The National Business Review’s relationship with NZPA (New Zealand Press Association), which is to close in a few months, has proved short-lived.
For most of our 40-year existence, the newspaper-owned agency has been a resolute “closed shop” in dealing with competitors or welcoming new members.
We were well and truly kept out.
That changed a few years ago when NZPA decided to become a standalone news agency on a par with its UK, American, Canadian and Australian counterparts.
They sell commodity news to all comers, most of them broadcasters and more recently websites, as well as to the newspapers that own the Agency.
Mostly these agencies concentrate on domestic news that regionally based newspapers are ill placed to cover. Meanwhile, the development of networked broadcast news pushed the public focus increasing on to major national and international stories.
The agencies also lost when newspaper ownership consolidated and they were able to put their own reporters at the centre of power or business.
After dropping its overseas correspondents, NZPA found itself providing only basic business and political coverage to its subscribers. From being a core provider of news for daily newspapers on fixed deadlines, it became a complementary one.
Meanwhile, ‘Newsroom’ and ‘Scoop’ emerged as rapid and more efficient disseminators of public announcements. NZPA’s role as a “gatekeeper” of what was news among these announcements diminished.
While broadcasters and other independent news providers (such as NBR) were able to use NZPA as a backup, APN and Fairfax could rightly feel they losing on several counts. They were effectively paying for NZPA stories as well as for their own, while also giving access to competitors who could concentrate on their own news agendas without fear of missing run-of-the-mill stuff.
We figure NZPA will not be missed. The news without it will have more variety, be more interesting and offer more choice.
It may finally be dawning on even the government’s sternest critics that a major natural disaster can have far-reaching economic consequences that need to be understood rather distorted.
Nevil Gibson is the Editor-in-Chief of the National Business Review. The above was a part of his online Insight column.
