Story of the New Zealand Press

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 664, 28 March 1952, Page 7

Story of the New Zealand Press

"TO a philosopher all news .. . is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet, not a few are greedy after this gossip." That was how Thoreau summed up newspapers nearly a hundred years ago. Since then the number of newspaper readers has grown astronomically. It wouldn’t be easy to say how many of

them are mainly "greedy after gossip," and how many read their papers in a way to justify the view of Wickham Steed, a former editor of The Times, that the outstanding function of the Press, "to gather, to make known and to interpret news of public interest," is "socially valuable and, uprightly discharged with a sense of responsibility, highly honourable," that "upon it the

safety of a community may depend." But most people nowadays certainly rely on their newspapers for somethingand it is equally true newspaper men get a ready audience when they start talking shop. A picture of The Press in New Zealand as seen by a number of men who have been associated with newspapers in one way or another will be given in nine talks which YA and YZ stations are to broadcast weekly at 9.15 p.m. on Thursdays, starting on April 3. New Zealand seems always to have had a

great number of newspapers, but the forerunner of them all was the old New Zealand Gazette. Only ten weeks after the famous gathering at Waitangi the first issue of this first paper published in New Zealand (there had been one issue in London) came off the press which had been set up in a prefabricated house on the Petone beach. In less than two months a second paper had appeared, in the Bay of Islands. The stormy atmosphere in which some of those early papers were established (sometimes the storm quickly overwhelmed them) will be described by Dr. G. H. Scholefield, former Chief Librarian of the General Assembly Library, in the first talk in the series. In the following two weeks he will bring the story of the development of the New Zealand Press down to recent times, and some surprises are guaranteed for those who don’t know their newspaper history, There are now forty-three daily papers in New Zealand, as well as many published less frequently. W. E. Crawford, editor of the Northern Advocate, thinks that this is a good thing-that there’s safety in numbers, In his talk,

the fourth in the series, he will describe the Press today, including the Press Association system of news collection and distribution. Then John Hardingham, Parliamentary correspondent of the New Zealand Herald, will give a picture of a reporter’s life as he sees it; Geoffrey Webster, literary editor of the Auckland Star, will explain the interest of newspapers in their readers’ tastes; an advertising man will discuss "The Press and its Advertisers"; and R. H. Billens, managing editor of the Manawatu Times, will talk about "The Press and the Fourth Estate." The series will end with a talk by Alan Mulgan on "The. Future of the Press." Mr. Mulgan is a former literary editor of the Auckland Star, and when he retired in 1946 was NZBS Supervisor of Talks,