So the German company who owns NZ Woman’s Day, New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, The Australian Women’s Weekly, the Listener, North & South, Next, Metro, Kia Ora, Home NZ and Your Home & Garden has just dumped them all…
Covid 19 coronavirus: Bauer Media closing – publisher of the Listener, Woman’s Day, North & South
Bauer Media NZ is closing its doors permanently, staff have been told.
The New Zealand wing of the company publishes a range of New Zealand magazines including the NZ Woman’s Day, New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, The Australian Women’s Weekly, the Listener, North & South, Next, Metro, Kia Ora, Home NZ and Your Home & Garden.
…hands up who loves Adam Smith’s ungloved invisible hand?
The madness of allowing so much of our media to be owned by overseas interests is coming home to bite. Who would have thought selling vast chunks of NZ media to a foreign German company could end badly?
Metro, North & South and the Listener represented the best middle class journalism NZ ever had and spans a journalistic and cultural legacy which is heartbreaking in its destruction.
We have just had amputated some of our most important societal treasures because a rich German family wants money over duty.
Who doesn’t love the free market now?
This is a failure of transnational capitalism not Jacinda stopping magazine publications during a 4 week pandemic lockdown .
The media landscape has been mutilated by Facebook and Google and because the Government has been too intellectually cowardly to implement taxation against those Trans-national Titans to directly fund journalism, this pandemic is becoming the last straw to break this seasons camel hair back.
Mediaworks are asking for everyone to take a paycut, David Slack and Jarrod Gilbert have been let go as columnists (which is tragic because they are 2 of the best columnists in NZ) and even that dreadful David Cormack has lost his paywalled opinion at the Herald, (although Cormack is awful enough to get picked up straight away at The Spinoff).
Expect NewsRoom and RNZ to suddenly have a whole lot of new columnists, but those job lifeboats aside, the Government must look at a media policy that is bold enough to not just sustain whatever is left over but to actually grow and rebuild the NZ media market.
As people start to rely on social media conspiracies during the lockdown to make sense of these extraordinary events, picking your source media is more important than ever. Other than the incredible range of opinion shapers on TDB, you should also consider the following outlets to get you through this Pandemic with information that won’t make you believe the shape changing Lizard aliens are taking over the planet using a one world Government.
AUT’s Asia Pacific Report: Their extraordinary coverage of the Pacific during this pandemic is an essential resource for what is happening in our region that simply has no peer.
TVNZ Breakfast: John Campbell’s compassion and professionalism as a journalist is needed now more than ever. Every week day breakfast, the Pandemic is explained and explored with a genuine care. This country owes him a bloody medal for his extraordinary broadcasting talent. John is walking this path with us and he makes the journey far less frightening. He is a bloody national treasure.
Thomas Coughlan, Henry Cooke & Luke Malpass at Fairfax: All three of these journalists have been light years ahead of the coverage of the pandemic and have all provided the most insight into what the existential changes to our economy and society will start looking like. They are daily must reads.
Waatea News: The best Māori Journalism right now, incredible grass roots coverage of how Māori are facing the pandemic.
Te Ao with MOANA on Māori TV: Best current affairs right now, Moana Maniapoto as host is laser like in her delivery of the hard questions.
NewsRoom: Are doing the best day to day journalism covering the Pandemic. You must read them daily.
Bryan Bruce podcasts: Asking what country we want to rebuild into post the pandemic. They appear on this blog.
Working Group: 2pm Friday MagicTalk: Funniest political panel show in NZ and was the first to point out that the pandemic was far more severe than everyone in January thought it was. Sean Plunkett and I carry Damien Grant for 60minutes and pretend the right wing have philosophical credibility so I can bash it down week after week.
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as far as the NZ Listener is concerned, I think the government should take it over as part of a public broadcasting setup.
Then the Right will call it State-owned propaganda. We have to beat this situation where they can pretend that privately-owned media are independent, and that is all we need.
WRONG – privately owned media are all biased in favour of Capitalism, and practise their bias fervently.
EEEE by gum! It’s just a bloody tragedy eh?
It might actually speed up a few supermarket queues as well when things return to ….. normal??
@mikesh – re the Listener – you mean like it used to be? We could probably “rebrand” it as The Radio Times
The gloating by the way, is because of the obvious consequences of allowing large (often global) corporate interests to buy up bits of the media – reducing plurality, running it primarily for the almighty dollar, then moaning when it all goes tits up.
It’s also because people are beginning to ‘feel’ it now as more and more bits get lost, that “something must be done!!!” (really….. NO really really really Mr f-f-f–Faafoi) about the google/facebook/other stealing of advertising revenue phenomenon, and that we can’t just keep talking about it.
As far as Radio and FTA TV, there are things we could have at least got underway during the past 2 and a half years
The government deemed them non essential and shut them down for the duration of the lockdown. Nek minnit!
The irony is so thick.
Our media who love rolling around in death and destruction and sensationalism for sooo long have finally becomes victims of their own blood lust. Saturation levels of armageddon is all there is now but in this orgy of premium weapons grade bad news they’ve killed their advertisers off, some forever but excruciatingly increased readership only to self destruct in the process. Something inside me thinks karma, at last!
Having said that most of this industry has been sick for quite so time and for Bauer to fold after only 6 days screams volumes for how knife edge their operations were anyway.
Mediaworks is surely next.
For all Trump’s many faults, at least he tries to protect his country’s industries – unlike successive neoliberal governments here.
Oh my God…
Thank you…. really like to be kept abreast of what’s really happening..,
Some of us have been describing the problems with off shore ownership of NZ media for many years–closely linked to the commodification of news, and the rise of digital media of course. Many skilled journalists quickly head for PR spinner jobs once they see how run down traditional media has become with off shore and electronic subbing, meagre resources etc.
I hope the recent Local Democracy initiative which has seen local Govt and regional stories reported in detail by professionals keeps happening though beyond this current execution of titles.
Well, that’s interesting news…!
I stopped reading those rags the moment they were sabotaged then spun into trite pap for the marshmallow minds of a post neoliberal Nu Zillind.
‘ The invisible hand’ Aye?
Thanks piss poor formal edumacation. ( Though I am well educated in many other fields and endevours, some of which I won’t write about here.)
But now I know.
Scottish and the 1700’s aye?
So that’s the dawn of how to fuck people on the deal. Of how to manipulate and exploit. To treat human beings as sheep or cows.
Two and a half centuries later and we can still find his invisible hand in our trouser pocket.
Two and a half centuries of unbridled greed manifested as ‘industrialization’ has brought our biosphere to its knees. Well done adam smith.
Competition versus cooperation.
As a disciple of ‘winning’ you lose and because of that, we all lose. Is that irony or what?
Hehehe! Who are all the news influencer journo’s gunnah go work for now? Oh! I know! Start a blog!
Won’t miss the awful Joanne Black boring small minded and uninformed Pamela Stirling, Boring Bill Ralston and the unfunny, out of touch Wellington centered Jane Clifton. North and South was still a reasonable publication with a good standard of journalism. I will miss the book reviews. I am afraid to say the John Key years have made me a very disloyal kiwi and I source most of my information from overseas sites some of which I actually pay money to subscribe to! NZ went intellectually backwards during Key’s tenure and the reigning out of touch boomers who dominated our remaining publications all supported the Natzis. They were complicit and compliant in the trashing of our culture our environment and the aspirations hopes and dreams of young New Zealanders. So FUCK EM ALL!! I don’t care about any of them.
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