Rotorua Morning Post

In 1931, after the Rotorua and Bay of Plenty Publishing Company paid £10,000 for the Rotorua Chronicle, the paper moved from evening to morning publication with a name change to Rotorua Morning Post.

Edward G Guy was the paper’s manager and then managing-director over the next two decades. The first editor was Lyonel George Ashton. Following him, through to 1941, the editor was Edmund G Webber, whose distinguished journalism career began at the Manawatu Times in Palmerston North. In August 1941, Sergeant Webber was appointed editor of the weekly N.Z.E.F. Times, published in Cairo for the country’s land, sea and air forces.

After his wartime career editing the N.Z.E.F. Times and as a war correspondent, it was expected that E G Webber would return to edit the Morning Post, Rotorua’s morning daily. Instead, he was appointed a special New Zealand Press Association representative in London.

Nevertheless, the Webber connection continued when, in 1946, the Morning Post published Johnny Enzed in Italy, the second of his books featuring the wartime soldier character Johnny Enzed. The year before the Rotorua and Bay of Plenty Publishing Co. had published Johnny Enzed in the Middle East. Both were illustrated by cartoonist Neville Colvin.

Webber’s replacement, H Lawson Smith, had wide-ranging experience with the Otago Daily Times in Dunedin, The Times, Palmerston North, The News in Whangarei, Sun in Christchurch, and Auckland’s New Zealand Herald. He retired in 1961.

In early 1947, the paper moved back to evening publication as the Rotorua Post and ran front page news from 1953.

During the 1950s, chief reporters included Douglas C Stevens, killed in a car accident returning from a work trip to Whakatane and Kawerau in 1957, and W D Grace, chief reporter for five years earlier in the decade, who was then chief sub-editor at the Rotorua Post before joining the NZ Wool Board.

In 1960, the Rotorua Post became part of a new newspaper grouping, United Publishing and Printing (UPP) headquartered in Rotorua, with a capital of £1.5 million. Shareholders in the four newspapers – Rotorua Post, Manawatu DailyTimes, Levin Chronicle and Wanganui Chronicle – and Wellington printer Hutcheson, Bowman and Stewart, became UPP shareholders.

Four years later and now called the Daily Post it was among the first NZ newspapers to buy web-offset presses which reduced costs while producing high quality printing.

Ian Thompson was editor for 21 years from 1964. A reporter on the Press and Greymouth Evening Star before moving to the Rotorua Post in 1958, he worked his way up to assistant editor before becoming editor. When he retired in 1985, he was reputedly the country’s longest-serving newspaper editor. The Daily Post’s other long-time editor, Robin Mayston, retired in 2002 after nearly 18 years in the job. Described in his 2015 obituary as a journalist of the old school, his mantra was ‘there is no such thing as a slow news day, just slow reporters’.

In 1985, UPP was bought by Wilson and Horton in which, in turn, became part of APN. The Daily Post moved to a compact format in 2013. The next year it was a morning paper again and part of the NZME group.