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Metro editor Henry Oliver with the Metro archives (Photo: Edith Amituanai/ Metro magazine/supplied)
Metro editor Henry Oliver with the Metro archives (Photo: Edith Amituanai/ Metro magazine/supplied)

MediaMarch 31, 2021

One year after the NZ magazine apocalypse

Metro editor Henry Oliver with the Metro archives (Photo: Edith Amituanai/ Metro magazine/supplied)
Metro editor Henry Oliver with the Metro archives (Photo: Edith Amituanai/ Metro magazine/supplied)

Metro editor Henry Oliver recalls the fateful Zoom call which ended Bauer New Zealand and what came next.

A year ago this week I joined a Zoom call with 200 or so other Bauer employees. On being let into the meeting, I scrolled through screen after screen of little black boxes with little names in the corners. A few people struggled to turn off their video as instructed. You could hear a murmuring of distant chatter in adjacent rooms, the clicking of mouses trying to find the mute button. Soon, Brendon Hill, our Sydney-based CEO, arrived on screen only to disappear again. Evidently, he was struggling too. He reappeared and began reading a prepared statement. I barely listened to the words. I didn’t need to. As soon as I heard his voice – his usual trans-Tasman work-hard-play-hard boom reduced to the shaken monotone of a reluctant corporate executioner – I knew exactly what he was going to say.

Hill thanked us for our attendance and briefly summarised the economic impact of Covid-19 on Bauer’s business in New Zealand, especially given the government’s ban on magazine publishing. “In response…” he said before the audio cut out for a crucial 11 seconds “… owner with no success. Due to this, it is with great sadness that we are announcing today that the New Zealand business is no longer viable and Bauer New Zealand will close our operations. This is effective today.”

I’d been the editor of Metro since January 2019, only one issue more than our annual six-issue cycle. It was the kind of dream job I never considered a possibility until it very much was. Five years earlier, when I quit my professional career to become a freelance writer, my highest ambition was to write for Metro, but I never dreamed of editing it. It was the kind of job that only came up every five to seven years, then went to someone already in the building. So while I loved my time there, when those words hit — “close our operations” “effective today” — I didn’t feel the loss I knew others did. Even though I was the editor, I didn’t yet feel ownership over the title. It had been a privilege, sure, but one that wasn’t owed to me. I felt lucky to have been there at all.

At Bauer, I sat three desks down from Virginia Larson, who’d edited North & South for 12 years. On the other side of some cupboards topped with indoor plants so cared-for they looked fake was The Listener, edited by Pamela Stirling for the last 16 years (she’d been a journalist there for 16 years before that). They’d spent the prime of their professional lives leading these titles; I, it suddenly seemed, was just briefly passing through. I grew up loving magazines (I barely read anything else as a kid) and when I took the job at Metro, I knew there was a possibility I’d be there at its end, a headshot three-quarters down the news report of its demise. If I’m the last to do it, I thought at the time, at least I got to do it. I just never thought I’d only get seven issues.

A selection of Bauer Media covers, pre-2020

In the year since, from the wreckage of Aotearoa’s biggest magazine publisher, a revived industry has emerged. Bauer (a global family-owned company based in Hamburg, Germany) went on to sell its Australia/New Zealand operation to an Australian private equity firm which then sold off as many New Zealand titles as possible and rebranded to Are Media to continue publishing those that it kept, including The Listener, NZ Woman’s Weekly and Woman’s Day. Sido Kitchin, formerly the editorial director of the latter two titles, joined School Road Publishing to launch not one or two but four new titles: Woman, Haven, Thrive and Scout. Simon Farrell-Green, then editor of Home, started Here; Zoe Walker Ahwa, then editor of FQ and Simply You, started Ensemble; four former editors (Kelly Bertrand, Emma Clifton, Nicky Dewe and Alice O’Connell) started Capsule. North & South was bought by Verena Friederike Hasel and Konstantin Richter, two German journalists (Richter is also a board member of the largest media group in Switzerland) who quickly invested in a new team for its relaunch; FQ and Home were bought by Parkside Media and relaunched with new staff; and Metro was bought by Simon Chesterman, who I’d been friends with for years, but never would have guessed would be remotely interested publishing a magazine. 

Simon had called me a week or so after the Zoom call and asked what I thought about Metro’s future, and whether I’d want to return. It sounded too good to be true, but every week or so he called me with an update on the bidding process. During those calls, we talked about life during Covid; how we’d all be living more local lives for the foreseeable future (a likely result of climate change in the longer term anyway). We talked about the potential of print media; how it can be uniquely beautiful and tactile, and how its physicality was key to its survival – the magazine as an anecdote to the infinite social media death scroll and the 36 open tabs sitting lonely, unread. We talked about Metro as a quarterly; fewer issues but with more pages, more writing, more design, more photography, and more space (which, ironically, was promised four years earlier when Metro went from 10 issues a year to six). We talked about Metro’s potential off the page — Simon had recently sold a sports streaming platform to Sky and had ideas about how Metro could exist online that were beyond anything we dreamed of at Bauer. We wanted Metro to be faster where it should be fast and slower where it could be slow with nothing in between.

We’re now six months in, having recently released our second issue together along with returning food editor Jean Teng, art director Kelvin Soh (with his team at DDMMYY), and Nick Shaw and James McKee (with their digital agency Fracture), all of whom are part-owners of the title. A year ago, there was suddenly no Metro. Now, Metro is out on its own again, less frequent but bigger and (we think) better than it has been in a long time. We’re free to rethink the way a magazine can exist in 2021. We’re free to build a business from scratch, with as few middle people as possible. We’re free to make our own mistakes, to try things that were written off long ago by people with much more experience than we have, free to dig back into our past and write a new future for ourselves.

Now, after months of supermarket magazine racks half-filled with dreary back issues wedged in between the odd Australian or British import, the New Zealand magazine industry is back — not to the former glory of the turn of the century, but certainly to a beyond where we left off at the start of the pandemic. Most of the old titles are looking better for the break and the new titles serve niche audiences in new and exciting ways, showing that an industry made up of mostly independent publications might serve readers better and have a better chance of commercial survival than an industry dominated by one global company. Though, despite the warranted relief that local magazines have “bounced back”, the root causes of the volatility haven’t gone away — there’s still not enough advertising to go around after Facebook and Google take their dominant share, and most people are still conditioned to believe that media should be free (unless it’s $12 a month to Netflix or Spotify). So while it feels good that news of the death of the magazine industry turned out to be greatly exaggerated, a hard truth remains: not all of these titles will make it. But if they don’t, at least it won’t be almost 20 of them going down at the same time.

An hour or so after that Zoom call, I told The Spinoff, “no one wants to be the last editor of a magazine. Despite all evidence pointing otherwise, I find myself still hoping, perhaps naively, I’m not.” 

One year later, I’m still hoping.


Hear Sido Kitchin tell Duncan Greive about the Bauer closure and launching four new titles with School Road Publishing in this episode of media podcast The Fold. Subscribe and listen to on Apple PodcastsSpotify or your favourite podcast provider.

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AUT’s city campus, Auckland (Photo: Supplied)
AUT’s city campus, Auckland (Photo: Supplied)

MediaMarch 30, 2021

Future of AUT’s Pacific Media Centre under spotlight following director’s departure

AUT’s city campus, Auckland (Photo: Supplied)
AUT’s city campus, Auckland (Photo: Supplied)

One of AUT’s Pacific research centres has been without a director since the end of last year and a lack of clarity around its future is causing division among staff and supporters. Teuila Fuatai reports.

Since 2007, AUT’s Pacific Media Centre has built a considerable portfolio and solid reputation for its research and reporting on issues throughout the Asia Pacific region, and as a training ground for Pasifika journalists and academics.

However, a month after veteran Pacific correspondent and researcher Professor David Robie retired as director late last year, the centre was packed up without any formal notification or explanation to the remaining AUT staff members associated with it. The move prompted a social media outcry among supporters and regional journalists, who raised concerns about the centre’s closure and the lack of communication from the university.

A photo of the packed up PMC sent to David Robie (Photo: Supplied)

However, in response to queries raised by The Spinoff, AUT’s head of the School of Communications Dr Rosser Johnson denied that the PMC was being closed, and reiterated that the contents of the PMC office had been packed up and relocated to a new space beside other key departments elsewhere in the AUT’s communications department.

“I made the decision that we were going to get all our staff of Pacific heritage in the same sort of place, which is on this [12th] floor,” Johnson said.

“We’ve got five staff of Pacific heritage – one won’t be moving because he’s in a department that’s on another floor. The rest are going to come up to here in the School of Communications.”

Johnson also said the decision to relocate the PMC from the space it had always occupied was made by the school’s “senior leadership team”. Staff connected to the PMC were only notified via email after it was done.

Senior lecturer and PMC research associate Khairiah Rahman, said it “would’ve been nice” to have been notified about the shift beforehand. An AUT staff member for 15 years, Rahman’s involvement with the PMC spans nearly a decade and she is also a member of its advisory board. She said the lack of information to staff members like herself has fuelled concerns about the school’s intentions for the PMC’s future. She said too that the absence of a succession plan for Robie’s replacement prior to his retirement had been particularly worrying.

“Ideally, [the transition] should be seamless. But Professor Robie retired at the end of last year… and we didn’t have a ready successor. I think it’s not a matter of blame but of strategic planning. Was it up to him [Robie] or was it up to the university?”

Former PMC designer Del Abcede, Former PMC director David Robie and Tagata Pasifika journalist John Pulu (Photo: Supplied)

According to Robie, he had tried several times to engage with the school regarding a transition plan in the past few years, but nothing had happened. Johnson, however, attributed the delays to the impacts of Covid-19. By September last year, a decision had been made by senior leadership staff “that we weren’t going to do anything new before the end of the year,” he said. The process was delayed again by this year’s lockdowns, he added. An internal advertisement was circulated among AUT staff over the past week seeking “expressions of interest” for the role of PMC director. Those keen to apply had until Friday March 26.

Chair of the PMC’s advisory board and an associate professor at AUT’s School of Social Sciences and Public Policy, Dr Camille Nakhid, said she was disappointed about the lack of information being offered to staff members like herself. Nakhid also believes the role of PMC director should be advertised externally to attract a range of qualified candidates.

“I understand… we may move things in a different direction, but we do not know what that direction is,” Nakhid said.

“We [the board] do wish for a reinvigorated PMC but we are concerned that the direction in which they take it will be to the detriment of the Pacific and Pacific communities and other communities with whom the PMC works.”

Robie, who is the founding editor of the research journal Pacific Journalism Review and continues to publish work through various outlets, has been critical of the treatment of the PMC since his departure from AUT. He is adamant those with long-standing links to the centre – like Nakhid and Rahman – not be sidelined in planning for its future.

“On every parameter, the centre’s done incredibly well,” Robie said. “If they follow through with the team they’ve got, I see a great future.”

A multi-disciplinary research unit, the PMC focuses on media and communication narratives in the Asia Pacific region and has a special focus on communities and journalists that have been marginalised or censored by authorities and power structures.

Prior to its move, the centre also housed a range of outlets enabling students and academics to publish and promote their work, including the award winning Pacific Media Watch, which was co-edited by a journalism student every year and helped foster the careers of Pasifika journalist Alistair Kata and RNZ journalist Alex Perrottet.

Robie himself brought considerable experience to the centre, having lived and worked extensively in Papua New Guinea and Fiji, and covered significant human rights and media abuses throughout the region over a 40-year career. The PMC had been established as an outlet to continue that work and for journalism students to research and cover regional issues largely neglected by New Zealand’s mainstream media, such as West Papuan human rights abuses and electoral corruption in Fiji.

Don Mann, chief executive of the Pacific Media Network which runs 531 PI and Niu FM, said the PMC’s current transition period was an opportunity for AUT to assess other ways it could strengthen Pacific media.

“First and foremost, I think to have an organisation that stands for what PMC was originally set up for – a watchdog organisation that protects the freedom of journalism and its role in the democracy – is very worthy,” he said.

“I think the issue which AUT is possibly facing is whether that’s AUT’s role.”

Moving forward, Mann said a focus on developing Pacific people in media and journalism at AUT would be great to see. The underrepresentation of Pacific people who are experts in their communities in media spaces has been a problem for far too long, he said.

“It would be a really opportune time for AUT to look at a centre of excellence for developing Pacific people in broadcasting, new media, journalism and multimedia.

“You look at where our office, Pacific Media Network, is based in Manukau,” Donn said.

“Within walking distance, we’ve got MIT, AUT and Auckland University. The question I’d be asking if I was in AUT is: What’s our plan to engage with diverse communities? What’s our plan to engage with Pasifika communities? What’s our representation at AUT of Pasifika people? I’d be taking this opportunity to look at all those issues.”

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