Good news: Reflections from media that thrived - or survived - in 2025
Saturday, 3 January 2026
Bernard Hickey feels like he’s made it to the end of a horror film.
“I’m like the guy at the end of the zombie movie who's sitting there, exhausted but alive, and everyone else is gutted and has been eaten alive around them,” the journalist says.
In this analogy, it’s the media industry that’s been gutting people. Hickey, an industry veteran who has cycled through numerous roles and now pens a daily newsletter on online subscription service Substack, is the survivor.
The Post has called him up to try and highlight some media positivity after another fairly grim year for the industry.
Among the debris, the possibly permanent hiatus of long-running investigative publication North & South and the decision by Metro Magazine to slash its staff writing team - and editor - in favour of guest writers (though it has managed to launch a new summer issue).
It hasn’t been as violent as 2024, which saw the closure of Newshub and the end of TVNZ programmes like Sunday and Fair Go - and yet there has still been an emphasis on doom and gloom.
Hickey, whose newsletter The Kākā goes out routinely every morning, has been a fixture through it all.
And yet, despite boasting more than 25,000 subscribers, many of whom pay for the privilege, he’s not as upbeat as you might expect.
“You may have thought, ‘Oh, this is a positive story I could tell’. And what I'm telling you is that it's partly positive, but it's not a positive solution, so to speak,” he says.
In a recent State of The Kākā Nation, he noted that paid subscribers peaked in April in 2025 and had since dropped off 5%. “This is the first year we haven’t grown,” he wrote, “so it’s time for us to reassess and look to adapt.”
After helping to co-found both Interest.co.nz and Newsroom, Hickey landed on Substack - the popular online newsletter service - in an effort to try and achieve his goal of creating sustainable journalism that people would pay for. His goals were lofty; he wanted staff, an empire of Hickey-ites. Five years later, it’s still predominantly him.
“In the UK, for example, there's a bunch of Substacks that have started to grow and employ journalists on a scale, but I haven't managed to do it here, and that post from a few weeks ago is essentially an admission of… defeat, is too strong a word. But an admission of plateauing and to say to people, it’s probably not going to grow much from here.”
Despite that admission, The Kākā remains one of the country’s most successful independent journalism projects. He’s in a privileged position, he admits.
“I'm one of those, don't tell anyone, ‘near boomer’ people who got lucky and bought a house for not much in 1992 which means that I have not got a big rent to pay,” he says.
“That's the difference, and that's the problem, really. It's the problem of journalism at the moment … we don't have the scale or the profit margin to be able to grow numbers back to where they should be, and have the scale and the infrastructure to train new people.”
The rise of independent news
Substack has become a go-to home for many journalists who chose to leave newsrooms or were forced out by industry cuts.
Chris Schulz, who has worked for Stuff, The Herald and The Spinoff, balances his role as an investigative journalist for Consumer with a music Substack called Boiler Room.
“All the numbers are trending upwards, my newsletter's getting consistent growth, and the feedback is great,” he tells The Post. “One thing about writing a newsletter is that you learn where to take it from your audience, so I feel like I'm getting better at it too.”
Boiler Room is a “weeknight/weekend hobby” at this point, says Schulz, but it’s helped plug a gap left by newsrooms culling dedicated arts and culture writers. Despite a comparatively small subscriber base, it’s resonating with readers.
“I won the Taite Prize for journalism, my first ever journalism award, and I got to travel to follow stories, like attending Electric Avenue for the first time,” he says. “As music journalism continues to flounder elsewhere, I feel really proud that I'm doing something about that, even if it's not reaching quite as many people as I would like just yet.”
But Substack has faced its fair amount of criticism this year. Some of the platform’s biggest writers chose to leave, citing the rise of far-right content - including Nazis - being hosted on the service.
One notable departure was David Farrier, the former TV3 journalist turned documentarian whose newsletter Webworm has an international fanbase. He quit Substack earlier this year, shifting to the open source service Ghost.
Farrier says he has no regrets about leaving, though admits it’s become harder to attract new readers.
“I no longer have that nagging worry about Substack's algorithms feeding my readers trash, and - gosh I almost forget this sometimes - Substack no longer clips 10% from what my readers pay for Webworm, so that money can go back into Webworm,” he says.
Webworm provides a mixture of light-hearted and heavy news, from a woman in Washington building a giant tunnel under her house through to abuse carried out by megachurches. Farrier was even teargassed after President Donald Trump sent National Guard troops to Los Angeles.
He’s confident that if Webworm continues to deliver good journalism, new audiences will find it. “If I do shitty work, then Webworm should deserve to die one day.”
Like Hickey, it’s been about five years since Farrier decided to launch his own news service.
Independent journalism is “hard to make work”, but he feels lucky to be able to do it.
“I have a lot of fun on Webworm, [but] I also take it pretty seriously. So I do think about the future a lot. And Substack is increasingly making moves that subtly, and unsubtly, trap writers on the Substack platform,” Farrier believes.
“Webworm is sort of a mish mash of people who like the kind of stories I tell, and this really lively community has built up around it.”
People are choosing to ‘switch off’
Traditional media has had another fairly gloomy year, though digital and radio audiences are picking up.
In January, NZME closed 14 community newspapers. In July, Stuff followed suit, ending its Auckland community papers. Not long after Metro Magazine went through job cuts that included the loss of its long-serving editor.
Despite this upheaval, one media manager says there have been green shoots for print publishing.
Stuart Dick is the general manager of Are Media, the company that publishes the likes of Woman’s Weekly, The Listener and Air New Zealand’s onboard magazine Kia Ora.
While the last few years have been “particularly disrupted”, he says magazines have remained “remarkably stable” throughout that period (though Are Media has been put up for sale by its owner).
“We're actually in growth across every title in our portfolio at the moment,” Dick says.
People trust the brands and recognise quality, he believes, and are choosing to switch off content they feel is becoming “overwhelming”.
“There is a movement of people recognising that they do need time to switch off, turn off the screen and just enjoy things that aren't, you know, immediate and digitally-led.”
Frances Morton, editor of the long-running TV Guide, says readership was up in 2025 and the 40-year-old publication remained a favourite.
“It blends trusted, accessible listings with smart storytelling that celebrates local and international storytelling — a familiar weekly ritual that’s evolved with how New Zealanders actually watch, stream and talk about television now.”
Meanwhile, AA’s free quarterly magazine Directions continues to be the country’s most read publication. It arrives like clockwork in the mailbox of almost every AA household up and down the country. That’s 680,000 magazines produced, delivered to the homes of about 1.2 million AA members.
Of course, it’s hard to know how many people bother to read it - but editor Kathryn Webster says the feedback from readers is unlike any other journalism job she’s had.
“We get some really darling responses. We get people making an effort to write to say how much they've liked the last issue, or how much it's reminded them of something from their lives. It's really cool,” she says.
“The engagement from members is really heart-warming.”
Even with the push to digitise the magazine, including two bonus online-only editions each year, it’s the print version that readers are drawn to, she believes.
“We get a lot more response from the print issues, but people like that they’re getting another dose of content, if you like, through the digital issues.”
Don’t forget about Coffee News either. That’s the free, weekly, one-sheet you might find at your local cafe, filled with easily digestible content (horoscopes, trivia and fun facts) to accompany your overpriced flat white.
Its New Zealand director, Rudy Kokx, says the brand is intending to expand to 25 franchisees by the end of next year, with Rotorua, Masterton and Hamilton coming onboard from February.
“We keep costs low with generic content, supplied to all franchisees around the country,” he says.
“The cost of minimum wage and print does put pressure on … but the choice to stick with black and white printing (and the fact it's still accepted and expected by our audience) is definitely helping keep costs down.”
In Bernard Hickey’s zombie movie, he’s not the only survivor. Will 2026 bring a sequel? That’s anyone’s guess.