The owners insist it will continue – but how?
Print magazines are prohibitively expensive to make in New Zealand. The fact of even the most beloved titles folding is not, on its own, surprising. Every product has its time and no one is so naive to think good things can be made and paid for with good intentions.
What is surprising, however, is the insistence that Metro will continue to publish magazines despite news this week that its editor and food editor (read: the editorial team) were made redundant, and the designer and commercial manager resigned as a result. Magazines like Metro require real people with real journalism, writing, design and editing skills to produce it. All of those people are no longer working at Metro. So why, and how, has it not folded?
When Bauer shut down in the first 2020 lockdown, it was the broad belief that the magazines affected could only be saved by, in essence, philanthropy. Rich people who cared about journalism, the arts, or both, choosing to spend a portion of their money keeping these institutions alive. If they could figure out a way to eventually make them profitable, that would be a bonus.
North & South was bought by a wealthy overseas couple who had moved to New Zealand in lockdown and wanted to keep longform investigative journalism going. That energy and philanthropy ran out in 2023 and the publication was sold to School Road Publishing, a media collective owned by an advertising industry veteran. Today, North & South is a digital-only product, essentially a monthly email newsletter. There were plans to return it to print by the end of the year but according to owner Greg Partington just this week, “I’m just not satisfied that the revenues are there”. In other words, it’s dying a very slow and quite depressing death.
Meanwhile, Metro was bought by local businessman and designer Simon Chesterman. The smaller and more local (to Auckland) of the publications carried on, albeit with reduced outputs. As media outlets were downsizing and shuttering with every passing month, it felt like only a matter of time before Metro’s production costs would prove too high even for those not looking to get rich out of journalism. Which made its 2023 sale to Still – a conglomerate owned and run by the billionaire Fukutaki family – a perfect solution. A family worth billions known for arts investment and a local mission to “acquire 100 companies that are fundamentally good for New Zealand”? A win-win.
But even a billionaire business is still a business. This week, Henry Oliver penned his final editorial for Metro after seven years as editor. [Obligatory small NZ disclaimer that Oliver used to work here at The Spinoff, food editor Charlotte Muru-Lanning also used to work here, and Oliver’s wife currently works here. Small!] In his editorial, Oliver wrote “the magazine will be in new hands, with new ideas about what its role should be, what form it should take and how it should fit into the life of the city beyond 2025”. This is all well and good, but whose hands?
Metro chairperson and Still’s projects director Sam Johnson, who has no hands-on journalism experience, told the Herald that “guest editors” would be contracted to produce issues until the company could financially support full-time staff. What Johnson appears to have not considered, or simply doesn’t know, is that “guest editor” is not a real job.
In a fully functioning magazine staff room, a guest editor is the print equivalent of an SNL host. When the finished product is seen by the public, this “guest” will be front and centre and can maybe add some fun name recognition, but in the lead-up, they’re likely to attend a single meeting, throw out some bad ideas, then leave the actual staff writers to make the thing.
In other words, guest editors only work if you have actual editors and writers there to do the real work, because you would never ask a guest to muck in like that. Publications over the years have tried the sneaky “we’ll just use guest editors” approach in order to remove the biggest salary in the editorial team. But in those situations, there’s still staff writers and sub editors left to do the day-to-day job of producing a magazine. Metro has none of those people now.
Johnson told the Herald that while these magical guest editors are (presumably) single-handedly producing a 180-page magazine each, the sole employee remaining, new general manager Julia Barnes, will be “taking time to reset Metro as a magazine for more of Auckland”.
What will that look like? Impossible to say and I barely dare imagine it. Because any time a business promises “more” while simultaneously culling staff, you know you’re about to see a product and reputation crumble before your eyes.
Metro has been through a number of iterations in its 45 years. Some I enjoyed more than others, but all possessed a clear voice, vision and sense of self. Not to mention an editor worth remembering.
I will be waiting with bated breath for what the new iteration of Metro looks like, sans journalists. Perhaps Still, Johnson and Barnes will figure out magazines in a way no one else has managed to, and make Metro profitable enough to re-hire strong editorial staff. But based off the little information given and the loss of the very roles central to making Metro what it is, I imagine in six months (or a year) we’ll all look back and realise the last real issue of Metro was published in October 2025.
