fantastic people, staff and the communities.