Westport News reports its own struggle to retain crucial advertising from the local council. Photo: Westport News
"It's like a drinking hole in a Serengeti that everyone comes to one point to get their water on a Tuesday or Thursday, when they used to be delivered. There was that shared experience and ability to graze and find stuff that you were interested in," Tim Murphy, former editor at the New Zealand Herald, said about the appeal of local community newspapers.
Tellingly, Murphy - these days co-editor at Newsroom - lapsed into the past tense in last Monday's episode of daily podcast The Detail, titled 'The Death of the Local Rag'.
These days, those watering holes are fewer and further apart, and 'news deserts' between them threaten to grow bigger.
Even Taupō - a substantial town and a tourism hub - is one of 14 places where the Herald's publisher NZME is proposing to close the local community paper - even though it has had the market to itself since rival Stuff closed its Taupō Times paper in 2022.
Meanwhile, one of the last independently owned daily papers in the country says it is "on a knife edge" in Westport, where it is also the only source of local journalism after 151 years in print.
Westport News is a proper daily paper that charges for its news in print and online.
It is family-owned and employs 15 people, as well as a number of mostly young people paid to deliver it in the district.
"We have never given away a copy. Even though it's not huge, we are getting an income from everything we do. We have been able to survive by focussing on local, local, local," editor and co-owner Lee Scanlon told Mediawatch back in 2020.
But recently, local readers were confronted with the front-page headline: "Your newspaper is at risk."
The News had discovered Buller District Council had decided to pull all of its advertising from the Westport News and publish it instead in a free weekly paper - The Messenger - published in Greymouth.
"All councils have a statutory obligation to publish their activities, so meetings and consultations and road closures and things like that. The council's decision actually puts our tiny little paper that runs on the smell of an oily rag at risk," News reporter Ellen Curnow told Nine to Noon earlier this year.
Westport News called on readers to speak up against the council's move. The 'letters to the editor' page has filled up with readers calling on the council to reconsider.
"Like all print media, The News faces very challenging times. We sit on a knife edge. Council's senior staff have sharpened that knife," News co-owners Lee and Kevin Scanlon wrote last Monday.
The next day's front page reported former Buller mayor Garry Howard was "shocked that the Westport News did not get approached and asked for options".
The council had made "a massive PR mistake" bypassing the local paper, he said.
"I love The News and sometimes hate The News, but it is an open forum that I, like many in the community, regard so highly - and will fight to retain," he told the paper.
The story also noted that this was not just local for Howard - it was personal.
His wife Robyn works as a proof-reader for the paper - but he said the paper was a community asset like a school, police station or the fire brigade.
On Wednesday, the paper's cartoon portrayed the council's controversial communications policy as a prize turkey.
That was the same day that Lee Scanlon went to a council meeting to address the policy.
"They heard from 12 speakers, most of them supporting the Westport News. The majority of councillors said: 'We don't like it.' It's the council staff who have cut out the Westport News from this advertising proposal," Lee Scanlon told Mediawatch.
"I would like to think councillors will reconsider the value of the local newspaper, and don't just leave their staff to decide communications, because that is a strategic decision.
"We had 50 to 60 people turn up yesterday. They couldn't all get into the council meeting room.
"The council has agreed to a 12-month trial with The Messenger, and the councillors weren't prepared to overturn that. So that leaves us exactly where we are."
Lee Scanlon has been in the tricky position of reporting a genuine local controversy while also campaigning on behalf of the paper.
The Westport News team: Front from left: Debbie Daniels, Ellen Curnow, Ray Curnow. Back from left: Raquel Joseph, Brett Evans, JoAnne Lavery, Lee Scanlon, Robyn Callaghan, Vanessa Neighbours, Sharna Johnson, Ellen Herbert. Absent: Jan Berry, KerriAnne Fussell, Kevin Vuglar. Photo: SHEREE CARGILL PHOTOGRAPHY
"On the very first day, we ran our lead story under my byline and an interview seeking answers to questions from the council chief executive under my byline to make it quite clear I was writing it," she told Mediawatch.
"On the front page we put a statement from my husband and I as co-owners to tell readers 'the future of your newspaper is at risk - and this is why'."
She said the 'prize turkey' cartoon was created by the News' cartoonist, working independently.
Who needs who the most?
The council is not obliged to support the Westport News - and Greymouth's 4000 residents who do not buy the paper may not see the messages the council pays to publish.
"I understand that logic. The Messenger is a free newspaper with a wider circulation than us - but (that) does not equal readership. We know the people who pay for our paper read it.
"Their logic for doing this is that the community had told them it wanted change. Their own survey which found about 80 percent of people were getting their newsletter and most of them were reading it. Only 26 per cent of the respondents were looking for any change at all - and that's only 68 people.
"But now we have seen this community come out in support of the local paper.
"We rely on every dollar. I'm not saying that the council is obliged to prop us up. We're actually just asking to be seen as the local newspaper that has served the community for 151 years.
"When news deserts pop up, we know that interest in local government [declines] and this district has had huge turnouts in elections . . . because of what they read in the local newspaper," Lee Scanlon told Mediawatch.
Tough times in Taupō
While the future of the Westport News has been front page news there, the Taupō & Tūrangi Herald has yet to report to its readers the news that owner NZME proposes to close it - along with more than a dozen other local papers in the North Island.
"Very sorry to hear about the shutdown proposal. You do a great job at keeping the community informed," local station Lake FM said on Facebook the day news broke in the Herald.
"You've got the paper, there's one other semi-local radio station (More FM) across the road with a morning programme (Breakfast Club with Andrew Leiataua) - and then you've got us," Jesse Archer, the morning host at Lake FM, told Mediawatch.
Lake FM publicises local events and happenings, but does not have journalists or a newsroom.
"Back in the day, the radio stations and networks used to advertise positions called 'community broadcasters' - and that's what I see my role as here and that's the approach that my colleagues take as well," Archer said.
"While all the media in town get the same kind of press releases from the council and the police, it's only the local paper that's actually sending the reporter along to an event ... or going and finding, you know, maybe the other side of the story."
"The newspaper at the moment is a curated 'one place to go'. The local community groups on Facebook scare me. They're mostly just a stream of random stuff.
"We've always been big on local events so I don't think that will change. We might look at opportunities to increase our kind of news service, but it really depends on how things look commercially.
"Maybe we need to think differently about our radio output. We've got good, strong connections with community organisations so we know about events that are happening.
"Maybe a separate website where we actually curate all that. Maybe there's another local news service that could spin up an association with the radio."
When NZME announced plans to close 14 local papers, some local mayors reacted with worry.
Sam Broughton, the chair of Local Government New Zealand, called for the publicly funded Local Democracy Reporting service to be expanded to all the country's regions.
But for that to happen, reporters have to be hosted at an established and viable news organisation.
"I absolutely support that idea - and it's something I've been campaigning for in the background. There's already a precedent in that LDR scheme for radio stations to participate."
He pointed to his former station 1XX in Whakatāne and CFM in Coromandel as two rare examples of locally run radio stations with journalists committed to regular local news on air.
"What I like about the LDR service is that it creates an arm's-length situation between the media and the council. Because we want to take council money for advertising - and at the same time we want to scrutinise and ask questions about what the council's up to."
"I would also call on RNZ as an organisation with probably the most stable funding for journalism to be looking at creating more roles in the regions as well, where a vacuum has been left by the local newspapers shutting up shop."
In Westport, Lee Scanlon said she was heartened to hear about local councils backing the local North Island papers which could be closed.
"The mayor in central Hawke's Bay has been leading the charge to save the newspaper. It's the opposite of what's happened here."
"I have mixed feelings about [extending the Local Democracy Reporting scheme). I wouldn't support [it] in this area, coming in on top of the Westport News, because actually, we have a long, long record of covering our council."
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