Death knell for print media?

Written By: - Date published: 11:32 am, March 16th, 2009 - 13 comments
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A conversation that seems to be occuring more and more frequently is asking what’s the future of our newspapers? It’s a global question and is examined in some depth in this interesting article from The American which says:

Speculation about the future of the newspaper or its equivalents should start with a review of the newspaper of the past. It was a brilliant blend of three things:

•Technological innovations—Cheap paper from wood pulp; the high speed rotary press that turned rolls of newsprint into 30,000 two-sided pages an hour; the linotype; a long-distance telecommunications system that was fast but too expensive for individuals to use.

•The nature of the newspaper itself—a cheap, portable, disposable, random access device that could serve as a platform for content of all kinds. Think of it as 19th-century broadband.

• The moat around content created partly by copyright law, but even more by the difficulty and cost of stealing it. No one could economically take and resell the product without a large-scale operation, which made any taker easily visible. Even after the invention of the copy machine it cost almost as much to copy a single article as to buy a whole paper. Copyright was important, but protection-via-technological impossibility was crucial.

If the question is whether newspapers can remake themselves into strong businesses adapted to the Internet Age, combining the past strengths of the news biz and their incredible brand recognition with the new power of the Internet, the answer is ‘maybe.’

These forces produced a business model of extraordinary power.

Fast forward ten years it will be interesting to see where our publication industry sits – and what role blogs and other online communications play. But what we must take care to protect is that staffing levels that allow the gathering and analysis of events, lest we all end up commenting on anecodotes alone.

Preparing the Obituary

By James V. DeLong Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Filed under: Culture, Public Square
Netizens and the news business are locked in a mutually destructive death spiral. Can anything arrest the decline?

In small-town Ohio in the early 1950s, the main link to the outside world was the Canton Repository newspaper. The radio had a role, as did the movies, and television was about to explode through the culture, but the newspaper had breadth and depth. It was the Repository that had the maps showing how the Marines fought out of the trap at Chongjin Reservoir, and it was the Repository that nurtured my unshakable view that an essential feature of a good newspaper is lots of comic strips.

The Repository was delivered daily in the late afternoon. Paperboys collected bundles of papers that were tossed off a truck at Sterling’s Drugstore downtown and showed an admirable skill at folding each into proper aerodynamic shape. Some rode special bikes, with a front wheel built small enough to accommodate a large basket which held the papers within easy reach to grab and throw. The boys also bore the collection risk—once a month they trudged their routes, punch cards in hand, ringing doorbells and recording the payments, or, since the town was poor, the excuses.

On Sundays, we added the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Pittsburgh was closer, but the lines of culture ran north and Pennsylvania was considered exotic. This was Indians and Browns territory, not Pirates and Steelers, and the papers were important parts of the identity.

The Repository still exists, circulation 66,812, and 86,357 on Sunday. GateHouse Media bought it in 2007 from the Copley Press, but Mr. Stock Market does not think much of GateHouse Media’s prospects, since the price of $20 per share in May 2007 has shrunk to 7 cents in March 2009, even worse than the 83 percent haircut taken by newspaper stocks generally in 2008. Mr. Market’s gloom seems warranted, since the company has $1.4 billion in debts and must include ‘intangible assets’ and ‘goodwill’ of over $1 billion to provide the balance on its balance sheet.

The state of newspapers as financial entities does not reflect their basic strengths as brands.

The Plain Dealer is the largest paper in Ohio and is part of Advance Publications, the empire of the Newhouse family that includes the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and a slew of business magazines. Its market penetration is impressive, as more than 75 percent of adults in the area read it on Sundays. Advance is privately owned, so its finances are unknown.

The immediate question is whether these institutions will survive into the next decade, or possibly even into next year. The answer is complicated. If phrased as: Will these and other newspapers continue to put content on newsprint and blanket their viewsheds? the answer is ‘no.’ Some will continue in their present form, but many are in a downward spiral. The New York Sun just folded, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune is in bankruptcy, the McClatchy chain has $40 million in operating income per quarter and debt service of $34 million, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is about to shut down or go online-only. For the first nine months of 2008, the Washington Post newspaper business lost $178 million on $600 million of revenue; the company is bailed out by its educational subsidiary and cable television. The rot has spread to the magazine business, too; a dozen big ones had ad page decreases of 20 percent or more last year.

Some numbers are still rosy. Circulation may have peaked in 1984 at 63.3 million and declined since, to 54 million in 2007, but 20.4 million of that decline came from afternoon papers, slain by TV news. The morning papers increased their circulation from 35.7 million in 1984 to 44.5 million in 2007. Ad revenue, $23 billion in 1984, went to almost $50 billion 25 years later. Such improvement in market position was hardly a catastrophe for the survivors. Furthermore, the Newspaper Association of America will be happy to deluge you with numbers on readership, penetration, time spent, and other favorable aspects of the business. Indeed, despite the looming Internet, until 2005 ad revenue was expanding steadily, to a peak of $49.4 billion.

However, after the 2005 peak, ad revenues declined to $45.4 billion in 2007, followed by quarter-by-quarter falls of 12 percent to 20 percent during the catastrophes of 2008. Audience share is in a long-term decline. In 1992, 71 percent of survey respondents said they read a paper ‘regularly,’ but only 46 percent said so in 2008, and only 34 percent read a newspaper ‘yesterday’ (which is probably a better measure), and the decline is particularly large among young people. The newspapers’ share of total advertising also declined between 1984 and 2005, as the national market tripled while their revenues only doubled.

Most important, both the stock market and the internal industry observers are extremely gloomy. As noted, the former has given business not just a haircut but a shave as well, and there has been a recent boom in the number of woe-is-us articles that the Internet is killing the industry, including suggestions that the only solution is endowments or patronage.

The news biz has not really lost its readers; it just lost its ability to monetize them.

Even the Ozymandias of the business, the New York Times, is selling off valuable real estate assets to feed the hungry demands of its declining news business and recently accepted money from Mexican billionaire and crony capitalist Carlos Slim on distress-financing terms.

Clearly, the current business model is sick unto death.

But if the question is changed to whether newspapers can remake themselves into strong businesses adapted to the Internet Age, combining the past strengths of the news biz and their incredible brand recognition with the new power of the Internet, the answer is ‘maybe.’ It depends heavily on their shrewdness and on their ability to develop a new model for monetizing content and selling it to the society at large.

Peering through the murk of doomsaying, the state of newspapers as financial entities does not reflect their basic strengths as brands. Many besides GateHouse are in financial trouble because the assets on their balance sheets are heavily tilted toward the airy—’Goodwill,’ ‘Intangibles’—while the liabilities are hard debt and pension obligations. Gannett, the largest chain, had $9 billion in these two asset categories, as of September 2008, and $4.4 billion in harder assets, such as ‘Receivables,’ or ‘Plant.’ It also had long-term debt and other liabilities of $5.4 billion. As of January 2009, Gannett was considering a $5 billion dollar write-off.

If one examines the balance sheets with a thought to letting out the air, transmuting the debt to equity through the purge of bankruptcy, and reconstituting the newspapers as mixed print and Internet entities, a future looks possible.

Yet a third question is: If the newspapers do not survive, then what takes on the crucial social and economic roles they have performed over the past century and more? That is unknowable. Failing some inventive institutional spark, some vital functions might simply go unperformed. The Internet is creating a ‘tragedy of the commons’ situation for news, and no one ever claimed that all problems have solutions. Decay and decline are always options, and—unless some mechanism is found to let producers of information monetize their work—inevitabilities. Absent institutional invention, a government-funded news service seems not just possible but likely, possibly supplemented by privately funded organizations with varying axes to grind.

Is Past Prologue?

Speculation about the future of the newspaper or its equivalents should start with a review of the newspaper of the past. It was a brilliant blend of three things:

•Technological innovations—Cheap paper from wood pulp; the high speed rotary press that turned rolls of newsprint into 30,000 two-sided pages an hour; the linotype; a long-distance telecommunications system that was fast but too expensive for individuals to use.

•The nature of the newspaper itself—a cheap, portable, disposable, random access device that could serve as a platform for content of all kinds. Think of it as 19th-century broadband.

• The moat around content created partly by copyright law, but even more by the difficulty and cost of stealing it. No one could economically take and resell the product without a large-scale operation, which made any taker easily visible. Even after the invention of the copy machine it cost almost as much to copy a single article as to buy a whole paper. Copyright was important, but protection-via-technological impossibility was crucial.

If the question is whether newspapers can remake themselves into strong businesses adapted to the Internet Age, combining the past strengths of the news biz and their incredible brand recognition with the new power of the Internet, the answer is ‘maybe.’

These forces produced a business model of extraordinary power.

The high costs of printing and the need to maintain a distribution network capable of blanketing a metropolis in a few hours created a strong bias toward local monopoly or, at least oligopoly. The result was the bedrock of the newspaper business—huge power in a local market.

At the other end, the news gathering business, the papers could pool their resources to fund joint operations and share massive economies of scale. The Associated Press is dominant, a cooperative with 4,100 employees, owned by 1,500 daily newspapers. Each pays a fee, and also feeds local stories to the service. The AP also supplies 5,000 TV and radio outlets, and, more recently, the Internet, such as Google News, all of which pay for the service.

The efficiencies are amazing: In 2007, the AP had revenues of $710 million; apportion this out among 51 million newspaper subscribers and it comes to about $14 each. (That overstates it, because AP gets revenues from radio, TV, and the Internet, too.) Against this, each subscriber generated over $1,000 of revenue for the industry.

Each newspaper was thus placed neatly as a bottleneck between the worlds of news makers and news consumers, and became the center of a multi-sided market. It had a platform: the ability to deliver, every day, to hundreds of thousands of readers, as many sheets as it wished of content-carrying newsprint. The basic costs of the platform were largely fixed; the extra ink and paper required for a million copies are not that much greater than for 100,000, as compared with the long- and medium-term investment costs. Newsprint is only about 14 percent of the costs of a news operation.

Starting with this basic news product, the paper could then hire some reporters to do local coverage, perhaps set up some out-of-town bureaus, especially in state capitals and Washington, D.C., to get the local angle on events there, and add every possible feature that might pick up a marginal customerfeatures, comic strips, crosswords, whatever. Pack in enough variety and it is hard to find anyone who won’t find a quarter’s worth of value somewhere.

Then the paper could turn around and sell all those eyeballs to advertisers, and, because it was difficult for the advertisers to find an alternative channel to masses of consumers, these ads got good prices. Television was a threat, but it is a low information medium compared with newspapers, so display ads and classifieds became cash cows. This set up a happy upward spiral, too. Because advertising is itself valuable information, consumers would buy the paper to get the ads that the advertisers were buying to reach the consumers, and the more that each side signed on, the more valuable the service became to the other.

Furthermore, the newspaper protected the business models of its advertisers. A department store or a supermarket or an auto dealer needed to reach large numbers of people, and it could use the eclectic audience drawn in by the newspaper’s multiplicity of features. A niche competitor could not afford the price of a large ad because it was not trying to appeal to as many people.

As a final stroke of fortune, the advertising is not overly irritating. It is at the fringe of vision; look at it if it interests you or ignore it. The great weakness of advertising on audio or visual media is that it forces your attention and takes your time, so that a TV show, with a ratio of content to ads of about 2 to 1, becomes a frustration. As the publisher of Harper’s put it: ‘No offense to my fellow journalists, but newspapers and magazines are first and foremost effective catalogs, which some people like to read. If the headline or cover line grabs you, there’s a good chance you’ll start turning the pages and bump into the ads. Advertising on the Internet and TV (with Tivo, muting, and zapping), is simply too easy to dodge.’

The wedding of news and advertising is only the first level of sophistication. A newspaper is also an aggregator and filter of the news, assuring its readers that its staff has scanned the universe and selected for presentation what the readers need to know that day to be informed. For the hard core, this is an immensely valuable and time saving function. It also enables a newspaper to capture a good share of the budget of time that the reader is willing to allocate to news, akin to the way a good department store vacuums up its customers’ disposable income.

Newspapers also became the indispensable links between the newsmakers and the public. Anyone wanting attention had to go through the paper and its staff, a relationship that bred symbiosis and reinforced indispensability. The newspaper became the gatekeeper for commentary. No one not tapped by it could reach a significant audience. It became the certifier of experts, whose knowledge could be obtained for a pittance since they had no alternative way of reaching the public. They sold community, as the Repository provides for several counties in northeast Ohio, and as do hundreds of small town weeklies for their communities.

The Internet is creating a ‘tragedy of the commons’ situation for news, and no one ever claimed that all problems have solutions.

The result of these happy synergisms was a sturdy structure. In 2005 (the revenue peak), papers collected $44.7 billion for print advertising ($17.3 billion for classified, $22.2 billion for retail, $7.9 billion for national). Online ads produced $2 billion, and $11 billion was paid in by 54 million daily readers. About 75 percent of all circulation was via subscription.

Since then, it has been downhill. Although the model is powerful, it is also intricate and highly leveraged in that fixed costs are high and marginal costs of adding a subscriber or ad are low. As in any leveraged model, extra revenues go directly to the bottom line because the business can supply increases in demand without incurring significant cost increases. That is why newspapers had, for years, rates of return that were the envy of the business world. But levers go down as well as up, and declines in revenue also affect the bottom line quite directly.

At many papers, the inherent leverage of the business model was compounded by adoption of leveraged financial models, as news properties were loaded up with debt. Because debt service is sacred, decreases in revenues result not in a decrease in a variable called ‘profit’ but in an immediate need to cut costs, which means cutting the quality of the product.

The most immediate threat from the Internet is classified ads. Newspapers are not efficient media for classifieds if there is an Internet alternative. Classifieds are concentrated on the three big categories of autos (24.4 percent), employment (33 percent), and real estate (32.3 percent). These are all particularly vulnerable to the current slump, but they are also vulnerable to complete cannibalization by the Internet. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how this would not happen, because these listings attract people who are actively looking, not casual browsers flipping through a paper. So Craig’s List or other specialized websites will take over this area. The papers themselves are well positioned to run such sites, of course, but the threat of competition will keep the prices down.

Losing up to 30 percent of the revenues in a leveraged model is not good, but the real fear is that the rest of the advertisers will also leave, or at least demand substantial rate reductions to stay. National advertisers, in particular, are likely to see a portfolio of Internet ads as more effective than a collection of newspapers. In any event, the existence of alternatives is certain to put downward pressure on ad rates.

A second effect of the Internet is to deprive the newspapers of much of their market power at both ends of the news business. For the subscribers, they are no longer the only serious link to the outside. For the newsmakers, they are no longer the only link to the readers. Institutions of all kinds can set up websites and communicate directly with interested communities.

The role of gatekeeper and certifier of expertise has largely departed, and they have lost their position as the only game in town for those who want to be informed. Experts can reach out on their own. Slovenly reporting and bias are illuminated. Columnists are exposed to competition—as when the New York Times put its pundits behind a wall and found that no one missed them enough to pay to read them. A decade ago, the news junkie had the paper or nothing. Now, surf the net. The model of adding numerous specialized features to the platform no longer works because the reader who once bought the paper for its sports, or finance, or the crossword now has better Internet options, and probably for free.

The Cost of Openness

It is a tribute to the power of the brands, as well as to the high value of the content that the papers collected, that circulation has held up as well as it has. The papers have also been reasonably successful in transferring that brand power to the Internet. Their own websites are huge portals, attracting 100 million viewers a day.

The Internet community seems unaware of the extent of its own dependence on the newspapers for raw material; it acts as if the news is simply there, like the ocean, and damned if anyone is going to tell them ‘no fishing.’

Viewed logically, the papers should have been able to use their brands to achieve Internet dominance. In 2008, 40 percent of the respondents to a Pew survey cited the Internet as a ‘main source’ of national and international news versus 35 percent for newspapers and 70 percent for TV. For 18- to 29-year-olds, the numbers were 59 percent Internet, 28 percent newspapers, and 59 percent TV. The missing fact here is that ‘the news’ is pretty much all from the newspapers, either from their own websites, or via their subsidiary the AP. The news biz has not really lost its readers; it just lost its ability to monetize them.

As a thought experiment, imagine what would happen if content were effectively locked up, so it could not be freely disseminated over the Internet. One would expect that over time all newspapers would move to the Internet, with subscribers paying for access. Perhaps some printed copies would be produced for sale at train stations and downtown newsstands and for people who lack Internet access, though the latter are unlikely to be newspaper readers. The transition might be slow for a time, because there are generational lags, but eventually a tipping point would be reached.

Over not too long a time, specialization would arise, with a few papers turning into dominant national brands while the rest become local and provide local news, advertising, and community. Ad rates would fall because space would not be scarce and there would be the threat of competition, but every local newspaper would have a huge brand name and first mover advantage that would allow it to become the premier local ad site.

Other websites would exist, of course, including the blogosphere, which consists largely of riffs on the news. However, these sites would feed revenue to the news-gathering business by paying for access or clicking, so they would be added sources of revenue.

It would be a rich mix, and, with the existing newspapers’ market power broken at both ends, it would produce new entities to create new aggregation and filtering functions, and perhaps new news collection services, since innovators would be able to monetize their investments.

That is not how it went down, though. The Internet was wide open, and the newspapers had given little thought to their crown jewels, the intellectual property in the content that they sold to readers, gathering the readership numbers that the paper then sold to advertisers. The protection by technology was accepted as the natural order of the universe, and the papers did not understand the implications of the fact that their power rested not only on their ability to monetize their intellectual property, but on the inability of others to do so.

Indeed, as reliable liberals, most reporters and editors had a bias against property; they favored seizing any piece of real estate in sight if doing so could be justified in terms of ‘smart growth’ or ‘endangered species’ or ‘historic preservation.’ When Hurricane Napster hit the music industry in 1999, the news biz did not sympathize with the recording industry. The editorials were full of comments about ‘the need to adapt’ and ‘don’t protect broken business models.’ Even in 2008, when the AP became concerned about bloggers quoting its stories, it decided to issue ‘guidelines’ on how much it thinks is fair. It discounted the possibility of legal action with the comment: ‘We are not trying to sue bloggers . . . That would be the rough equivalent of suing grandma and the kids for stealing music.’

Newsies’ biases also inhibited them in another way. In defending themselves against any limitations on reporting, they embraced the view that information wants to be free and that checks on disseminating it are immoral. The question of what use of news product is ‘fair’ is complicated—legally, economically, practically, and morally—but the newsies undermine their own survival.

There has been a recent boom in the number of woe-is-us articles that the Internet is killing the industry, including suggestions that the only solution is endowments or patronage.

At the outset, some newspapers tried to preserve a subscription model, but none, outside of some specialized worlds, succeeded. Too many sites went the other way, and no general newspaper possessed the power to compete with the spate of free content, especially when everyone uses the same wire services, and the content had ceased to be compelling. Besides, the papers drank some leftover Kool-Aid from the dot.com boom and decided that the big thing was to collect market share of eyeballs on the Internet and figure out later how to monetize them.

The newspapers were also a bit slow off the mark, and a new class of intermediaries arose. Newspapers are aggregators and filters of news, but the road to Internet glory lay in being an aggregator and filter of newspapers and other news sources rather than of the news directly. For the info junkie, the first stop in the morning is no longer to check the Washington Post or Times’s view of what’s news; it is to read the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post, a Real Clear website, or the comments posted on a preferred blog.

Even if sites link back to the original story, the search engines will pick up the aggregators, which will cream off a substantial share of the eyeballs attracted by the headline, and Google will skim off a good bit of the revenue for providing the service of interfacing with advertisers. A small share of click revenue cannot replace subscribers and major ads as sources of serious funding of content. The cold arithmetic is that as of a couple of years ago, for the Washington Post, ‘advertisers paid about $573 million last year to reach readers of the company’s newspapers, predominantly the 673,900 daily and 937,700 Sunday subscribers to the Post. Advertisers paid only about $103 million to reach the eight million unique visitors to the Post’s websites each month.’

Nor could the Post, as secure a newspaper as exists, do without the aggregators, because an undefined ‘most’ of its website traffic comes in from other sites, not from its own home page.

Essentially, the news was turned into a commons, and everyone was invited to drop in a fishing line and hook some advertising dollars. The problem is not that an advertising model cannot support the production of news content: pre-Internet, the industry had revenues of $1000 per subscriber, 80 percent of it from advertising, and the Internet can provide a vastly improved product. The problem is that no mechanism exists to channel the ad dollars back into the news production enterprises. So, inevitably, more and more people will launch their boats onto the ocean of content, and rising resources will be devoted to competitive efforts to attach advertising to that $14 per subscriber worth of AP content.

However, the whole structure of Internet sites still relies on the newspaper industry, including the AP. Since the newspapers support the wire services, the more the content leaks out the more they are supporting their competitors’ free ride, and the more they enable the entry of still more competitors for the advertising dollars.

Information Wants to Be…

The newsies must have had a Come-To-Jesus session recently, or perhaps Come-To-Darwin, because suddenly the Internet is full of rumbling about the need to find a monetization model. The editor of the New York Times just ‘challenged the belief among some of the digerati that ‘information wants to be free,’ saying ‘a lot of people in the news business, myself included, don’t buy as a matter of theology that information ‘wants to be free.’ Really good information, often extracted from reluctant sources, truth-tested, organized, and explained—that stuff wants to be paid for.” The LA Times talked of the need for an antitrust exemption so newspapers can jointly agree to stop giving away the product, and several columnists have chimed in about the need for monetization.

So from here, things will fork. Either the news business succeeds in establishing a property rightsbased monetization model, based on subscribers or control of advertising or both, or it doesn’t. If it does, then the scenario described earlier will play out, with national outlets, local outlets, and specialized outlets. Innovative news collection services will arise to compete with AP, especially in specialized areas, and the creative side of the Schumpeterian balance will accompany the destruction of the old print model. We would probably get a paid Internet and a free Internet, with a great deal of interesting crossover and interaction.

If the newspaper business continues on its present path, then the structure goes into both individual and collective death spirals. Advertising and circulation declines will reinforce each other, and, crucially, papers will withdraw support for the AP and become exclusively local, where their control over a news collection apparatus will provide them with some market power. As is true of any cooperative enterprise, withdrawal of support by some will place more burden on those remaining, so the overall quality of news collection will decline, more papers will drop out, and so on.

It is a tribute to the power of the brands, as well as to the high value of the content that the papers collected, that circulation has held up as well as it has.

It is this possibility of individual and collective death spirals that is causing news people to think about property rights and monetization. On the other side, the Internet community seems unaware of the extent of its own dependence on the newspapers for raw material; it acts as if the news is simply there, like the ocean, and damned if anyone is going to tell them ‘no fishing.’

So the Netizens will fight the news industry on this right up to the point of mutual destruction, and then all bets are off because it is impossible to begin to imagine the shape of an Internet deprived of the material produced by the newspapers and wire services. At that point, the options change to government bailouts of the news business, or endowments for wire services, or beneficent foundations.

It is hard to hazard how this one will come out. News collection will not disappear, but given the odds against creating a property rights model in the current zeitgeist, it seems ominously likely that we are headed for a government-sponsored news service. Maybe we will like it. China is already expanding Xinhua to go worldwide, so we can call ours Xinhua East. It shouldn’t take more than a few days to clear any given story through the White House information czar.

James V. DeLong is vice president and senior analyst of the Convergence Law Institute, LLC, and special counsel in the Washington, D.C. office of Kamlet Shepherd & Reichert, LLP.

Image by Darren Wamboldt/The Bergman Group.

13 comments on “Death knell for print media? ”

  1. Lew 1

    In the words wrongly attributed to Mark Twain: greatly exaggerated.

    L

  2. Draco T Bastard 2

    Government supported news – there’s no problems with that just so long as it’s an independent body. We get the journalists we need with the resources they need to report the information we need to run our society. It’s only downside is that we don’t have a bunch of worthless capitalists profiting from our accessing of that information and I really don’t think most people will consider that a downside.

    Information isn’t free but it does need to be freely available.

  3. gingercrush 3

    A fascinating but long read. Thanks Dancer. Don’t really have much to say about it though. Many pressing issues but not enough answers. Though I certainly agree with his point, that without newspapers. Without the way we gather news currently. Its hard to see how blogs will function as they are currently without them.

  4. Tane 4

    Let them collapse. The sooner the oligarchs who control the print media go down, the better. The net will fill the gap, along with niche publications, and the state can fund independent journalism along the lines of the public broadcasting model.

  5. lprent 5

    I was initially annoyed with the length of this. But it was a fascinating read.

    Good article

  6. Ianmac 6

    And don’t forget the position of magazines like the Listener. We have read it for decades, but in the last 2-3 years it has turned into a populist frothy thing with a right wing bias. (Current Listener Editorial:” ..Cullen who spent $1 billion of taxpayers money in a failing railway company that….English says is worthless. Has Cullen sufficient entrepreneurial acumen to run a business.” Or chair a business?)
    Typical of the denigration over recent years. Subscription now cancelled.

    • BLiP 6.1

      Absolutely spot on with your comment in regard to “The Listener”.

      I actually have more respect for “Investigate” than I do for the “The Listener” – Wishart is an off-the-edge raving fundamental but he doesn’t hide it, he doesn’t pretend his ill considered, pre-Christian Old Testament, and biased diatribes are anything else, where as The Listener . . .

  7. Peter Wilson 7

    I’d like to offer a dissenting view from the common idea amongst bloggers that one day they will become the pre-dominant media. Two things – most people still obtain their news and knowledge from traditional media sources, especially for political news. Most of us here probably read The Standard for ideological reinforcement – to feel better when National launches another attack on something we hold dear. It’s about being reassured.

    The second thing is that the internet is hugely energy-intensive. Unless we re-engineer the internet (particularly the long distance links) to use *far* less energy, having it as an information medium won’t be sustainable. Newspapers have less embodied energy per page than say, this blog.

    My model of the future sees multiple competing and complementary newspapers, many of which are produced and printed locally.

    So, it may well be that bloggers just change their medium, and actually get their message out to a non-techie crowd 🙂

    I live in hope

    • Draco T Bastard 7.1

      I think you’ll find that a blog uses far less energy per read than a newspaper. I also suggest that you re-read the article – especially the bit where it hypothesizes why bloggers didn’t exist before the internet.

  8. Jum 8

    Peter Wilson

    I agree with the written word continuing to be important. There is a certain security of holding words in your own hands.

    BUT, living in a fundamentalist right electorate, the local complementary newspaper is biased and bad enough, especially when it comes to getting Labour Point of View into print, but the glossy free local magazine is a dangerous doozy. The Act writer pretending to be a one of you columnist but spreading the gospel of money is more important than people; the man of the people MP columnist who blames women for daring to want equality in the 50s/60s and the 2008 pre-election anonymous writers who blamed the ills of the world on Helen Clark – you don’t wanna live in my town.

    It’s nasty.

    The written word is only worth continuing if it encompasses all viewpoints, especially in narrow-minded authoritarian little towns like mine. We’ll probably get sherriffs next. I’d put nothing past this JKeyll gummint especially with Hydra in charge of local government.

    • lprent 9.1

      That was the point of the post. It was demonstrated doing a few keystrokes. We’re keenly aware of the issue, which is why we keep raising copyright issues.

      Normal usage is to link to other sites content, that is an even more interesting legal quagmire.

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    5 hours ago
  • Government in a hurry – Luxon lists 49 priorities in 100-day plan while Peters pledges to strength...
    Buzz from the Beehive Yes, ministers in the new government are delivering speeches and releasing press statements. But the message on the government’s official website was the same as it has been for the past several days, when Point of Order went looking for news from the Beehive that had ...
    Point of OrderBy Bob Edlin
    5 hours ago
  • DAVID FARRAR: Luxon is absolutely right
    David Farrar writes  –  1 News reports: Christopher Luxon says he was told by some Kiwis on the campaign trail they “didn’t know” the difference between Waka Kotahi, Te Pūkenga and Te Whatu Ora. Speaking to Breakfast, the incoming prime minister said having English first on government agencies will “make sure” ...
    Point of OrderBy poonzteam5443
    7 hours ago
  • Top 10 at 10 am for Thursday, Nov 30
    There are fears that mooted changes to building consent liability could end up driving the building industry into an uninsured hole. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: Here’s my pick of the top 10 news and analysis links elsewhere as of 10 am on Thursday, November 30, including:The new Government’s ...
    The KakaBy Bernard Hickey
    10 hours ago
  • Gordon Campbell on how climate change threatens cricket‘s future
    Well that didn’t last long, did it? Mere days after taking on what he called the “awesome responsibility” of being Prime Minister, M Christopher Luxon has started blaming everyone else, and complaining that he has inherited “economic vandalism on an unprecedented scale” – which is how most of us are ...
    10 hours ago
  • We need to talk about Tory.
    The first I knew of the news about Tory Whanau was when a tweet came up in my feed.The sort of tweet that makes you question humanity, or at least why you bother with Twitter. Which is increasingly a cesspit of vile inhabitants who lurk spreading negativity, hate, and every ...
    Nick’s KōreroBy Nick Rockel
    12 hours ago
  • Dangling Transport Solutions
    Cable Cars, Gondolas, Ropeways and Aerial Trams are all names for essentially the same technology and the world’s biggest maker of them are here to sell them as an public transport solution. Stuff reports: Austrian cable car company Doppelmayr has launched its case for adding aerial cable cars to New ...
    12 hours ago
  • November AMA
    Hi,It’s been awhile since I’ve done an Ask-Me-Anything on here, so today’s the day. Ask anything you like in the comments section, and I’ll be checking in today and tomorrow to answer.Leave a commentNext week I’ll be giving away a bunch of these Mister Organ blu-rays for readers in New ...
    David FarrierBy David Farrier
    14 hours ago
  • National’s early moves adding to cost of living pressure
    The cost of living grind continues, and the economic and inflation honeymoon is over before it began. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: PM Christopher Luxon unveiled his 100 day plan yesterday with an avowed focus of reducing cost-of-living pressures, but his Government’s initial moves and promises are actually elevating ...
    The KakaBy Bernard Hickey
    14 hours ago
  • Backwards to the future
    Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has confirmed that it will be back to the future on planning legislation. This will be just one of a number of moves which will see the new government go backwards as it repeals and cost-cuts its way into power. They will completely repeal one ...
    PolitikBy Richard Harman
    15 hours ago
  • New initiatives in science and technology could point the way ahead for Luxon government
    As the new government settles into the Beehive, expectations are high that it can sort out some  of  the  economic issues  confronting  New Zealand. It may take time for some new  ministers to get to grips with the range of their portfolio work and responsibilities before they can launch the  changes that  ...
    Point of OrderBy tutere44
    1 day ago
  • Treaty pledge to secure funding is contentious – but is Peters being pursued by a lynch mob after ...
    TV3 political editor Jenna Lynch was among the corps of political reporters who bridled, when Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters told them what he thinks of them (which is not much). She was unabashed about letting her audience know she had bridled. More usefully, she drew attention to something which ...
    Point of OrderBy Bob Edlin
    1 day ago
  • How long does this last?
    I have a clear memory of every election since 1969 in this plucky little nation of ours. I swear I cannot recall a single one where the question being asked repeatedly in the first week of the new government was: how long do you reckon they’ll last? And that includes all ...
    More Than A FeildingBy David Slack
    1 day ago
  • National’s giveaway politics
    We already know that national plans to boost smoking rates to collect more tobacco tax so they can give huge tax-cuts to mega-landlords. But this morning that policy got even more obscene - because it turns out that the tax cut is retrospective: Residential landlords will be able to ...
    No Right TurnBy Idiot/Savant
    1 day ago
  • CHRIS TROTTER: Who’s driving the right-wing bus?
    Who’s At The Wheel? The electorate’s message, as aggregated in the polling booths on 14 October, turned out to be a conservative political agenda stronger than anything New Zealand has seen in five decades. In 1975, Bill Rowling was run over by just one bus, with Rob Muldoon at the wheel. In 2023, ...
    Point of OrderBy poonzteam5443
    1 day ago
  • GRAHAM ADAMS:  Media knives flashing for Luxon’s government
    The fear and loathing among legacy journalists is astonishing Graham Adams writes – No one is going to die wondering how some of the nation’s most influential journalists personally view the new National-led government. It has become abundantly clear within a few days of the coalition agreements ...
    Point of OrderBy gadams1000
    1 day ago
  • Top 10 news links for Wednesday, Nov 29
    TL;DR: Here’s my pick of top 10 news links elsewhere for Wednesday November 29, including:The early return of interest deductibility for landlords could see rebates paid on previous taxes and the cost increase to $3 billion from National’s initial estimate of $2.1 billion, CTU Economist Craig Renney estimated here last ...
    The KakaBy Bernard Hickey
    1 day ago
  • Smokefree Fallout and a High Profile Resignation.
    The day after being sworn in the new cabinet met yesterday, to enjoy their honeymoon phase. You remember, that period after a new government takes power where the country, and the media, are optimistic about them, because they haven’t had a chance to stuff anything about yet.Sadly the nuptials complete ...
    Nick’s KōreroBy Nick Rockel
    1 day ago
  • As Cabinet revs up, building plans go on hold
    Wellington Council hoardings proclaim its preparations for population growth, but around the country councils are putting things on hold in the absence of clear funding pathways for infrastructure, and despite exploding migrant numbers. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: Cabinet meets in earnest today to consider the new Government’s 100-day ...
    The KakaBy Bernard Hickey
    2 days ago
  • National takes over infrastructure
    Though New Zealand First may have had ambitions to run the infrastructure portfolios, National would seem to have ended up firmly in control of them.  POLITIK has obtained a private memo to members of Infrastructure NZ yesterday, which shows that the peak organisation for infrastructure sees  National MPs Chris ...
    PolitikBy Richard Harman
    2 days ago
  • At a glance – Evidence for global warming
    On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a ...
    2 days ago
  • Who’s Driving The Right-Wing Bus?
    Who’s At The Wheel? The electorate’s message, as aggregated in the polling booths on 14 October, turned out to be a conservative political agenda stronger than anything New Zealand has seen in five decades. In 1975, Bill Rowling was run over by just one bus, with Rob Muldoon at the wheel. In ...
    2 days ago
  • Sanity break
    Cheers to reader Deane for this quote from Breakfast TV today:Chloe Swarbrick to Brook van Velden re the coalition agreement: “... an unhinged grab-bag of hot takes from your drunk uncle at Christmas”Cheers also to actual Prime Minister of a country Christopher Luxon for dorking up his swearing-in vows.But that's enough ...
    More Than A FeildingBy David Slack
    2 days ago
  • Sanity break
    Cheers to reader Deane for this quote from Breakfast TV today:Chloe Swarbrick to Brook van Velden re the coalition agreement: “... an unhinged grab-bag of hot takes from your drunk uncle at Christmas”Cheers also to actual Prime Minister of a country Christopher Luxon for dorking up his swearing-in vows.But that's enough ...
    More than a fieldingBy David Slack
    2 days ago
  • National’s murderous smoking policy
    One of the big underlying problems in our political system is the prevalence of short-term thinking, most usually seen in the periodic massive infrastructure failures at a local government level caused by them skimping on maintenance to Keep Rates Low. But the new government has given us a new example, ...
    No Right TurnBy Idiot/Savant
    2 days ago
  • NZ has a chance to rise again as our new government gets spending under control
    New Zealand has  a chance  to  rise  again. Under the  previous  government, the  number of New Zealanders below the poverty line was increasing  year by year. The Luxon-led government  must reverse that trend – and set about stabilising  the  pillars  of the economy. After the  mismanagement  of the outgoing government created   huge ...
    Point of OrderBy tutere44
    2 days ago
  • KARL DU FRESNE: Media and the new government
    Two articles by Karl du Fresne bring media coverage of the new government into considerations.  He writes –    Tuesday, November 28, 2023 The left-wing media needed a line of attack, and they found one The left-wing media pack wasted no time identifying the new government’s weakest point. Seething over ...
    Point of OrderBy poonzteam5443
    2 days ago
  • PHILIP CRUMP:  Team of rivals – a CEO approach to government leadership
    The work begins Philip Crump wrote this article ahead of the new government being sworn in yesterday – Later today the new National-led coalition government will be sworn in, and the hard work begins. At the core of government will be three men – each a leader ...
    Point of OrderBy poonzteam5443
    2 days ago
  • Black Friday
    As everyone who watches television or is on the mailing list for any of our major stores will confirm, “Black Friday” has become the longest running commercial extravaganza and celebration in our history. Although its origins are obscure (presumably dreamt up by American salesmen a few years ago), it has ...
    Bryan GouldBy Bryan Gould
    2 days ago
  • In Defense of the Media.
    Yesterday the Ministers in the next government were sworn in by our Governor General. A day of tradition and ceremony, of decorum and respect. Usually.But yesterday Winston Peters, the incoming Deputy Prime Minister, and Foreign Minister, of our nation used it, as he did with the signing of the coalition ...
    Nick’s KōreroBy Nick Rockel
    2 days ago
  • Top 10 news links at 10 am for Tuesday, Nov 28
    Nicola Willis’ first move was ‘spilling the tea’ on what she called the ‘sobering’ state of the nation’s books, but she had better be able to back that up in the HYEFU. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: Here’s my pick of top 10 news links elsewhere at 10 am ...
    The KakaBy Bernard Hickey
    2 days ago
  • PT use up but fare increases coming
    Yesterday Auckland Transport were celebrating, as the most recent Sunday was the busiest Sunday they’ve ever had. That’s a great outcome and I’m sure the ...
    2 days ago
  • The very opposite of social investment
    Nicola Willis (in blue) at the signing of the coalition agreement, before being sworn in as both Finance Minister and Social Investment Minister. National’s plan to unwind anti-smoking measures will benefit her in the first role, but how does it stack up from a social investment viewpoint? Photo: Lynn Grieveson ...
    The KakaBy Bernard Hickey
    3 days ago
  • Giving Tuesday
    For the first time "in history" we decided to jump on the "Giving Tuesday" bandwagon in order to make you aware of the options you have to contribute to our work! Projects supported by Skeptical Science Inc. Skeptical Science Skeptical Science is an all-volunteer organization but ...
    3 days ago
  • Let's open the books with Nicotine Willis
    Let’s say it’s 1984,and there's a dreary little nation at the bottom of the Pacific whose name rhymes with New Zealand,and they've just had an election.Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, will you look at the state of these books we’ve opened,cries the incoming government, will you look at all this mountain ...
    More Than A FeildingBy David Slack
    3 days ago
  • Climate Change: Stopping oil
    National is promising to bring back offshore oil and gas drilling. Naturally, the Greens have organised a petition campaign to try and stop them. You should sign it - every little bit helps, and as the struggle over mining conservation land showed, even National can be deterred if enough people ...
    No Right TurnBy Idiot/Savant
    3 days ago
  • Don’t accept Human Rights Commission reading of data on Treaty partnership – read the survey fin...
    Wellington is braced for a “massive impact’ from the new government’s cutting public service jobs, The Post somewhat grimly reported today. Expectations of an economic and social jolt are based on the National-Act coalition agreement to cut public service numbers in each government agency in a cost-trimming exercise  “informed by” head ...
    Point of OrderBy Bob Edlin
    3 days ago
  • The stupidest of stupid reasons
    One of the threats in the National - ACT - NZ First coalition agreements was to extend the term of Parliament to four years, reducing our opportunities to throw a bad government out. The justification? Apparently, the government thinks "elections are expensive". This is the stupidest of stupid reasons for ...
    No Right TurnBy Idiot/Savant
    3 days ago
  • A website bereft of buzz
    Buzz from the Beehive The new government was being  sworn in, at time of writing , and when Point of Order checked the Beehive website for the latest ministerial statements and re-visit some of the old ones we drew a blank. We found ….  Nowt. Nothing. Zilch. Not a ...
    Point of OrderBy Bob Edlin
    3 days ago
  • MICHAEL BASSETT: A new Ministry – at last
    Michael Bassett writes – Like most people, I was getting heartily sick of all the time being wasted over the coalition negotiations. During the first three weeks Winston grinned like a Cheshire cat, certain he’d be needed; Chris Luxon wasted time in lifting the phone to Winston ...
    Point of OrderBy poonzteam5443
    3 days ago
  • Luxon's Breakfast.
    The Prime Minister elect had his silver fern badge on. He wore it to remind viewers he was supporting New Zealand, that was his team. Despite the fact it made him look like a concierge, or a welcomer in a Koru lounge. Anna Burns-Francis, the Breakfast presenter, asked if he ...
    Nick’s KōreroBy Nick Rockel
    3 days ago
  • LINDSAY MITCHELL:  Oranga Tamariki faces major upheaval under coalition agreement
     Lindsay Mitchell writes – A hugely significant gain for ACT is somewhat camouflaged by legislative jargon. Under the heading ‘Oranga Tamariki’ ACT’s coalition agreement contains the following item:   Remove Section 7AA from the Oranga Tamariki Act 1989 According to Oranga Tamariki:     “Section ...
    Point of OrderBy poonzteam5443
    3 days ago
  • BRIAN EASTON:  Peters as Minister
    A previous column looked at Winston Peters biographically. This one takes a closer look at his record as a minister, especially his policy record. Brian Easton writes – 1990-1991: Minister of Māori Affairs. Few remember Ka Awatea as a major document on the future of Māori policy; there is ...
    Point of OrderBy poonzteam5443
    3 days ago
  • Cathrine Dyer's guide to watching COP 28 from the bottom of a warming planet
    Is COP28 largely smoke and mirrors and a plan so cunning, you could pin a tail on it and call it a weasel? Photo: Getty ImagesTL;DR: COP28 kicks off on November 30 and up for negotiation are issues like the role of fossil fuels in the energy transition, contributions to ...
    The KakaBy Bernard Hickey
    3 days ago
  • Top 10 news links at 10 am for Monday, Nov 27
    PM Elect Christopher Luxon was challenged this morning on whether he would sack Adrian Orr and Andrew Coster.TL;DR: Here’s my pick of top 10 news links elsewhere at 10 am on Monday November 27, including:Signs councils are putting planning and capital spending on hold, given a lack of clear guidance ...
    The KakaBy Bernard Hickey
    3 days ago
  • Gordon Campbell on the new government’s policies of yesteryear
    This column expands on a Werewolf column published by Scoop on Friday Routinely, Winston Peters is described as the kingmaker who gets to decide when the centre right or the centre-left has a turn at running this country. He also plays a less heralded but equally important role as the ...
    3 days ago
  • The New Government’s Agreements
    Last Friday, almost six weeks after election day, National finally came to an agreement with ACT and NZ First to form a government. They also released the agreements between each party and looking through them, here are the things I thought were the most interesting (and often concerning) from the. ...
    4 days ago
  • How many smokers will die to fund the tax cuts?
    Maori and Pasifika smoking rates are already over twice the ‘all adult’ rate. Now the revenue that generates will be used to fund National’s tax cuts. Photo: Getty ImagesTL;DR: The devil is always in the detail and it emerged over the weekend from the guts of the policy agreements National ...
    The KakaBy Bernard Hickey
    4 days ago
  • How the culture will change in the Beehive
    Perhaps the biggest change that will come to the Beehive as the new government settles in will be a fundamental culture change. The era of endless consultation will be over. This looks like a government that knows what it wants to do, and that means it knows what outcomes ...
    PolitikBy Richard Harman
    4 days ago
  • No More Winnie Blues.
    So what do you think of the coalition’s decision to cancel Smokefree measures intended to stop young people, including an over representation of Māori, from taking up smoking? Enabling them to use the tax revenue to give other people a tax cut?David Cormack summed it up well:It seems not only ...
    Nick’s KōreroBy Nick Rockel
    4 days ago
  • 2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #47
    A chronological listing of news and opinion articles posted on the Skeptical Science  Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Nov 19, 2023 thru Sat, Nov 25, 2023.  Story of the Week World stands on frontline of disaster at Cop28, says UN climate chief  Exclusive: Simon Stiell says leaders must ‘stop ...
    5 days ago
  • Some of it is mad, some of it is bad and some of it is clearly the work of people who are dangerous ...
    On announcement morning my mate texted:Typical of this cut-price, fake-deal government to announce itself on Black Friday.What a deal. We lose Kim Hill, we gain an empty, jargonising prime minister, a belligerent conspiracist, and a heartless Ayn Rand fanboy. One door closes, another gets slammed repeatedly in your face.It seems pretty ...
    More Than A FeildingBy David Slack
    5 days ago
  • “Revolution” is the threat as the Māori Party smarts at coalition government’s Treaty directi...
    Buzz from the Beehive Having found no fresh announcements on the government’s official website, Point of Order turned today to Scoop’s Latest Parliament Headlines  for its buzz. This provided us with evidence that the Māori Party has been soured by the the coalition agreement announced yesterday by the new PM. “Soured” ...
    Point of OrderBy Bob Edlin
    5 days ago
  • The Good, the Bad, and the even Worse.
    Yesterday the trio that will lead our country unveiled their vision for New Zealand.Seymour looking surprisingly statesmanlike, refusing to rise to barbs about his previous comments on Winston Peters. Almost as if they had just been slapstick for the crowd.Winston was mostly focussed on settling scores with the media, making ...
    Nick’s KōreroBy Nick Rockel
    5 days ago
  • When it Comes to Palestine – Free Speech is Under Threat
    Hi,Thanks for getting amongst Mister Organ on digital — thanks to you, we hit the #1 doc spot on iTunes this week. This response goes a long way to helping us break even.I feel good about that. Other things — not so much.New Zealand finally has a new government, and ...
    David FarrierBy David Farrier
    6 days ago
  • Thank you Captain Luxon. Was that a landing, or were we shot down?
    Hello! Here comes the Saturday edition of More Than A Feilding, catching you up on the past week’s editions.Also in More Than A FeildingFriday The unboxing And so this is Friday and what have we gone and done to ourselves?In the same way that a Christmas present can look lovely under the ...
    More Than A FeildingBy David Slack
    6 days ago
  • Cans of Worms.
    “And there’ll be no shortage of ‘events’ to test Luxon’s political skills. David Seymour wants a referendum on the Treaty. Winston wants a Royal Commission of Inquiry into Labour’s handling of the Covid crisis. Talk about cans of worms!”LAURIE AND LES were very fond of their local. It was nothing ...
    6 days ago
  • Disinformation campaigns are undermining democracy. Here’s how we can fight back
    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Misinformation is debated everywhere and has justifiably sparked concerns. It can polarise the public, reduce health-protective behaviours such as mask wearing and vaccination, and erode trust in science. Much of misinformation is spread not ...
    6 days ago
  • Peters as Minister
    A previous column looked at Winston Peters biographically. This one takes a closer look at his record as a minister, especially his policy record.1990-1991: Minister of Māori Affairs. Few remember Ka Awatea as a major document on the future of Māori policy; there is not even an entry in Wikipedia. ...
    PunditBy Brian Easton
    6 days ago
  • The New Government: 2023 Edition
    So New Zealand has a brand-spanking new right-wing government. Not just any new government either. A formal majority coalition, of the sort last seen in 1996-1998 (our governmental arrangements for the past quarter of a century have been varying flavours of minority coalition or single-party minority, with great emphasis ...
    6 days ago
  • The unboxing
    And so this is Friday and what have we gone and done to ourselves?In the same way that a Christmas present can look lovely under the tree with its gold ribbon but can turn out to be nothing more than a big box holding a voucher for socks, so it ...
    More Than A FeildingBy David Slack
    6 days ago
  • A cruel, vicious, nasty government
    So, after weeks of negotiations, we finally have a government, with a three-party cabinet and a time-sharing deputy PM arrangement. Newsroom's Marc Daalder has put the various coalition documents online, and I've been reading through them. A few things stand out: Luxon doesn't want to do any work, ...
    No Right TurnBy Idiot/Savant
    6 days ago
  • Hurrah – we have a new government (National, ACT and New Zealand First commit “to deliver for al...
    Buzz from the Beehive Sorry, there has been  no fresh news on the government’s official website since the caretaker trade minister’s press statement about the European Parliament vote on the NZ-EU Free Trade Agreement. But the capital is abuzz with news – and media comment is quickly flowing – after ...
    Point of OrderBy Bob Edlin
    6 days ago
  • Christopher Luxon – NZ PM #42.
    Nothing says strong and stable like having your government announcement delayed by a day because one of your deputies wants to remind everyone, but mostly you, who wears the trousers. It was all a bit embarrassing yesterday with the parties descending on Wellington before pulling out of proceedings. There are ...
    Nick’s KōreroBy Nick Rockel
    6 days ago
  • Coalition Government details policies & ministers
    Winston Peters will be Deputy PM for the first half of the Coalition Government’s three-year term, with David Seymour being Deputy PM for the second half. Photo montage by Lynn Grieveson for The KākāTL;DR: PM-Elect Christopher Luxon has announced the formation of a joint National-ACT-NZ First coalition Government with a ...
    The KakaBy Bernard Hickey
    6 days ago
  • “Old Coat” by Peter, Paul & Mary.
     THERE ARE SOME SONGS that seem to come from a place that is at once in and out of the world. Written by men and women who, for a brief moment, are granted access to that strange, collective compendium of human experience that comes from, and belongs to, all the ...
    6 days ago
  • Weekly Roundup 23-November-2023
    It’s Friday again! Maybe today we’ll finally have a government again. Roll into the weekend with some of the articles that caught our attention this week. And as always, feel free to add your links and observations in the comments. This Week in Greater Auckland On Monday Matt ...
    Greater AucklandBy Greater Auckland
    7 days ago
  • Geoffrey Miller: New Zealand’s strategy for COP28 in Dubai
    The COP28 countdown is on. Over 100 world leaders are expected to attend this year’s UN Climate Change Conference in in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which starts next Thursday. Among the VIPs confirmed for the Dubai summit are the UK’s Rishi Sunak and Brazil’s Lula da Silva – along ...
    Democracy ProjectBy Geoffrey Miller
    7 days ago
  • Coalition talks: a timeline
    Media demand to know why a coalition government has yet to be formed. ...
    My ThinksBy boonman
    7 days ago
  • The Hoon around the week to Nov 24
    Luxon was no doubt relieved to be able to announce a coalition agreement has been reached, but we still have to wait to hear the detail. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / Getty ImagesTL;DR: The five things that mattered in Aotearoa’s political economy that we wrote and spoke about via The Kākā ...
    The KakaBy Bernard Hickey
    7 days ago
  • Passing Things Down.
    Keeping The Past Alive: The durability of Commando comics testifies to the extended nature of the generational passing down of the images, music, and ideology of the Second World War. It has remained fixed in the Baby Boomers’ consciousness as “The Good War”: the conflict in which, to a far ...
    7 days ago
  • Skeptical Science New Research for Week #47 2023
    Open access notables How warped are we by fossil fuel dependency? Despite Russia's invasion of Ukraine, 35-40 million cubic meters per day of Russian natural gas are piped across Ukraine for European consumption every single day, right now. In order to secure European cooperation against Russian aggression, Ukraine must help to ...
    7 days ago

  • New Zealand welcomes European Parliament vote on the NZ-EU Free Trade Agreement
    A significant milestone in ratifying the NZ-EU Free Trade Agreement (FTA) was reached last night, with 524 of the 705 member European Parliament voting in favour to approve the agreement. “I’m delighted to hear of the successful vote to approve the NZ-EU FTA in the European Parliament overnight. This is ...
    BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz
    1 week ago
  • Further humanitarian support for Gaza, the West Bank and Israel
    The Government is contributing a further $5 million to support the response to urgent humanitarian needs in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel, bringing New Zealand’s total contribution to the humanitarian response so far to $10 million. “New Zealand is deeply saddened by the loss of civilian life and the ...
    BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz
    2 weeks ago

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