Dust settles on Hooton’s ‘bombshell’ appointment to editor-in-chief
Friday, 19 June 2026
ANALYSIS: It has been a big week.
On Monday morning staff at The Post and the Sunday Star-Times were told at a hastily-called meeting that former National Party strategist-turned consultant Matthew Hooton would be the publications’ new editor-in-chief, replacing Tracy Watkins who leaves the company in just a fortnight.
It was a deeply unexpected announcement, described as a “bombshell” by this publication. Hooton’s name was not among those rumoured to be in consideration to replace Watkins.
The announcement was met - for the most part - with stunned silence from the journalists in that Monday meeting. Hooton wasted no time, cropping up in planning meetings with different departments almost immediately before flying to Auckland where he has been in the Stuff office for the rest of the week.
The initial response, as has been widely reported across multiple media outlets, was one of shock. RNZ vox-popped Wellington locals on the appointment, while a Newstalk ZB broadcaster columnised on it. Messages of “are you OK” were received by journalists in The Post newsroom. LinkedIn was a flurry of media executives offering reckons.
Read more:
Hooton is not and has never been a journalist, though had been the scribe of a very well read and very well-informed column for the NZ Herald - presumably a column that he will now write for The Post’s audience.
It’s suspected it was an idea to poach Hooton’s column that later coalesced around the prospect that maybe he should be in discussion to run the joint entirely. Stuff owner Sinead Boucher revealed Hooton was only approached a month ago with the help of a mutual friend.
In the days since, the tenor of the conversation has started to evolve from shock to some form of curiosity. There remain fundamental questions about how Hooton will operate in a newsroom - questions, it must be said, The Post has been unable to ask Hooton on the record.
He has declined to be interviewed during the crossover period with Watkins, though The Platform’s Sean Plunket cold-called him earlier in the week.
The outstanding questions largely relate to how Hooton will choose to run his papers. It has been well reported that The Post will soon print from Christchurch, for a large Wellington audience, under the editorship of Hooton who will primarily be based in Auckland. How will the new editor address a significant change in deadlines for reporters? What will it mean for coverage of Wellington issues? How will Hooton manage complaints, legal threats and other thankless backroom tasks an editor has to address?
The Post has made in-roads to become a national news brands, but remains tied to Wellington in many minds. Hooton’s task will be to untangle that.
It’s also now known that while Hooton holds the print edition of The Post in great regard, he had not been a reader of the online edition until recently - something perceived in the newsroom by some, at least initially, as an insult. One way of looking at that is that if someone with Hooton’s background wasn’t reading The Post, then there is more room to make the outlet a must-read for political insiders (Hooton, on just day three in the role, appointed Henry Cooke as new political editor).
But beyond these questions, there is now a growing view - including among some in The Post newsroom - that Hooton’s editorship is a fascinating experiment. On LinkedIn, The Spinoff’s founder Duncan Greive summed that view up, describing The Post under Hooton as potentially being “ideologically unpredictable in a really exciting way” while noting it may also, at least at the start, alienate some readers worried about a shift to the political right.
On that note, one political insider on the left of the divide said Hooton was “not the boogeyman” some have perceived him to be. Though he has well-established links to the right of politics, another source said he maintains a strong belief in institutions and wouldn’t expect his journalists to be right-wing mouthpieces.
Hooton’s Herald column has long been highly critical of the current government, though from a right wing perspective.
During a Stuff town hall address in Auckland on Thursday - details of which were swiftly leaked to Newsroom’s Tim Murphy - Hooton spoke emphatically about the respect he had for The Post, its journalists and its history.
He described national affairs editor Andrea Vance as New Zealand’s best investigative journalist, along with Nicky Hager - notable, given Hooton appeared in Hager’s 2006 expose The Hollow Men.
“Andrea is more equal opportunity than Nicky when it comes to investigative journalism,” said Hooton, adding that she produces “in a day” what other investigative journalists write in a year. ”I can't think of anybody who's better than her.”
He also referenced his PhD in conservative philosophy, to which he was met with a tongue-in-cheek heckle of “w…er” - Hooton didn’t flinch, instead embracing it.
“Just to fulfil that stereotype, I'll quote Edmund Burke - he said that society is a partnership, and it's a partnership between those who were living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born, and I think that's right.”
Of the role of the media, he reflected on his tenure as a parliamentary press secretary, believing that scrutiny from journalists made him a better political staffer.
“It's not when you've done a ‘gotcha’, it's that you could do a gotcha,” he said.
“Hopefully [it] disciplines the powerful institutions [so] that we don't need to do gotchas on them - although we want to stay in business. So let's say we have 95% success of that.”
For someone whose lack of journalistic credentials have been well and truly canvassed, it wasn’t a bad pitch.