Bethany Rolston looks back at the three years she wrote for the Te Awamutu Courier, one of the 14 NZME community newspapers set to close before Christmas.
Looking back at the three years I was a journalist at the Te Awamutu Courier feels like a happy sort of fever dream, a haze of deeply absurd and incredibly sincere moments. When I joined the now 113-year-old newspaper as a reporter, I’d recently graduated from journalism school and was stoked to get paid to write every day. Having been born and raised in the Waikato, it was also the local rag I grew up reading so was a bizarre sort of homecoming. I was the newest journalist in 26 years – just a small blip in a long line of reporters to tell the town’s stories.
Founded in 1911, Te Awamutu Courier had been under family management for three generations before it was purchased by Wilson and Horton (later known as APN, and then as NZME) in 1992. Its readership stretched from the pretty rosebush-flanked streets of Te Awamutu to the black sands of mighty Kāwhia. The free newspaper came out on Tuesdays and Thursdays (it has since dropped to just one day a week). Between the three of us – the editor, a sports reporter, and me – we hustled hard to fill the pages with as many interesting stories we could write. There were days I felt like Ricky Gervais’s journalist character Tony Johnson in the Netflix show Afterlife, bumbling around the town in the search of a good story. I’d interview toddlers about winning mullet competitions, meet 90-year-olds learning to tap dance and visit prison inmates to find out how meditation was quieting their minds.
We were proud to publish hyper-local stories that would never make a daily newspaper, like cat competitions and the mystery of 50 poisoned birds found in a local carpark (not related, that I know of!) We marked the town’s milestones and celebrated its young people – each year publishing photos of the newly announced head students from the local secondary school. There was a time when the newspaper published photos of the town’s latest marriages and newborn babies, too. Every time someone turned 100, one of us would sit with the newly minted centenarian for an hour and learn about their lives, and days later publish their front-page story. There was a popular section called “What’s Hot and What’s Not” where readers could submit their anonymous gripes and delights about the town eg.“can your dog please stop shitting on my lawn?”, or “thanks to the kind strangers who helped me when I fell over in the supermarket”. We were there to report on the sombre events too. I photographed several house fires (and now I have an obsession with switching off sockets). We spoke to families of children who died in quad bike accidents and lost count of the number of ram raids in our town.
Morning tea at 10am was non-negotiable (a Sudoku was optional) and we’d often be invited to the editor’s home for freshly caught snapper from his recent fishing trip. My small team of colleagues spoke fondly of the golden days of the newspaper when the staff boasted 35 people, their cleverest headlines (“knicker nicker nicked” –a story about a local underwear thief), and the raging staff parties.
We tracked locals who had since moved away and had successful careers, always reminding people they were from our town (never forget the Finn brothers are from Te Awamutu). We had an incredible sports section that filled at least a third of the newspaper, heralding everyone from amateur badminton players to Olympic athletes like cyclist Rebecca Petch. We dug up tales that were unique to our people – like finding the origins of the town’s nickname, Rosetown, or the man working to find justice for the unmarked graves at the former psychiatric hospital at Tokanui.
The editor, Dean Taylor, has worked at Te Awamutu Courier for 37 years, and been at the helm as editor for the past 13. He’s something of a local legend with a mane of silvery white hair, instantly recognisable at local events (whether you wanted him there or not). He was a stern give-no-shits editor from 9am to 5pm, and then in his spare time he would coordinate Christmas light trails, run theatre events and give blood (he recently marked his 250th plasma donation). If the paper happened to fall on April 1 he would publish an April Fools’ story to prank the town. One week he decided there had been enough negative news so he decided to run a “good news only” edition. He believed the best people in New Zealand came out of Te Awamutu, and made sure everyone knew it.
Working at Te Awamutu Courier taught me how to pick up the phone and speak to anybody, how to meet an immovable deadline, how to sit through a council meeting (and make some sense of it), and how to recover from making mistakes so publicly (I once wrote about a 30-metre-long orchid, not orchard). It was the start of a career based around my love of people and words.
Te Awamutu Courier was last week announced as one of the 14 NZME community newspapers due to close before Christmas. NZME has claimed increased costs and declining profitability are the reasons for the axing. The company has hinted that private buyers may be keen on buying some of the individual community mastheads, so there might be a small spark of hope.
I know the exact stories that will be published in the final editions of the paper – a write-up of the local Christmas parade, perhaps a list of all the best streets decked out with lights, stories of new businesses opening, or charity fundraisers. And now, there’ll be a story about the paper’s own closure. To the people of Te Awamutu, hold tight to that newspaper, because it might just be your last.
