A recent Listener cover headlining the last impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Photo: RNZ Mediawatch
The latest Nielsen media readership results were mostly another dribble into the ocean of bad news our local media companies float on top of right now.
The New Zealand Herald's readership dropped from from 531,000 to just under half a million.
The Press lost 11,000 readers year-on-year, and The Sunday Star-Times lost 1000. The Herald on Sunday shed 6000 readers.
But New Zealand Listener was a distant light piercing through the gloom.
The country's oldest and most popular current affairs magazine increased its readership by 5000 to just over 207,000 in the latest results.
Its success bucks the general media trend as well as the crisis that struck the magazine business in 2020, when Covid brought advertising to standstill and pandemic restrictions forced magazines off the newsstands and outlawed delivery to mailboxes.
German-owned Bauer Media - the dominant magazine publisher in New Zealand at the time - shut down its entire stable of magazines at the stroke of a pen. Staff were informed of the 'effective immediately' closure in a single Zoom call with no notice.
Some publications never returned. Others, like North & South, experienced a rebirth only to again stop publishing in printed form recently.
New titles that emerged after the pandemic - like Woman, Thrive, and Haven - did not last.
Meanwhile, the once bulky and well-staffed lifestyle newspaper inserts have been thinning out too.
The long-time editor of the New Zealand Herald's weekend magazine Canvas - Sarah Daniell - and its award-winning feature writer Greg Bruce departed in recent rounds of NZME redundancies.
Some of the gaps left by these local writers and publications have been plugged by content from overseas publications.
But the endless stories about whether coffee and red wine are either killing you, or making you invincible do not really have a local connection - and that has left a gap in the market.
Some of that will be filled now by RNZ's new lifestyle section Life launched without fanfare last week.
It is filled with recipes, reviews, and stories on things like the joy of slow hiking and a heavily researched and sourced article on whether a four-minute shower is really enough to get clean.
(Spoiler alert: yes, if you prioritise your most grotty areas).
Under the new management of Are media, the new New Zealand Listener has been having some success with in-depth, non-shower related news on culture, and social issues.
Recent cover stories include a lengthy feature by its politics writer Danyl McLauchlan on how New Zealand forfeited its place as one of the world's most prosperous countries.
McLauchlan's assessment of the lasting effects of Covid on New Zealand covers eight pages in is the current week's edition - as well as the cover.
Inside, veteran journalist Rebecca Macfie has a wrote about "how New Zealand's benevolent state granted her privileges long denied Māori". It was a by-product of her 'Hardship & Hope' Listener series last year exploring poverty and grassroots work to reduce it.
The latest Listener issue takes aim at Kiwi exceptionalism, bravely asking whether the perception we 'punch above our weight' might be a myth.
Those topics are a little meatier than readers were used to in recent years, when Listener covers generally headlined health and wellbeing - and well-known people.
Back in 2008, the former longtime Listener journalist Gordon Campbell lamented "an increasingly narrow fixation on the lifestyle choices and social anxieties of a baby boomer elite".
"Someone recently suggested to me that a typical Listener cover story nowadays would run something along the lines of 'Is Your House Making You Fat?'"
The magazine's editor since 2023 - Kirsty Cameron - attributes its recent growth to audiences seeking out slow, in-depth reading experiences as an escape from a frenetic information landscape.
"I like to think we cut through the noise. We're offering really well written, well researched, well edited work every week," she told Mediawatch.
Cameron - also a former editor of North & South - said The Listener may also be benefitting from commercial media retreating from local lifestyle content.
Audiences are not as well-served as they once were with in-depth commentary on local culture, and social issues, and may be seeking it out from the magazine.
It now has the country's largest dedicated arts and books sections alongside its longer front-cover features, she said.
"I come back to this thing of a magazine's purpose being curation, and the other thing magazines need is a personality. Unfortunately what happens when the big media companies start gutting all their departments is you lose people who are champions of their different parts of the whole, and everything becomes a bit sort of same-same after a while.
"And you want to keep surprising people."
What exactly is lifestyle journalism in 2025?
"I think it's very broad and it's become a corner where all sorts of things are swept. When perhaps front-page editors and newsdesk editors don't know where to put something, they'll classify it as 'lifestyle'.
"And that can be anything. It can be culture, entertainment, pop culture, the arts. It's obviously food and stories about hospitality. But it can also be people's personal experiences."
Cameron supports RNZ's increased efforts to cover lifestyle and social issues.
Its non-commercial mandate meant it might be able to give topics more in-depth coverage than might be the case at commercial companies, which tend to have more constraints on their time and budgets, she said.
Though she acknowledged there might be industry concerns about the public broadcaster attracting audiences commercial companies also need to reach, she said it was good for a public broadcaster to expand the breadth of its coverage.
"It's Radio New Zealand, and New Zealand is more than just Wellington," she said.
"As long as you don't start bringing advertisers in, I think we'll let you do it," she added, tongue-in-cheek.
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