A legend in NZ newspapers – and football

May 10 update: Jim Mora, host of Radio New Zealand's Afternoons program, interviewed Iain Gillies today. Listen to the interview to hear Iain's story in his own words, in his delightful Scottish accent.

Iain Gillies’ office on the second floor of the Gisbourne Herald’s building is filled with ephemera from his half-century in the news business, as well as his even longer career as a football (soccer) player, manager and coach. The walls are covered with certificates, plaques and news clippings. He points to a postcard of his hometown of Mallaig on the northwest coast of Scotland and mementos of his time as a member of the Glasgow Celtic, a U.K. football powerhouse.

Football brought Gillies to New Zealand but a job at the family-owned Herald (circulation 8,500) kept him here. He answered an ad to play soccer in Gisborne and continued to play after starting work at the Herald in 1959. After a stint as chief reporter (city editor), he became editor in September of 1980. The day I visited the Herald, Gillies was about to write his final leader (editorial) before stepping down as editor. His almost three decades as editor is unmatched in New Zealand in recent years.

Gillies isn’t really retiring. He’ll continue as a part-time sports writer – sharing duties with his son John, who runs a used-book shop a block away from the Herald’s office. And Iain has offered to write an occasional editorial whenever his successor, Jeremy Muir, can’t find time. Jeremy, 36, represents the sixth generation of his family to be involved in newspapers in New Zealand. His father, Michael, is the paper’s managing director.

Journalism runs in the Gillies family. In addition to John, two other sons and a niece also worked at the Herald. Son Angus has written two books of an intended trilogy about a crime spree by a Rastafarian gang on the North Island’s East Coast in the mid-1980s. I just started reading the first volume, a gift from Iain.

Newspapers on the rebound: Michael Muir is the president of the Newspaper Publishers’ Association of New Zealand. He said this week that newspaper advertising is rebounding and readership is strong. He’s optimistic about newspapers, saying they remain a vital credible source of news for Kiwis:

"What we are seeing with the explosion of the Internet is a crying need to distill the blizzard of information and opinions, much of it unreliable to make some sense of it."

The challenge that Muir and his counterparts face is how to attract young readers, used to finding information online, to their printed editions.

New editor, new challenges in Nelson

Paul McIntyre traded the comfort of a metropolitan daily for the challenges of a regional newspaper. After 14 years at The Press in Christchurch (the largest city on the South Island), McIntyre is hoping to reinvigorate the much smaller Nelson Mail, founded in 1866. To turn around declining circulation, he plans to emphasize hard news, improve photography and launch campaigns around local issues.

At The Press (circulation 83,000), McIntyre held a variety of newsroom roles, including news editor and online editor. As editor of the Mail (circulation 16,000), McIntyre, 45, will oversee a staff of eight reporters, three editors and three photographers. Subbing (copy editing and page design) is done in house by editors employed by the Mail’s parent company, Fairfax, some of whom work in the newsroom in Nelson.

When I visited McIntyre in mid-March, he had been on the job for just a month. He was already impressed by the dedication of his staff. “Journalists work harder at small papers than at big-city papers,” he said, an assessment that reflects my own experience. “I like being closer to the action here.” He was getting better acquainted with community issues, including declining employment in the fishing industry and port.

His immediate task is to stabilize circulation, which peaked at 23,000 a few years ago. Nelson’s population is aging, as people are attracted by its mild climate. (It’s the sunniest city in New Zealand.) That’s the demographic that still reads printed newspapers. But many of the retirees and summer residents are migrants from elsewhere in New Zealand, and they bring their reading habits with them.

Both The Press and The Dominion Post (from Wellington, across the Cook Strait on the North Island) circulate in Nelson. Together, they sell about 11,000 copies a day in Nelson. In McIntyre’s view, they have an advantage because they are morning papers, hitting the streets hours ahead of the mid-day Mail.

McIntyre is itching to switch the Mail to morning publication. For inspiration, he points to his native England, where most regional papers lost circulation in the six months ending February 28. An exception was the Dorset Echo on England’s south coast, whose circulation grew by 2.1 percent after switching from afternoon to morning publication. McIntyre believes a similar change would benefit the Mail. In the meantime, he is trying to learn more about issues affecting Nelson and its surrounding region to redirect the paper’s coverage. I’ll check in with him in a few months to see how he’s doing.
Photo: The Nelson Mail

Newspapers' digital futures: USA and NZ

A reporter for The Press in Christchurch, Alex van Wel, interviewed me for a piece he wrote about ways in which newspapers in this country and the United States are adapting content to the Internet. He spent most of February on the U.S. East Coast, talking to editors and journalism educators – in some ways, the mirror image of what I’m doing here.

Among those Alex interviewed was Jay Rosen, journalism professor at New York University, and Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He also visited the Shelby Star in North Carolina, a paper struggling to attract advertisers to its digital edition.

My contribution to the article was to observe that because New Zealand doesn’t have local TV stations, many of the advertisers that dominate U.S. local TV (car dealers, home furnishing stores, appliance dealers) have stuck with newspapers here. That’s helped them remain stronger than their U.S. counterparts, at least in the short term.
Alex’s bottom line is this:

And, while people currently in the 50s and 60s may never own a [digital] tablet, younger readers – the core customers of the future – will, and they are likely to demand that fuller and richer experience. The trick is keeping the print product strong while uplifting the online offering.

In a nutshell, that's the challenge facing editors worldwide.