Probable Closure of NZPA Sends Shockwaves Through Media

Probable Closure of NZPA Sends Shockwaves Through Media

By the Scoop Team

Shock waves went round New Zealand’s tightly knit journalism community this evening as news of probable closure of the NZ Press Association (NZPA) sank in.

According to reports in Stuff and The NZ Herald the NZPA board - read executive members of the Newspaper Publishers Association - heard today from a major member, the Fairfax NZ group, that it no longer wants to buy NZPA’s coverage.

That means almost-certain death for the struggling news agency, which employs around 40 journalists and subeditors , and which has been operating since the early 1870s.

NZPA underwent major change in 2005 when Australian newspaper group Fairfax - new buyers of the former INL newspaper group (then NZ’s largest) - said it would withdraw from the traditional press association system, which saw all daily papers contribute stories to the network and share them.

That forced NZPA to become an independent news agency in terms of its coverage, although it was still jointly owned through the NPA by Fairfax, APN (NZ Herald group) and Allied Press (Otago Daily Times).

Since then it has survived longer than most predicted, dependent on continued subscription by Fairfax and APN and other news organisations to whom it sold news, like TV channels, radio networks and others.

Recently the NZPA board instructed the organisation to stop selling news to some of its clients, creating a hole in the organisations finances and increasing its reliance on Fairfax and APN funding.

Public confirmation that Fairfax intended to cease its funding - Scoop understands that the Australian media giant indicated its intentions around Christmas - has made the financial situation for the organisation grave.

The biggest risk to the national news discourse – and the democratic process – of NZPA closing down will be that readers will be dependent on news sources that are not truly national.

Both Fairfax and APN have blind spots in their national coverage, provincial regions where they don’t own newspapers to feed into their internal news networks.

A Facebook group called Save NZPA was started by journalists this evening and was growing rapidly as the night went on.

ENDS



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