NEWS IN NEW ZEALAND.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 3748, 7 February 1907, Page 2

NEWS IN NEW ZEALAND.

New Zealand could hide away in a corner of South Australia and never would be missed. Yet according to Mr Kirkpatrick, of the great State, there aee only two daily morning newspapers in the country, both producing an evening issue. Mr Kirkpat ick was struck with the avidity of the New Zealander for realing. It isn’t that the New Zeakmder is a greater reader than his cousin in South Australia, bat that New Zealanders have been energetic in planting newspapers. The South Australian State has tremendous townless stretches and one can’t set up a newspaper-office in the Great Desert, nor would a daily paper have a very large circulation on a million-acre sheep run. New Zealand has many advantages in this respect for there are very many towns, an evidence of the progressive nature of the people. This of course is no slur on our Australian relatives, for it is no use cutting up land where there is no water supply and no town can be born without something to feed it when it arrives. New Zealand really is a wonderful country for newspapers. It has sixty-two that appear daily, not a bad start for a handful of people who wouldn’t make an old world town. There are thirtythree tri-weeklies, twenty-four biweeklies, sixty-eight weeklies, thirty-six monthlies and others. It is inconceivable to many Australians that one town will often support two papers. Newspapers are a distinct and valuable feature of New Zealand life and of course a great help to the progress of the country. They are too an index of the increasing occupancy of land in New Zealand, for as we say there are no newspapers where there are no towns and towns are merely depots for the settlements. South Australia will of course have plenty of newspapers when it has plenty of settlement—a vastly different and more difficult problem in the great hot State than in wellwatered and temperate New Zealand.