As The Press turns 165 we consider: Do newspapers have a future?

Saturday, 23 May 2026

OPINION: Do newspapers have a future? I thought I knew the answer to that question. Let us skip back a few years.

It is routinely believed that the science-fiction classic Children of Men depicted a broken, dystopian society. And it did, but there seemed to be some glimmers of hope and this was one: they have newspapers in that future.

Broadsheet newspaper pages describing social collapse paper the walls of shabby rooms, which was reassuring for newspaper fans at least. Or so it seemed when the movie came out in 2006. The bad news, and I just checked, is that Children of Men is set in 2027.

Two recent stories tell us more about the state of newspapers in 2026. It is a tale of two papers in two cities.

The first city is Washington DC, where the Washington Post laid off around one third of its employees in February. The redundancies, which took out more than 300 reporters, were described as a bloodbath. Former editor Martin Baron called it “a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction”.

It followed a controversial series of editorial realignments at the Post, including a narrowing of opinion pages to focus on free markets and personal liberties, and a refusal in 2024 to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time in decades.

The editorial department had drafted an endorsement of Kamala Harris that owner Jeff Bezos refused to run.

The second city is about 320km to the north-east, where there is better news. The New York Times added 310,000 net new digital subscribers in the first quarter of 2026, reportedly taking subscriber numbers past 13 million in total. That is said to be “the largest paid audience in the history of the paper”.

Except these new subscribers are not reading the Gray Lady on paper, but online through their apps. And not all of them have signed up for the news, but for their daily dose of Connections and Wordle.

Both examples are forks in the road. On one side, there is the undermining of a mighty news brand and the political whims of an owner. On the other, there is genuine innovation that points towards a healthy future.

A third newspaper, in a third city, is The Press. The paper you are reading is about to mark 165 years in business. The first edition of six pages was cranked out of a cottage on Montreal St on May 25, 1861.

In 2021, The Press marked its 160th anniversary by publishing 160 stories from its archives - one for every year of publication in a print supplement distributed with the daily paper.

Five years on - just a blink of an eye in the newspaper’s history -much has happened. There has been a change in corporate structure. There have been movements in media trust, press freedom and social cohesion. There has been the rise of alternative media sources and pressure on publicly-owned media. And, readers may have noticed, there has been a shift in the paper’s focus, towards greater localism and transparency.

We can take these one at a time and see what they tell us about the future.

First, Stuff divided its business in 2023. The stuff.co.nz website, and the news on ThreeNow, are produced by a business that, since 2025, has been half-owned by Trade Me. (Readers with long memories see the irony: Stuff’s predecessor used to own Trade Me.) Masthead Publishing is a separate business, including all the print newspapers and associated subscriber websites including thepress.co.nz.

For a public that has not caught on, there is complete separation between the Stuff Digital and Stuff Masthead businesses; separate staff, separate websites, though ongoing collegiality remains.

How about media trust? According to the AUT’s annual news trust survey, has found that trust in media has been in sharp decline since Covid19 though it improved slightly last year.

When AUT asked 1000 New Zealanders if they “trust most news most of the time”, 37% said they did in 2026, up from 32% in 2025. A survey by communications company Acumen found similar results.

RNZ was the most trusted news brand in the AUT survey and the Otago Daily Times the most trusted newspaper. It cannot be coincidental that the Otago Daily Times has changed the least during the past six years and we mean that in a nice way.

It has a trust score of 6 out of 10. The Press and The Post sit on 5.7, the first year both titles were counted independently of Stuff. Which is also on 5.7.

The slump and slow rise in trust follows a time of social disunity in the Covid-19 era, and a suspicion of the Government’s funding of reporting and editorial roles under the Public Interest Journalism Fund (PIJF). A feeling took root during the paranoia of the Covid period that the Government was somehow bribing journalists. Even NZ First leader Winston Peters bought into that rhetoric.

As media commentator Gavin Ellis wrote, while PIJF projects and personnel fell squarely in the area of public good, there was a sense that government money was “tainted”.

If anyone thinks the media was soft on the last Labour government, they should ask Kiri Allan, Michael Wood, Iain Lees-Galloway or David Clark for their thoughts. But a perception can be hard to shake.

The alternative media

It would be nice to think that trust and social cohesion can be rebuilt after the shock of the pandemic, but some alternative media sources that emerged during that period or soon after are less concerned with traditional media values and the social outcomes those values aim to foster.

Online news service the Platform’s recent, successful campaign against the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) showed how alternative media sometimes resists the regulations that were designed to maintain community standards. Those standards can seem archaic in a more fractured, pluralistic time.

Mainstream media is also a political target, especially in an election year.

Public ownership of RNZ makes it vulnerable to political pressure, such as that exerted by ACT leader David Seymour, yet a softer advertising market and smaller audiences means TVNZ and commercial operators such as Stuff and The Press are arguably also more vulnerable than they used to be. But a weakened fourth estate means weakened democracy.

The Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index for 2026 has New Zealand’s press freedom slipping. We are at 22 out of 180 countries, down from 16th place in 2025.

“New Zealand has long been a model for public interest journalism, but recent closures of major news services have threatened media plurality and independence,” the report says. “Although press freedom is highly respected, the media landscape has deteriorated due to society’s growing polarisation.”

Global issues of media funding and ownership were put in the spotlight by the recent Hungarian election. The Byline Times in the UK reported on the links between former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban’s government, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, tech magnate Peter Thiel and the UK’s Free Speech Union, which is headed by former journalist Toby Young.

Ownership and funding is a story here, too. New Zealand’s version of the Free Speech Union encouraged billionaire Jim Grenon to invest in NZME, the publisher of the NZ Herald and owner of Newstalk ZB. Grenon also funded the Centrist website, bankrolled an alternative biography of Jacinda Ardern and was revealed to be the backer of a defamation case brought against TVNZ by anti-co-governance campaigner Julian Batchelor.

Businessman Troy Bowker has been another supporter of alternative media. He offered to fund The Platform’s campaign against the BSA but he denied that a dislike of Stuff informed his decision to buy the Petone building that houses its printing plant.

Where is the local journalist and the local newspaper in all this? Media companies and their trained journalists plough on, working within an established system that values balance, accuracy, fairness and privacy. It is easy to sound unfashionably high-minded about this, and media companies sometimes fail to meet the standards they set, but there are values to which they aspire. It is about democracy and the public interest.

Act locally

No one is pretending the New York Times, a global brand, presents an image of The Press’ future. That is unless someone in the South Island invents a puzzle as addictive as Wordle.

Instead, curation has become key. There was a time when a daily newspaper could claim to be all things to all people, a paper of record, history written in the present. Everyone who appeared in court, every car that was for sale, every department store bargain, the arrivals and departures of ships – it was all in the paper. Monopolies on classified advertising produced what are fondly recalled as the rivers of gold.

We think of New Zealand’s daily newspapers from that golden age as being conservative, and in many ways they were, but they were diverse in what they covered. Changing economic models mean that kind of broad range is now impossible.

A daily paper must be narrower, and more in tune with a specific audience than a broader one, but no one has emerged as serious competition for The Press’ position in Christchurch.

Neighbourhood Facebook pages discuss local issues with little moderation or fact-checking, while news sites such as Chris Lynch Media provides up-to-date breaking news. Strong, individual voices such as John MacDonald on Newstalk ZB provide important local commentary, while Gerard Smyth’s Frank Films brings rich video-led South Island stories.

While some journalists have begun writing Substack newsletters, including Anna Fifield (Between Giants), Simon Wilson (Hopetown) and Peter Newport (Crux) , there has been no version of this in Christchurch. Not yet anyway.

A digital subscription to The Press is one of a series of personal, targeted interests, sitting alongside a streaming service or a weather app. The local is increasingly valued at a time when both mainstream and public media are North Island-focused.

Newspapers have to adopt a form of new regionalism and a new humanism. The human element, including the highlighting of trusted columnists and reporters, is in contrast to faceless and rapacious technology. But it is an unfair fight. AI search summaries mean that links to the original sources, which are often news stories produced by human beings not data centres, are declining. As The Spinoff put it, “The content we generate is now being used to train the very tools that threaten our livelihood”.

A time beyond the dominance of mainstream media and agreed standards might move us closer to the openly partisan press of the 19th century. That was an age in which magnates such as James FitzGerald, initial owner of The Press, created newspapers to push their own causes.

Here is a challenging thought: like democracy itself, is the mainstream media, with its ideas of the common good and neutrality, just a blip in history? In that case, does it seem uncanny that the life of the gothic Press building on Cathedral Square, which stood proudly from 1909 to 2011, corresponds so closely to the halcyon days of the mainstream media itself?

As US journalist Rebecca Solnit wrote recently, this is both a golden age of journalism, in which hardworking journalists still deliver the goods across a range of new and old platforms, and an age of AI slop and decline, in which local news has withered.

The phrase “news deserts” describes the increasing number of communities that lack their own, trustworthy news sources. You picture tumbleweed, droughts and lawlessness, armies of bots and the occasional human blogger. It is a scene as dystopian as anything in Children of Men.