Australian broadcaster Nine Entertainment’s sale of its remaining New Zealand newspaper asset is set to change the shape of the country’s news publishing landscape.
About the time it was divesting its Australian radio business, Nine sold the Petone premises of Stuff’s former Dominion Post print facility to a third party, leading to this week’s announcement that printing in the North Island will end next year.
Stuff Group chief executive Sinead Boucher – who famously bought the group for a nominal NZ$1 – has announced the Petone print site will close in 2027, affecting the jobs of 30 staff.
Stuff leases the premises, which Fairfax successor Nine sold last November, but owns the manroland Goss Geoman press on which papers are printed, as well as the extensive Ferag mailroom.
Now all printing operations will switch to the company’s Christchurch plant, requiring copies of the Post and other titles to be trucked and ferried for the estimated ten-hour journey.
Some Stuff papers for North Island readers are already printed at rival NZME’s Auckland print site. It is not clear whether this proportion will increase, but even this would involve an eight-hour road trip.
Boucher (above) said Stuff had been working on a strategy to consolidate printing for two years, with bringing printing operations under one roof “part of our strategic plan since the management buy out in 2020”.
The Petone site had been modernised with the installation of a press relocated by Fairfax when its Tullamarine, Melbourne site was closed. However, while the press belongs to Stuff’s current owners, the building does not and the current lease expires in mid-2027. Successor owners Nine sold the building to PE investor (and reported NZME shareholder) Troy Bowker last year, and there is speculation about the terms available to Stuff after the lease expires.
The flexible Goss Uniliner 80 press in Christchurch is similar to that installed at Fairfax’s Ormiston, Queensland print site, having been ordered at the same time, and has since been sold to News Corp Australia for its Truganina, Melbourne site, where editions of many of Nine’s papers are also printed.
Previous owners of Stuff, Fairfax Media had closed the Invercargill print plant of the Southland Times in 2012, moving production to Allied Press’ Dunedin site, citing the prohibitive $10 million cost of upgrading. In 2018, Fairfax offered more than a third of its NZ print titles for sale to independent publishers.
Stuff’s Masthead Publishing business announced the closure of print editions of a number of its community newspapers last year, saying that digital news audiences were continuing to grow.
At stake with the Petone closure are currently not only the Post, but the Taranaki Daily News (New Plymouth), Manawatu Standard (Palmerston North) and Wairarapa Times-Age (Masterton), plus some titles currently printed under contract.
Rival NZME. already prints part of the Sunday Star Times run, and would likely take on the lower North Island part as well. The Ellerslie, Auckland print site is also reported to print the Waikato Times for Stuff.
The modern press at Christchurch is understood to have ample capacity, given dwindling – but largely unreported – print circulations. The problems, however, lie in the logistics of delivering papers from the South Island print site to the North Island, the four-and-a-half hour road journey plus four hours on the Cook Strait ferry (with its limited sailing times and planned maintenance outages) likely to impact editorial deadlines. The cost of air freight is likely prohibitive, but may be viable in some circumstances.
Either way, change appears inevitable, bringing reportedly, the first time since the 1800s that the Post – created by INL’s 2002 merger of the Dominion and the Evening Post – has not been printed in town.
The announcement has drawn a variety of comment, not all of it informed or sympathetic. On the Knightly View commentary site, Gavin Ellis accused Nine of “total disregard for its former NZ subsidiary when it sold the property”, suggesting it might have anticipated that the new owner would give Stuff notice to quit.
On LinkedIn, manrolandGoss web service operations manager Oliver Poerschmann said the press was now for sale, “and will hopefully find a new owner as committed in keeping newspaper printing, and the importance it still holds in a democratic society, alive.”
Peter Coleman
Pictured top: The Petone press and (above) Sinead Boucher, photos Stuff.