Новая Зеландия: История и современность газеты The New Zealand Herald

Daily newspaper
the newspaper

The New Zealand Herald is a daily newspaper published in Auckland, New Zealand, owned by New Zealand Media and Entertainment, and considered a newspaper of record for New Zealand. It has the largest newspaper circulation in New Zealand, peaking at over 200,000 copies in 2006, although circulation of the daily Herald had declined to 100,073 copies on average by September 2019. The Herald on Sunday is the most widely read Sunday paper in New Zealand. In 2023, the Weekend Herald was awarded Weekly Newspaper of the Year and the publication's mobile application was the News App of the Year.

The New Zealand Herald was founded by William Chisholm Wilson, and first published on 13 November 1863. Wilson had been a partner with John Williamson in the New Zealander, but left to start a rival daily newspaper as he saw a business opportunity with Auckland's rapidly growing population. After the New Zealander closed in 1866, The Daily Southern Cross provided competition, particularly after Julius Vogel took a majority shareholding in 1868. First published as The Southern Cross (without daily in its title) in 1843 by William Brown, it became a daily publication in 1862, with its name modified to The Daily Southern Cross. Vogel sold out of the paper in 1873 and Alfred Horton bought it in 1876. In 1876 the Wilson family and Horton joined in partnership and The New Zealand Herald absorbed The Daily Southern Cross. In 1879 the United Press Association was formed so that the main daily papers could share news stories. The organisation became the New Zealand Press Association (NZPA) in 1942. In 1892, the New Zealand Herald, Otago Daily Times, and Press agreed to share the costs of a London correspondent and advertising salesman. The Wilson and Horton families were both represented in the company, known as Wilson & Horton, until 1996 when Tony O'Reilly's Independent News & Media Group of Dublin purchased the Horton family's interest in the company. At some point, the company was purchased by APN NZ, a New Zealand subsidiary of APN News & Media. In April 2007, APN NZ announced it was outsourcing the bulk of the Heralds copy editing to an Australian owned company, Pagemasters. The Herald is now owned by New Zealand Media and Entertainment, formed in 2014. That company was owned by Sydney based APN News & Media and the Radio Network, formerly owned by the Australian Radio Network. In November 2012, two months after the launch of its new compact format, APN News and Media announced it would be restructuring its workforce, cutting eight senior roles from across the Heralds range of titles.

On 10 September 2012, the Herald moved to a compact format for weekday editions, after 150 years publishing in broadsheet format. The broadsheet format was retained for the Weekend Herald.

The Herald is traditionally a centre right newspaper and was given the nickname "Granny Herald" into the 1990s. In 2007, an editorial strongly disapproved of some legislation introduced by the Labour led government, the Electoral Finance Act, to the point of overtly campaigning against the legislation.

In July 2014, the Herald published a front page story about the death of Guy Boyland, a New Zealand born soldier killed in Gaza. The paper pulled a photograph of the television star Ryan Dunn, killed in 2011, from Boyland's Facebook page, erroneously claiming it was of Boyland. When the Heralds mistake was revealed, the paper issued apologies to Boyland's family, his friends, and the paper's readers. In a 2016 study by Philippa K. Smith and Helen Sissons, the authors said the mistake was caused by "a series of lapses in the newsroom". They concluded that the incident caused damage to the Herald reputation, which it tried to repair by apologising. The Herald promised to reform its newsroom processes.

In July 2015, the New Zealand Press Council ruled that Herald columnist Rachel Glucina had failed to properly represent herself as a journalist when seeking comment from Amanda Bailey on a complaint she had made about Prime Minister John Key repeatedly pulling her hair when he was a customer at the cafe in which she worked. The Herald published Bailey's name, photo, and comments after she had retracted permission for Glucina to do so. The council said there was an "element of subterfuge" in Glucina's actions and that there was not enough public interest to justify her behaviour. In its ruling the council said that "The NZ Herald has fallen sadly short of those standards in this case." The Heralds editor denied the accusations of subterfuge. Glucina subsequently resigned from the newspaper.

In 2020, the New Zealand Herald ran inserts provided by the People's Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, pushing Chinese state disinformation about COVID 19. The newspaper subsequently deleted the story from its website.

A compact sized Sunday edition, the Herald on Sunday, was first published on 3 October 2004 under the editorship of Suzanne Chetwin and then, for five years, by Shayne Currie. It won Newspaper of the Year for the calendar years 2007 and 2009 and is New Zealand's most read Sunday newspaper. In 2010, the Herald on Sunday started a campaign to reduce the legal blood alcohol limit for driving in New Zealand, called the "Two Drinks Max" campaign. The paper set up a campaign Facebook page, a Twitter account, and encouraged readers to sign up to the campaign on its own website. It is currently edited by Alanah Eriksen.

The newspaper's online news service, originally called Herald Online, was established in 1998. It was redesigned in late 2006, and again in 2012. The site was named best news website at the 2007 and 2008 Qantas Media Awards, won the "best re designed website" category at the 2007 New Zealand NetGuide Awards, and was one of seven newspaper sites named an Official Honouree in the 2007 Webby Awards. A paywall was added for "premium content" starting on 29 April 2019.