The past and future of The Press
Sunday, 14 June 2026
As The Press turns 165, PHILIP MATTHEWS finds there is still enormous demand for local journalism and new ways to deliver it.
The scene was London in the 1990s, in a newspaper office on Leigham Court Rd. An object appeared in the newsroom like a visitor from the future.
What was it? It was a computer that could access the internet.
New Zealander Kamala Hayman was working as news director at the South London Press, a popular weekly paper, when that computer appeared.
“Nobody in the newsroom knew how to use it,” Hayman says. “But about the same time, a journalist from New Zealand joined the newsroom and she knew how to access the internet. She took on the task of searching the world wide web for all of us.”
That young journalist was Joanna Norris. “This was pre-Google. She would go to Ask Jeeves, or whatever it was.”
It was Ask Norris. Hayman often tells this story because it seems both funny and massively significant in hindsight. They could see the internet as a useful research tool but had no sense of the impact it would have on journalism’s business model. That continues to reverberate.
“We didn’t realise that advertising was going to be hoovered up by global tech giants and that was what underpins our journalism.”
More than a quarter of a century later, Hayman and Norris are in senior positions in New Zealand journalism. Norris went on to become editor of The Press and is now managing director of Stuff Masthead Publishing. Hayman is the current Press editor.
We are in a meeting room on the other side of the world from south London but otherwise this feels like an analogous moment.
“We’re now in a position where AI has arrived in our newsrooms and we don’t really know how it will play out,” Hayman says. Many reporters are using it to help search for information, to handle large data sets, to transcribe interviews and more.
“But I don’t think we yet know what AI could mean for our industry. We can guess and we can try to adapt.”
Building a new audience
The Press newspaper turned 165 years old in May. That is some accomplishment. Many newspapers do not live that long. It turns out the South London Press folded last year, after 160 years in business.
I wrote last month about some of the challenges facing this paper and others like it in a rapidly changing media climate. I also wrote about The Press in its early days, when it was a vehicle for the British writer Samuel Butler to try out the radical ideas he developed in his novel Erewhon.
But while there are challenges, the media story is not one of doom and gloom. There continues to be massive demand for local journalism and innovative ways to produce and distribute it.
If you were to rank important dates in Press history, 2023 would be on the list.
That was when owners Stuff Limited split the business into Stuff Digital and a mastheads division. Stuff Digital has continued running the mass-market, wide-ranging free news website, while also producing TV news for ThreeNow. Separate, paywalled websites were created for the heritage news brands. As well as The Press, that meant the Waikato Times, founded in 1872, and The Post, which can trace its genealogy back to 1865, when The Evening Post started in Wellington.
If it sounds like I am hung up on history, it is because the heritage brands offer context and background that newer online providers lack. There is something valuable about institutional knowledge and all that accumulated experience and community goodwill.
Back to 2023. The decision to separate the mastheads from the Stuff site and put up paywalls was both controversial and a leap of faith, Norris says.
Would readers follow? Norris had an inkling they would, as they already subscribed in print.
“Three years later, they did follow, and not only that but Kamala and her team have been able to grow a credible subscription base as well as grow an audience, which is important for advertising revenue,” she says. “We still have a strong print product, but we also have a strong digital subscription product, which is funded by both advertising and by our consumers who buy the product. And a large number of those are digital only. They don’t want a newspaper delivered to their door. But they still want the journalism.”
In one way, it was going forwards by looking backwards. It was a reprioritisation of newspaper titles over the internet brand.
Actual subscriber numbers are commercially sensitive, but Norris says the trajectory “has exceeded our budget, which is essentially a very well-informed forecast, and this year, the growth has been better than budget”.
The International News Media Association (INMA) has the numbers and according to its benchmarks, “we are outperforming all similar brands, similar size, similar paywall type, and our growth, particularly at The Press, has been faster than our peers globally”.
Nielsen readership figures for the month of April show The Press had a unique audience of 397,000 with 6.1m page views.
It also confirms, as the New Zealand Herald found, that New Zealanders will pay for online news. For a long time, many were sceptical about that.
“What we want now is to grow that audience beyond the geographical boundaries that we can deliver a newspaper to,” Norris says. “Print is increasingly expensive to get to far-flung parts, over the Alps or up beyond Kaikōura or into the middle of the island.”
South Island separatism
There is a current media buzzword, and that is “localism”. When The Press and other mastheads uncoupled from Stuff, they moved from a large, national platform.
Stuff is a behemoth. The Nielsen figures from April show Stuff had a unique monthly audience of 2.1 million in New Zealand, ahead of Trade Me, the Herald site, RNZ and Reddit.
But a big site needs big stories. The local news can struggle.
“We saw that stories we knew were really important to our readers, just because we’ve been journalists for decades, were not performing on Stuff,” Hayman explains. “It was a real frustration. Really important civic journalism wasn’t getting the traffic Stuff was used to seeing.”
The Stuff model meant every story had to be relevant across the country.
“Of course that’s not true for a lot of local journalism. People are very interested in their area of geographic interest. You can’t apply the national lens to everything.”
A national site offers reach, but risks flattening out geographic specifics. National radio and television stations have this challenge too. But at The Press, Hayman says, “we’ve managed to create this platform where we’re free from that. I know South Islanders have a real interest in other South Islanders.”
Both Norris and Hayman are South Islanders, from Dunedin and Christchurch respectively. There is a form of southern chauvinism at work. Or is it southern separatism? It is a view that the south is often left out of the national picture, whether it is discussions about the economy or even a political party’s list. Things are different here, and there is island-wide solidarity.
“The South Island is different from the rest of New Zealand,” Norris says. “It’s also the same. We are obviously New Zealanders, we live here in the South Island, but equally we knew there were economic considerations, aspects that were heavily influenced by the rebuild and the role of the economy post-rebuild, which were quite different from the rest of the economy.
“The property market performs very differently from other parts of the country. When you only report at a national level, you sometimes lose the important geographical nuance that comes from reporting on a place.”
The vision is to be a South Island news source, which is why stories from Nelson, Southland, Marlborough and Timaru papers are also on the website, along with coverage from Queenstown and the West Coast.
If there is a South Island blind spot for The Press, it is probably Dunedin. Hayman says she would love to invest in Dunedin.
“We pick up Dunedin stories where we can, but it’s not as much of a focus as I would like it to be.”
Digital fairness and the future
There is no shortage of stories. There is no shortage of readers.
“We don’t have an audience problem,” Norris agrees. “93% of New Zealanders over 15 read one of our products across the Stuff group. There is no lack of demand or lack of interest in news. The challenge for all media companies globally is how we fund that when there is rapacious demand from the global tech platforms, which now also include the AI platforms as well as Google.
“The thing with companies like Google is they control the whole infrastructure. They control how you buy advertising, how you price that advertising, where that advertising goes, which eyeballs see it and how our content is treated during searches. If you control literally every part of that infrastructure, it’s like the old railway barons.”
The standard figure has 80% of digital advertising in New Zealand going to offshore companies. The tech giants, basically.
This is why the New Zealand media felt and still feel strongly about the Fair Digital News Bargaining Act, which sought to compensate media companies for the loss of revenue.
The act’s progress has stalled for now but a Canadian example shows how it could be done. Its Online News Act has Google paying C$100 million (NZ$1.23m) annually to compensate news organisations.
There are other disruptions. AI-driven searches on Google mean information is scraped from news sites without the reader being directed to the source. The original site that produced the content misses out on the traffic.
“The word ‘scrape’ is an interesting one,” Norris says. “It’s really a synonym in this circumstance for theft or stealing. Our content is being taken by platforms without our permission and without placing a value on that, when clearly it has a value to their business model. So we should call it what it is, which is theft.”
As Hayman says, the good and the bad of AI remains one of the unanswered questions in newsrooms.
“AI can be a useful tool, but it’s really, really important that what makes our journalism work is that we talk to people and challenge people. We have to remember that good journalism is humans talking to other humans.”
Which brings us to the question of trust. Critics like to cite surveys that show only a minority of New Zealanders trust the mainstream media. It was 37% in the last AUT survey. Norris has given a lot of thought to this.
“People clearly trust our content because they come to us with regularity and frequency that indicates to me they trust what we’re offering. That’s true of our paywall products like The Press and at-scale products like Stuff.
“The trust surveys are interesting. I think there is a global disinformation programme that suggests to people they shouldn’t trust the mainstream media.
“But we are professional journalists and we front up every day on the behalf of our audiences, and it’s convenient for those we write about to suggest we are not trustworthy.
“That said, trust is about more than just accuracy, fairness and balance. It’s also about showing up in formats that work for people. Do they trust us with their time? Are we in formats that are relevant to their lives? If you’re a 17-year-old who is using TikTok, that is a format that you trust because it works for you. We need to do more thinking about how we meet people’s needs because that forms a trusting relationship.”
As Hayman says: “Our future is about having direct relationships with our readers and advertisers. That way they come straight to us. They don’t have to go through the filter of social media or Google search or ChatGPT.”
Being relevant might not mean being a newspaper that appears at the front door in a plastic bag. Then again, it might be.
In other words, here is the science fiction question. When will the last newspaper be printed?
Predictions are impossible. Norris remembers that soon after she took over as editor in 2012, she said papers would become weekly in 15 years. As in 2027.
Yet daily papers have persisted.
“The Press audience continues to want the paper daily, six days a week, on their doorstep,” she says. “And I think that’s pretty amazing and wonderful, and long may it continue. I think print will exist in some form beyond our lifetimes, because it has still got a special place in people’s lives, but it will be alongside other formats.”
That is as specific as any prediction can get.