OPINION:
Long before he was a famous radio host, Jono Pryor would ride his BMX through suburban New Zealand delivering copies of the Herald to subscribers along his run. This was his introduction to media and the significance of this paper to so many around him.
“I’d be weighed down by what felt like 70kg of newspapers and I’d pedal up hills, it was excruciating,” he recently recalled on The Front Page podcast in reflecting on the fact the paper had celebrated its 160th anniversary.
The Herald continues to carry great weight, although you won’t always know that from picking up the paper from daily stands today.
The pages and pages of classified ads that once contributed to Pryor’s calves straining up hills on a bike ill-suited for the job are long gone, and the actual mass of the paper is not what it once was.
But the weight of the paper in terms of its meaning to Aotearoa remains – and it’s still found, as it always was, in the pages next to the advertising.
The real substance of the Herald has always been in the stories told by journalists over the decades.
From politicians at the highest echelons of our society to families living in the backseats of station wagons, the Herald has been there for more than a century and half, telling our stories no matter how hard they might have been.
As former Prime Minister Sir John Key said earlier this week: “If I was to reflect on my time in the Herald – good times and bad – that would take a very long time. But it’s fair to say that in my dealings with the Herald over a very long period of time, not quite 160 years, I’ve always found the Herald to be extremely professional, fair and, you know, pretty much on the money.”
This is not to say that every story that matters has always been told by the Herald. No matter how large or successful a publication is, there are always blind spots and omissions that deserve more light.
The poet Dylan Garity summarises this beautifully in the poem Resurrection about his machinist grandfather, whose hand was crushed by a printing press (or as he says “crushed by other people’s stories”).
“This is the problem with stories: they have to leave something out,” writes Garity.
“The editor cuts a line and someone’s face fades. The editor says 200 words or less, and suddenly a whole family goes missing. The spotlight isn’t about the light; it’s how it makes everything around it dark. My grandfather’s face is erased from every story.
“The machines survive but the man who made them doesn’t. The machines make the photo, but their maker is out of frame.
“But we can choose where to point the camera. We can choose how to tell the story.”
Those last few lines are the important ones. It’s the stories that Herald journalists and editors choose to tell that inform 2.2 million New Zealanders every week.
Historically, the Herald has made mistakes. There were decades when Māori and Pasifika faces were completely erased or, even worse, villainised.
The Herald doesn’t hide from this history today but instead uses it as a reminder that we must always think carefully about where we point the spotlight.
There are many doomsday prophets in 2023, assembling in the digital town squares of social media to prophesise about the impending demise of the New Zealand Herald. But if you were to look beyond this noise, you would notice the toil of writers working hard to offer fresh narratives on what Aotearoa looks and feels like today.
There’s a hopefulness and gravitas to be found in the work of writers like Joseph Los’e (Kahu), Vaimoana Mase (Talanoa), Julia Gabel (data), Katie Harris (social issues), Jamie Morton (science), Matt Nippert (business investigations) and more. These are brave scribes choosing to listen and tell stories that simply haven’t been told before. Critics and analysts often love to talk about the rapid change in this industry and how new platforms [insert social media channel of your choice] are set to kill news companies and journalism.
But as celebrated chief creative officer at advertising agency The Monkeys Damon Stapleton is always at pain to point out: “People are spending too much time worrying about picture frames rather than what’s in them.”
Whether it’s presented in print, online, video, podcast or in a TikTok post, the only thing that has really ever mattered is the story that goes into it.
As much as this industry has gone from the burden of a cart of newspapers towed behind a BMX to the weightlessness of online distribution, the only thing that has ever mattered is stories that are told in the news.
The audience reading the stories doesn’t always have to agree with what has been written or how a story has been framed. The Herald is regularly lambasted from both the left and the right for leaning one way or the other. And while we certainly take a lot of this criticism on board and look at how we can improve things, it’s worth remembering that news publications like these are one of the few places online where you are still confronted by information that challenges your worldview on a daily basis.
In an age of algorithmic recommendations and increasingly confined echo chambers where all contrary thinking is locked out, there is still enormous value in a space where you can read the thoughts of both Simon Wilson and Matthew Hooton in a matter of a few clicks.
If we are truly interested in open and honest debate that happens within the decorum informed by New Zealand’s media law, then spaces like the Herald will be worth protecting for the next 160 years.
The great weight that Pryor once lugged through the streets of Aotearoa is still there where it’s always been. It lies in the power of a story told so well it shifts a perspective, reveals injustice or holds the powerful to account.
So how much does a Herald newspaper weigh today? The same it always has: enough to bring down a politician or mobilise a nation during an earthquake.
Damien Venuto is an Auckland-based journalist with a background in business reporting who joined the Herald in 2017. He is currently the host of The Front Page podcast.
Thick black smoke can be seen across the city.