Read all about it: Turning the page on a 50-year-career in newspapers
Wednesday, 4 February 2026
Les Deller was just 16 and almost straight out of school when he picked up a job at what was then Independent Newspapers, publisher of the weekly “shock horror” tabloid NZ Truth.
Half a century on and Deller is still on the staff, though now employed by Stuff at the company’s Petone printing plant and long past the era of sleaze, crime and gossip scandal that filled the pages of Truth.
Similarly the days of more than one edition when you could, quite literally, hold the front page or change out stories are well gone.
So too linotype and hot metal printing, which involved casting the words in the stories and headlines out of molten lead and the composing rooms where editorial staff worked with production staff to fit stories into pages on a composing stone.
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Deller’s official title, stores and service assistant, offers little insight into what he actually does, deep in the bowels of newsprint land surrounded by mountainous rolls of paper and sleek new-era machinery.
He is in charge of all the inward goods that arrive at the site ‒ including newspaper inserts, plates, print and publishing material ‒ and unloading newsprint as it arrives. He manages and adjusts the stock level on a daily basis, entering amounts into a software-based inventory system to ensure there’s enough on hand, prepares paper reels for production each day and helps out in the publishing department.
Deller, whose first pay packets including those from a previous short-lived job at a local tile factory went towards a motorbike, reckons he has been in the business through the best of times. He has worked alongside some of the industry’s finest, including famed sports photographer Peter Bush, and in the midst of history as it was made; 9/11, the Iraq War of the early 2000s, Margaret Thatcher, the Muldoon years, and the Springbok tour.
His fondest memories are from the ‘80s and early ‘90s when INL– Independent Newspapers Ltd – still published both a morning paper, The Dominion, and an afternoon one, The Evening Post.
Typewriters and ciggies
He recalls journalists hunkered down over typewriters, the pungency of cigarette smoke wafting through rooms, the noise and clamour of the old presses, the 3pm exodus to the pub downstairs.
There was a “tea lady” and a large company cafeteria where “white collar” editorial and “blue collar” print staff from across numerous floors mingled, though not with colleagues from the competing paper.
“I miss the characters that were around then. There were all sorts of shenanigans, people turning up for work drunk, hot heads having a bust-up …”
Alongside improvements in behaviour, subject matter has also changed remarkably, reflecting both technological progress and the shifting landscape of news consumption, Deller said.
Certain topics, including hyper-local news, had dropped off the radar, replaced instead by more consolidated content.
“Every little thing you did would end up in the paper,” Deller recalls, “speeding, drink driving … you would read about someone you knew.”
The impact of automation was immense, with lay-offs and down-sizing “gutting” the print industry across the board, he said.
Newsprint, once sourced from the mills in Kawerau ‒ Deller remembers almost running out of it in the late 1970s after workers there went on strike ‒ now comes from a variety of sources around the globe. A print run in 2026 used nothing like the tonnes of paper it once did.
Still, contemplating a future that doesn’t mean a daily trek from his home in Johnsonville to Petone isn’t something Deller dwells on.
He has no plans to retire. “I mean, what else would I do?”