The Horowhenua Chronicle is Horowhenua’s long-serving newspaper, with a proud 132 year history of supporting community news journalism in the Horowhenua district.
Slated for closure in 2024, the Horowhenua Chronicle was bought by local Media Specialist and media sales veteran Richard Christie. This is his story.
Our philosophy
What the Horowhenua Chronicle has essentially become is a research and development project, centred on the question of how a community newspaper publication can survive and thrive in today’s tough media environment.
Big Jake’s Coming…
There’s an old story about a salesperson who, after a long day of hard work, stops in a pub in an unfamiliar town for a drink. He hurries in, puts his things down, then asks the bartender for a beer. ‘You’d better hurry up and drink that,’ says the bartender, ‘because Big Jake’s coming.’
The salesperson doesn’t know what to make of this. Before he can ask, the bartender disappears. Just then, the pub’s doors burst open and the meanest looking giant bursts in. ‘Get me a drink!’ he roars. The salesperson doesn’t know what to do, so he leaps behind the bar, grabs the tallest glass, fills it with Scotch and passes it to the giant. The giant downs it in one gulp. ‘D-do you want another?’ the salesperson stammers. ‘Nah, I’ve got to get out of here,’ replies the giant. ‘Big Jake’s coming.’
I think that anyone who has worked in media in the last ten years can relate to such a story. Each of the last few years have been a series of insuperable hurdles for media businesses. Just when you’ve cleared one hurdle, there’s another, bigger one just around the corner. Just survived a round of redundancies? That’s great. Google just released a new product. Are you across it? Just developed a successful case study for a local business? That’s great. Chat GPT has been released.
Following the events of recent years, the mentality of many media professionals is an odd mix of exhaustion and the pursuit of survival. After all, how do you survive the endless line-up of Big Jakes?
There were specific reasons why I decided to buy the Horowhenua Chronicle. I am self-taught in a few things, including the ability to analyse profit and loss statements. When news came that NZME was slating fourteen community newspapers for closure, after a period of grief, it slowly began to dawn on me that this may be the opportunity to pull together the skills I had been developing for the last ten years and finally put them to good use.
A blow-by-blow account of the Horowhenua Chronicle buyout
I have told this story to a handful of people around Levin but I will tell it again. The Horowhenua Chronicle was not the first community newspaper I had considered buying in 2024. I had, for a while, grown disaffected by the company I was working for and the path it appeared to be on. Despite its breadth of operation and large number of products and the massive amount of data at its fingertips, I no longer believed that this business was the vehicle that would succeed in raising money for local journalism well into the 21st Century. I wanted people around me who shared that vision, and who weren’t afraid to ask tough questions.
An opportunity came up towards the start of 2024 to register an interest in purchasing the Howick-Pakuranga Times, a community newspaper based in East Auckland. I wasn’t the only person interested – in total there were four interested parties – but the business broker was very intelligent and instead of pitting us against one another, encouraged us to form a consortium to work together on a buyout. The first meeting went well – we each explained the opportunity we saw in the acquisition, and it became clear that we all had complementary skills. I was by far the least wealthy of the four interested parties, but I had the most on-the-ground knowledge and sales experience and also had a clear vision for how such a business could not only survive but thrive.
Despite the great start, a shock came two weeks into negotiations, when the business broker called one morning to announce that the owner of the Howick-Pakuranga Times would soon be unable to make payroll and the business would be placed into liquidation.
Everything moved into overdrive. Immediately, we had one investor drop out. The remaining three of us scheduled a series of night-time meetings to plan out how we could proceed with the buyout. At the very end of this sequence of meetings, another investor announced that he had his doubts and ended up pulling out. We were down to a consortium of two.
We made our proposal to the owner. I was down in Kapiti that day and came within two minutes of handing in my resignation to the Wellington General Manager. Just before I did so, I took a call telling me that the owner of the Howick-Pakuranga Times, under tremendous personal pressure, having founded the business and worked in it for 50 years, had declined our offer. The business soon went into liquidation.
There was a somewhat happy ending to the story. The Howick-Pakuranga Times was bought out by local business magnate and Act Party candidate Bo Burns, and the paper was restored with many of the jobs being saved. But the situation taught me a lot about how these sorts of negotiations can fall apart at the last minute. In particular, it taught me that things can happen rapidly and to not trust words but actions of other parties.
The experience served as a dry run for buying the Horowhenua Chronicle. This time, I did everything right – or so I thought.
The decision to buy the Horowhenua Chronicle came down to three factors.
- By going through the correct channels at NZME, I had access to the sales history and the expense records of the paper
- I had extensive experience in the market, having sold into the paper for over five years
- I had relationships with advertisers that helped me judge, despite the overall downturn in print advertising revenue across most (not all) NZME community newspapers, that this downwards trend was not permanent and was a state of affairs that could be reversed.
I formed the judgement that the paper was profitable and could support four full time roles. Importantly, this level of profitability could be maintained without the need for an increase in advertising prices.
The big complexity was around distribution. The Horowhenua Chronicle had inherited a legacy of a poor reputation around distribution. Years of cuts and cost reductions had weighed on the paper, and the recent decision to cut back circulation by 1,000 rural households had dented a lot of people’s confidence in the masthead. There were many discussions had around circulation and distribution and these delayed the buyout and it came close to it not going ahead at all.
Due in part to the Confidentiality Agreement I had signed, but also to avoid getting anyone’s hopes up until the sale was finalised, I made it a principle not to inform the staff until negotiations were complete.
Sadly, these delays meant that the sale of the paper could not be finalised until Thursday 19th December and could not be announced until Friday 20th December. During which time, some other employees had to wait in a state of uncertainty and began to formulate their own plans.
Which in turn led to the incredible situation where two newspapers launched just as one of the newspapers was preparing to close. It was a story so insane it briefly made the nationwide news on TV One.
A town now flooded with paper
From having gone through the analysis, I knew that the market could not produce enough revenue to support two separate community newspapers. Both papers are currently playing out their cards as best they can, but what happens next remains to be seen.
By going through the process of having offered four former NZME staff their jobs, and having three announce that they were leaving to join the opposition, as devastating as this was, it forced us to really think about what was essential in producing a community newspaper in 2025.
The demands placed on the newspaper had gradually reduced over time, while the technology used to put them together had become more affordable and easier to learn. No longer was it necessary, for example, to have to hire out an accountant and have them post out invoices. This role could be incorporated into the role of the Director. Once one had mastered the essential processes in InDesign (although there are many of them), it became clear that many aspects of design and layout could be incorporated into the Director’s role as well.
For complex graphic design, we were lucky enough to get a hold of Alex D’Souza, a highly experienced designer who, also, had just been made redundant by NZME.
The result was a community newspaper that perhaps didn’t need $650,000 a year in advertising revenue to stay open.
Everything else flowed from that. The new Horowhenua Chronicle would require a dedicated team with a mix of skills, and a determination to challenge everything we knew about community newsprint.