From food prices to flooding, Te Pāti Māori to After the Party, here are the biggest stories of 2023, sliced a few different ways.
A tip: to create a perfect summer reading list (albeit with a crowded browser), click the headline of every story you missed to open it in a fresh tab.
The 10 most read
The stories read by more of our readers than any others this year
1) Breaking: Rita Ora doesn’t know her husband Taika Waititi’s ethnicity
The Spinoff editor Madeleine Chapman had to politely explain something fairly fundamental about Taika to his newish wife.
2) When will we know the NZ election result?
Toby Manhire answered the question most of the country was googling in mid-October.
3) Review: After the Party is queasy, morally complex and NZ’s best TV drama in years
Duncan Greive’s rave review came out before the show itself, and became one of our biggest hits – then the show lived up to his hype.
4) How much cheaper are groceries in Australia than New Zealand, really?
Data viz whiz Emma Vitz helped put numbers and charts against the eye-watering price of kai.
5) Everything the critics are saying about NZ’s first Wahlburgers restaurant is true
Chris Schulz went and ate a powerfully ordinary hamburger.
6) ‘Handcrafted’ chocolate companies accused of repurposing mass-produced lollies
Stewart Sowman-Lund scooped that some fancy choc was not nearly as artisanal as it made out.
7) All the supermarket hot cross buns ranked from worst to best
Madeleine Chapman gave Spinoff staff an in-office masterclass on “how to do a ranking” in November. It was her second of the year.
8) Dearly beloved: Inside the passionate fan club for one of NZ’s priciest supermarkets
Alex Casey has made the Christchurch beat her own since moving there earlier this year. This was a classic of the type.
9) The dark shadow over the NZ TV Awards
Duncan Greive had a good time at the TV Awards, but came away very worried about their future.
10) ‘Childish, immature, disgusting’: Why TV viewers are mad at Anika Moa this time
Is Anika Moa the most-quotable person in Aotearoa? This story says: yes.
The stories you lingered over
Stories our readers spent the most minutes reading this year
1) Goodbye, Kim Hill: a day with the doyenne of NZ radio
Toby Manhire’s magnificent profile of Kim Hill was a runaway winner of this category.
2) When will we know the NZ election result?
That SEO monster showing up again – people searched but also really read it, too.
3) I had a relationship with my teacher. It’s more common than you think
JP Stanley’s powerful essay in response to a major news story gripped readers in 2023.
4) The inside story of Pals, the little RTD that did it all wrong and got it so right
Duncan Greive’s longform story about how those pastel cans became the summer drink for a decent chunk of young New Zealand.
5) What happened to Wellington – Live?
Janhavi Gosavi’s brilliant investigative feature about the strange descent of a once-beloved community Facebook page.
Monster formats
We launched four new weekly series this year and continued our ever-popular Sunday Essays. Here’s the most-read edition of each series in 2023.
The Sunday Essay: The longest month
Ross Palethorpe reflects on a month as a trans person when New Zealand found itself host to Posie Parker and heightened tension.
Help Me Hera: My 17-year-old daughter is becoming very right-wing
Our trusty advice columnist coaches a concerned mother with an Act-curious daughter.
The Cost of Being: A 21-year-old flatting in Auckland
The most popular in our spending series as it separated the “students are allowed to have fun” from the “students are supposed to suffer”.
The Spinoff Books Confessional: ‘It’s appalling… hasn’t aged well’: The book Duncan Sarkies does not recommend
A great headline, you’ll have to click through to find out.
My Life in TV: ‘Childish, immature, disgusting’: Why TV viewers are mad at Anika Moa this time
People love to read about other people getting mad.
The biggest political animals
It was an election year. These were the biggest stories in politics.
1) When will we know the NZ election result?
OK Toby, we get it, you figured out how to get Google traffic.
2) Thank you for doing the shopping, Sam Uffindell
Tara Ward’s exquisite satire of a stray remark from the National MP prompted a whole national news cycle.
3) Wayne Brown pens sternly worded letter to the rain
Manhire captured the absurdity of Brown’s response to the floods in this instant classic.
4) What is NZTA? A user’s guide to the new, English names
Yet more satire – this time Manhire explained what our new departments will now be called.
5) Tory Whanau, Nicola Young and the rumour that overtook the story
Wellington editor Joel MacManus asked a very pertinent question: had anyone actually seen the video the whole country was talking about?
Pop cultural popularity contest
The Spinoff was built on pop culture. Here’s what hit the hardest.
1) Breaking: Rita Ora doesn’t know her husband Taika Waititi’s ethnicity
Chapman’s savagely funny explanation of Taika’s identity tops this chart too.
2) Review: After the Party is queasy, morally complex and NZ’s best TV drama in years
Honestly, if you haven’t watched this show, read this review then go watch it.
3) ‘Childish, immature, disgusting’: Why TV viewers are mad at Anika Moa this time
She’s just really, really funny.
4) Meet the New Zealand girl behind the creepy, viral M3GAN dance
Alex Casey is an expert at spotting stories hiding in plain sight. Here’s her finding out a key ingredient to a massive global horror hit.
5) It’s official: After the Party is the best TV drama we’ve ever made
And by official, we mean two of our editors decreed it. The Madeleines, Chapman and Holden, explain why After the Party is now at the top of the canon.
The most massive meals
Kai is a huge part of what we do here – and will be bigger again next year. Here’s what you read most about food.
1) Everything the critics are saying about NZ’s first Wahlburgers restaurant is true
“It tasted how it looked: tired.”
2) ‘Handcrafted’ chocolate companies accused of repurposing mass-produced lollies
“Can you see that? How there’s like a layer of chocolate over another layer of chocolate?”
3) All the supermarket hot cross buns ranked from worst to best
“With little to no spice across the board, they’re basically just… dinner rolls?”
4) The man reviewing every fish and chip shop in Christchurch
Charlotte Muru Lanning tracks down a man on a noble mission.
5) Confusing: every new restaurant in Auckland has the same name
Duncan Greive is hungry, but has no idea where he’s eating.
And 10 more of our biggest hits which just missed out on the main charts
1) Hot takes through the ages from Mike Hosking and Kate Hawkesby
Toby Manhire discovers a trove of neglected op-eds from New Zealand media’s most powerful couple.
2) The US women’s football team left their hotel and my soul left my body
Anna Rawhiti-Connell glimpsed heaven in the form of exquisite formalwear.
3) No, Whangārei High School students are not identifying as cats
Charlotte Muru-Lanning with one of those headlines that could only have come out in the “real-time feed of strangers posting things that might or might not be true” era.
4) ‘Fucking traumatic’: a first-hand account of Elton John’s flooded out show
Tommy de Silva with a vivid portrait of the experience of attending the Elton John show scheduled for the night of Auckland’s historic, deadly deluge.
5) Is this the beginning of the end for craft beer in Aotearoa?
Beer-writing pioneer Michael Donaldson contextualised the rash of failures which hit high-profile craft brewers this year.
6) Regional rail: what was, what is, and what could be
Emma Maguire gave us a fascinating, saddening and somehow hopeful guide to the under-appreciated (and certainly under-used) extent of our rail networks in Aotearoa.
7) ‘I’m tired of Shelley Bay’: Ian Cassels says goodbye to Wellington’s most controversial project
Wellington editor Joel MacManus had been in the job about 10 minutes when he secured an exclusive interview with the developer who finally said “enough” to a project that divided a city.
8) 12 graphs that show New Zealand isn’t doing as bad as you think
Max Rashbrooke delivered thoughtful, well-researched stories all year, many of which dared to ask us to look again at popular narratives. This one came out in the middle of a gloomy winter, and proved that sometimes people really do want good news.
9) Eggsplainer: where did all our eggs go?
Easy to forget, in the polycrisis, that for a while this year you just could not get an egg. Liv Sisson eggsplained (sorry, again) what was up with the chooks.
10) Where did ‘Up the Wahs’ come from? A Spinoff investigation
The phrase was suddenly everywhere, but what was its origin? Duncan Greive set out to find out, and ended up discovering a pretty plausible theory.